“I tried so hard on Viva Pinata,” composer Grant Kirkhope tells me. “I wღas left alone to write what I wanted, because after so many years you’re trusted to do just that. So I wrote as much countryside music as I could and I really thought to myself at the time that this could easily be on Classic FM or Radio 3. So I said to Rare, ‘Maybe we can push this a little bit further?’”

Launching for Xbox 360 and PC on this day way back in 2006, Viva Pinata has long cemented itself as a beloved classic amidst Rare’s catalogue, acting as one of the final games in what many describe as the company’s golden age. It was colourful, creative, and imbued with a charm that few games have managed to rep🉐licate since. There’s something special about it, and to celebrate its 15th anniversary I caught up with Grant Kirkhope to talk all about how the game’s signature sound was pieced together.

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[Viva Pinata] started off on Game Boy as a game called Animal Crackers, and it was this little thing that slowly evolved into something big,” Kirkhope tells me. “I wasn’t on the project from the start because I was still doing Grabbed By The Ghoulies, so Steve Burke was doing the music and I was asked to help with the sound effects until he moved onto Kameo: Elements of Element. I s𒅌ort of inherited Viva Pinata and ended up doing all of the music, effects, sounds, and stuff as normal.”

Viva Pinata

As one of the first projects at Rare on a new generation of consoles under the ownership of Microsoft, Viva Pinata was able to execute upon a level of ambition that Kirkhope hadn’t been accustomed to at the time. But he still remained humble. “To me it just looked like a relaxing experience,” he says. “Elgar and Va🔴ughn are huge inspirations of mine and I really admire those composers. They’re real British composers and they write music that when you shut your eyes you just think of the countryside. I did my best, and I won’t say I’m anywhere near as good as those guys, but I tried my best to get their spirit into Viva Pinata, so it was just this really beautiful, relaxing music to write. It was also the first time I’d used a live orchestra. Kameo was as well and we went to Prague to record and it was amazing. In the end I was just trying to find a gentle, pastoral 🏅vibe that I thought suited the game.”

Back in the noughties, video games were still maturing as an art form, moving on from MIDI soundtracks to orchestra﷽l efforts more in line with film and television. As a composer who cut his teeth on the SNES and Nintendo 64, Kirkhope viewed this as a major step forward for not only his career, but the industry as a whole. “It was such a pleasure to write that music, and I was in tears for a lot of the production,” he tells me. “When I went to Prague for the first time and booted up the opening theme, it’s just so unbelievable to have real people play your music, for a composer I don’t think there’s anything better than that.

Viva Pinata

“It was just an incredible experience. To get a BAFTA nomination, I really couldn’t believe it. Not once did any of us think this was possible, and it was when BAFTA was just starting to recognise games so receiving a nomination meant we were just over the moon. I remember Doug Stamper who ran Rare at the time ringing me and saying, ‘Grant, I think this is a career milestone for you’ and🍬 personally I think it probably was. I realized that I could write music like that, I liked writing music like that, and being able to use a live orchestra was a big deal for me. There are points in your career where you look back and say you tried really hard on something and it manages to pay off.”

Alongside the creation of Viva Pinata, I had to ask Kirkhope about his earlier days at Rare working on the likes of GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie, alongside how much the studio has changed over th🍎e years and why he 🃏left for greener pastures. Aside from converting Donkey Kong Country files from SNES to Game Boy, his first real project was James Bond alongside Graeme Norgate.

GoldenEye

“When I was a kid the Bond movies were the biggest things ever,” Kirkhope tells me. “They had the best music, the best plots, the best effects, so as a massive fan, I don’t think I was scared as much as I was excited to be on the project, we got ﷽to use the Monty Norman theme and I just loved being on it. It was fantastic fun but I didn’t even know what I was doing, a lot of the GoldenEye guys have never made a game before apart from Graeme but only at Rare, so none of the team had any idea what they were doing. I kind of feel that’s why the game is so good because you just do what you think is best right? If you have no idea what you’re doing you just kinda go, ‘Well I dunno’ and I think that often works the best because you aren’t constricted by any kind of rules.”

The earlier days of Rare were spr💛ead across a manor farmhouse, with individual teams being split amongst stables and barns so distinct ideas could develop without major crossover. This is a testament to Rare’s varied output at the time with games like Banjo-Kazooie, Blast Corps, Jet Force Gemini, and so many others being fundamentally distinct while still bearing the studio’s signature identity. “Just being at the old manor farmhouse with all of the teams together was wonderful,” Kirkhope says. “Banjo-Kazooie is the game it is because the bunch of people who worked on it got on like ♛a house on fire. It was a great laugh, constant pisstaking, we worked together, we went out at night together, and I feel like that camaraderie, that sense of humour really bled into Banjo. It was a bit like The Simpsons where adults understood some of our jokes and kids didn’t get some of it.

Banjo-Kazooie

“Rare was just a magical place for me. After speꦰnding 11 years on the dole, being paid to write music like this just felt like a dream. It was a great place, the family was wonderful to all of the staff and every team was kept separate. Each team was in a barn ꧃so you’d have coded keys and couldn’t get into any of the other barns so you’d never know what anyone else was doing. This created a friendly rivalry amongst the Conker team, the Killer Instinct team, the Bond team, and the Banjo team because they were all kept separate. That was part of the beauty and mystique of it all.”

Before the Microsoft acquisition, Rare seldom let itself be seen in the public eye. It had made a name for itself with a library of classics, but this reputation was one defined by familial secrecy. “Rare never courted any kind of publicity,” Kirk൲hope explains. “We never ever did interviews, and Tim Stamper used to say that we’re not pop stars, we’ll let the games do the talking and put them out when they’re ready. When Nintendo were pissed that we were late, Tim and Chris would take all the heat and we didn’t know. We’d all be working on the games and if they got delayed it was so they’d be better when they came out. There was no corporate pressure like needing to please shareholders in a certain quarter so the g𒐪ame needs to go in a crap state, there’s a massive bug on day one and people think it’s shit.

“It’s like when Cyberpunk 2077 came out and everyone hated it because it w💙as pushed out too soon, especially with the internet because it can kill games overnight. You bri🍃ng the game out, it gets reviewed, and it’s dead the next day. It wasn’t like that back at Rare because it was all regional magazines. But being at Rare during that period for me was just unbelievable.”

Viva Pinata

Like a number of key creatives from this golden era, many parted ways with the company following the Microsoft buyout. The studio began making different games, leavingꦕ behind its love for platformers for Kinect titles and larger, more ambitious projects that didn’t always provide much room for experimentation. Kirkhope went freelance, while founding members Gavin Price and Chris Sutherland went on to start Playtonic Games. The landscape changed so much over the years, and leaving was a bittersweet decision for many from the sounds of things.

“I just don’t think it was a place I wanted to be anymore,” Kirkhope says. “The whole Microsoft takeover didn’t quite go as I thought it was going to go. Not to say it was bad, it just didn’t suit me. It suited lots of other people🐓, so from that point onward it wasn’t the place I wanted to be anymore but I absolutely adored being there. I absolutely adored being at Rare. When I first got there in 1995 it was all family run and I loved that. They looked after the staff really well, and we’d meet up in the morning and decide what needed doing and we’d get it done. With Microsoft coming in it was all about producers and all of those layers came in and I feel that killed creativity a little bit. It’s just my opinion since plenty of people at Rare loved it and I liked it at the start, but it just kind of soured me as time went on.

Viva Pinata

As for a potential return to Viva Pinata, if Microsoft ever picked up the pho🌺ne Kirkhope said he would return to the𒅌 series “in a heartbeat” as composer. “I would love to do that, I loved making the music for those two games. It’s right up my street and if I wasn’t writing for games and writing for myself I’d be putting out music like that.”

Never say𒊎 never, and happy🐬 anniversary to Viva Pinata.

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