Whereas most of Nintendo’s music from the 1990s used basic looping structure and simple chiptune-reminiscent sounds, Donkey Kong Country (1994), composed by British composer David Wise rather than by Nintendo’s in-house composition team, featured texturally more complex music, including features characteristic of the 1970s/80s progressive rock style such as short repeated melodies and chord progressions with layering (Collins 44).
For example, in “Fear Factory” (Figure 1), we hear a repeated chord progression of (VI, iv, i) underneath a faster eighth-note melody. Very little harmonic movement occurs and the focus is more on the melodic layers that occur in this top voice. In addition, “Fear Factory” includes unconventional punk, “mechanic/industrial”, and “glitch” noises that emphasize melodic content (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v18pEFQb3EM&t=45s). As William Cheng discusses in Sound Play, the use of such unconventional sounds often contribute to a feeling of dissociation and alienation in the player, and create a divide between diegetic (that is, music the characters are aware of) and non-diegetic (that is, “background” music) soundscapes (Cheng 98-9). While this is not a direct element of prog-rock, both industrial and prog-rock music styles feature a strong focus on texture. Collins speculates that this may have been an attempt by Nintendo to capitalize on the ‘edgier’ market of other game producers such as Sega (Collins 46).
In this paper, an analysis of form, melodic structure, and instrumentation from Donkey Kong Country’s “Treetop Rock” and “Fear Factory” will demonstrate features atypical of Nintendo style, which normally features catchy tunes, simple instrumentation, and pop-inspired harmonies.
Figure 1:
e-: VI iv I VI ivBibliography
Cheng, William. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. The Oxford Music/media Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Collins, Karen. Game Sound an Introduction to the History, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
Use of Progressive Rock in Donkey Kong Country (1994)