Grant Kirkhope Didn’t Know He Was Working on a Mario Game

Despite the fact that it’s been on the radar for over a year, and has now been on the shelves for several weeks, it’s still difficult to wrap your head around Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Placing Mario in a franchise crossover outside of Nintendo is a neat idea, sure, but a franchise crossover with a cast of weird creatures from another franchise, without actually involving the protagonist of that world? Imagine if, to flip it around, they released a Rayman game which featured Goombas in it, but only Goombas.

Admittedly, the Rabbids have struck out on their own, they’re kind of like the Minions of the gaming world, although thankfully not quite so overused (yet), and despite the weirdness, there’s a lot of appeal in the game itself. One of the most enticing aspects of Kingdom Battle is the soundtrack, which was done by Grant Kirkhope. Kirkhope is one of the most lauded, beloved composers in gaming history; his partnership with Rare resulted in some of the most iconic scores of that era, from Banjo-Kazooie to Donkey Kong 64 to Perfect Dark. When the news broke that he’d done the music for a Mario game, the internet caught fire, but the thing is, it was news to him as well.

In a recent interview with NPR, Kirkhope revealed that when he’d originally signed the contract, he thought he’d been put on a standard, Ubisoft only Rabbids title. It was only when he went to meet the team in Paris and actually saw the game for the first time that all became clear. It wasn’t some grand trick though, seemingly they had just forgotten to tell him, leaving him sat in the Ubisoft Paris office, pale as a sheet, wondering how on Earth he could ever hope to exist in the same echelon as Koji Kondo.

His score is nothing like Kondo’s work, thankfully, trying to replicate it would have been a massive miscalculation. Instead, Kirkhope went back to his roots, producing something as charming and cartoonish as his Banjo-Kazooie score, with a litany of well-placed melodic callbacks to Koopa Kingdom. Since leaving Rare, Kirkhope has worked on a broad mixture of titles, including two games in the Civilization franchise and Team17’s bizarre platformer, Yooka-Laylee, but this is the first time in years that his style been so instantly recognisable.

Clearly, the project erased any fears Kirkhope might have had about filling big shoes, because he’s since said that he would love to work on a Zelda game, although he acknowledged that it’s unlikely to ever happen. What may well happen is that Kirkhope will be invited back to work on more Nintendo titles, even if it’s just the next Mario/Rabbids crossover, which given that we’re talking about Nintendo AND Ubisoft here, is pretty much inevitable.