Donkey Kong Country original trilogy composer picks his three favorite tracks

A portion of a SquareEnixMusic interview with composer David Wise…

SEM: As a retrospective, it would be interesting to learn about your personal favourite compositions from the Donkey Kong Country trilogy. If you were to choose your three favourite tracks, what would they be and for what reasons? Do you consider these your best works in general?

David Wise: I think my three personal favourites from the original Donkey Kong Trilogy would be:

Aquatic Ambience: For me, on many levels, this was part of a healing process. It was my first piece of music for Rare as a full-time employee, and it shaped the techniques I would use to create game music for several years.

DK Swing: I was obviously pleased at the time that this music was used to represent the Donkey Kong Licence, and am very humbled now that it is still being used to represent Donkey Kong Country Returns.

Bramble Blast / Stickerbush Symphony Having had it covered on Super Smash Brothers was an honour. It was also used in Boyfriends - Episode 10 by Team Genius — a hilarious short online comedy — as a homage to how hard the game was. And it’s currently running at in excess of 733,000 views on YouTube thanks to MechSoul. And also for me personally, because I felt it really pushed the very limits of the sound chip on the SNES.

As for my best works in general? Due to the nature of game development, there are countless tunes I’ve composed sitting in storage somewhere. Some of these I was particularly proud of. However, I always believe it is up to the people who listen to music to decide which tunes and scores should be considered as best works.