I’ve heard that you used to record your own samples.

Right. When we were working on Donkey Kong Country, we took a trip out to the Twycross Zoo, thinking that we could record some samples for of the monkeys. But they weren’t making much noise, until it was feeding time, and everyone was just going completely berzerk, and we couldn’t isolate the monkeys at all. It was a fun day, but a complete waste of time. We ended up having to get someone in the office make monkey sounds into the microphone.

But the other stuff, like the water drops or rustling noises, you did those yourself?

Yeah, if we needed water drops or balloon popping noises, we’d record those with a mic in the office. Other sounds we recorded from synthesizers. But even if we recorded them, they had to be tiny. The bigger the frequency range is on a sound, the more data it takes. So we would record something, and then we would spend hours filtering as much as we could out, and cutting it down as much as possible, just to get the very essence of the sound, to make it as small of a footprint as possible.

That sounds like it would take forever.

It did. For example if I wanted a frequency sweep, what I would do was get this Juno keyboard that I had, and sample it at a particular resonance at different frequencies. Then I would chop everything into single cycle waves. Then, I would write code to make it cycle properly, basically rebuilding the synthesizer through code on the Super Nintendo. We had to go down to a lot of detail.

A rare (and very 90s) pre-launch promo video for DKC showcases a bit of the music.

Since there were no lyrics, and you had such limited hardware, was it difficult to make the music feel—I’m not sure if this is the right word for it, but personal?

Oh, it was often very personal for me. I think everyone in their life goes through something, emotionally. Whether you’ve lost somebody, or something like that. I’ve found that being able to throw yourself into your work helps to be able to get through those tough periods. The technical side of it really gave me something else to focus on.

That makes sense. So things that you dealing with in your life, this gave you an escape?

In a way, yes. Also, when you are going through bad… well, not bad periods, but difficult periods in life, I think it’s really good to be creative. You create something that really draws from the heart, it takes everything you’ve got. And you push something out, and it really gives you a lift. So being creative, really going deep and making something fresh, and that you can be proud of, I think it’s definitely the way forward, on many levels.