A portion of a SMP interview with David Wise...

SMP: Fans are obviously excited about hearing “Aquatic Ambiance” redone in Tropical Freeze. Would you like to comment on the creation of this track for the original Donkey Kong Country and how you went about updating it for Tropical Freeze? Perhaps you’d like to share some of the tools you used this time around?

David Wise: On the original game, we had 64k of sample memory, which is simply minuscule by today’s standards. The original soundtrack relied on taking the smallest of single cycle waveforms and writing subroutines to re-sequence the order they were played back in. By contrast, this time I was using modern tools to host many virtual instruments with up to 64 gigs of memory in a very fast PC. Even with all that processing power, I still found myself throwing a lot of powerful instruments into the mix, to make it sound lush and detailed enough for a 2014 arrangement.