Composer Compendium: David Wise

In simpler times, there were great melodies driving the music composition in games. When you're limited to a handful of sound channels, it really tests composers to make a piece that fits the game they are working on and their ability to make it memorable. Compositions also had to survive repeated listens, since many games were short and had only a handful of tracks. Today, we are going to take a look at one of the best Western composers for one of the best European game development companies. David Wise was Rare Ltd's house composer from 1985 to 2009, and his work stands out as much as the company he worked for.



The first handful of David's years were spent with Nintendo's juggernaut Entertainment System. At the time, Rare's philosophy was to make as many games as they possibly could; some stood out as great titles for the system, while others were quite smelly. The first games that included Wise's compositions came out a year or two after his hire, and included Slalom and Wizards & Warriors.


The following year saw double the number of Wise compositions, which proves that he most likely was not sitting around doing nothing for the first couple years of his existence at Nintendo. One of the best racing games on the system also carries Wise's compositions, R.C. Pro-Am! The rest of his year's work featured the game show adaptation compositions of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! Rare's own video board game Anticipation rounded out 1988.


1989 and 1990 were big years for Mr. Wise; his compositions during this time are almost too numerous to list. The Sesame Street games are well known for their high quality digitized voices, which sound almost too good for the NES. Wise helped with those, starting with Sesame Street ABC. He also worked on such beloved classics as Taboo: The Sixth Sense, Hollywood Squares, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and WWF Wrestlemania. Mr. Wise also composed or rearranged the scores for more memorable ports such as Marble Madness, Cobra Triangle, and Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II. And finally, push your periscopes up and look across the horizon for the best and most valuable game ever made on the NES, according to members of RF Generation, Silent Service.


Though the decade changed, the NES still reigned supreme. As a result, David Wise still had plenty of projects to work on and 1990 was his biggest year yet. He composed many classics, and it also marked his first foray onto the Game Boy. His work with game show adaptations continued with Double Dare, a new "physical challenger." On top of this, David got to work on some original Rare titles such as Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, Solar Jetman, Super Glove Ball, Time Lord, and Pin*Bot for the NES, as well as Wizards & Warriors Chapter X: The Fortress of Fear and The Amazing Spider-Man on Game Boy. He also composed some arcade ports and movie adaptations, which include: Captain Skyhawk, NARC, Cabal, Arch Rivals, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.


[/i] was the next big and well-remembered Rare title that Wise composed. You can thank him for that groovy pause music, as well as everything else in the original NES release and the mostly unrelated Game Boy release. Sesame Street ABC & 123 was released in 1991 alongside the aforementioned Battletoads, Beetlejuice, and Super R.C. Pro-Am.


The next year saw Rare expanding its reach toward the up and coming Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, with Championship Pro-Am. They did not completely abandon the Nintendo systems, but did not have Wise move on to the new Super Nintendo yet. On the NES, Wise composed tracks for R.C. Pro-Am II, Wizards & Warriors III, and the port of Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat. Battletoads mania would arrive on the scene in 1993.

Since the original release of Battletoads, the series had proven quite popular, and as a result, Rare had the first Battletoads ported onto the Genesis and Game Gear. Battletoads in Battlemaniacs and Battletoads & Double Dragon marked Wise's move to the SNES. The latter also saw releases on the NES, Genesis, and Game Boy. Battletoads in Ragnarok's World was a proper Game Boy port of the first Battletoads that was also released in this year. Other than Battletoads, Mr. Wise also arranged the 16 bit port of Snake Rattle 'n' Roll for the Genesis, as well as X The Ball for the Arcade.


The next year may well be the year that solidified Mr. Wise as a truly great composer, as his music got to grace one of the most beloved video games of all time, not just of the 16 bit era. This was also the year that saw a severe decrease in output from this composer, as he was almost entirely limited to the series later spawned by this game. You may be asking what game I'm getting to and that game is Donkey Kong Country. Though he also composed tracks for Monster Max and the arcade port of Battletoads, 1994 was the year of Kong.


For the better part of the next decade Mr. Wise, was mostly limited to composing for the Donkey Kong Country series, so his early output of games for each year decreased to one or two a year until his departure from Rare. Both of the followup games to Donkey Kong Country on the SNES were composed by Mr. Wise, but his contributions diminished with each game. The first Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy features some of Wise's compositions and Diddy Kong Racing on N64 was the lone game he composed for on the Big N's system.


There was a three year lull between Diddy Kong Racing and his next game, which was the Game Boy Color port of the first Donkey Kong Country. After that he moved onto his lone Gamecube game, Star Fox Adventures. A couple Game Boy Advance games followed, Its Mr. Pants and Donkey Kong Country 3. Next was the DS games Diddy Kong Racing DS and Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise. By this point Rare had been sold by Nintendo to Microsoft. He only worked on one Xbox 360 game before his departure from Rare, War World. After that, he went freelance with his own studio, composing the iOS game Sorcery! Retro Studios brought him back to the land of Nintendo earlier this year to return to his most famous series. The Wii U needed help and David Wise delivered with the soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. His most recent game is Tengami for iOS and the Wii U.

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