"Unbelievable!": Banjo-Kazooie composer as shocked as everyone else to hear the Bubblegloop Swamp theme on a national NFL broadcast

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Yes, Sunday Night football really did just feature Banjo-Kazooie music

Banjo-Kazooie screenshot shows Banjo doing a thumbs up.
(Image credit: Rare)

Yesterday's Sunday Night Football broadcast was a notable one for a number of reasons. It was the final game of the NFL's regular season. It featured division rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens, in a winner-takes-all contest to determine the season's final playoff contender. It saw two of the league's greatest quarterbacks leading their respective teams to the edge of victory on a pair of thrilling drives in the game's final minutes. It also inexplicably included a segment featuring music from the 1998 Nintendo 64 classic, Banjo-Kazooie.

I caught the second half of the game this morning (the NFL's primetime schedule does not respect my early bedtime) and I thought I was still dreaming when, midway through the third quarter, a graphic popped up comparing the starting stance of Steelers defensive tackle Cam Heyward to a frog. "That's right," color commentator Chris Collinsworth exclaimed, "he's got a frog stance!"

And, of course, the clip quickly reached original Banjo-Kazooie composer Grant Kirkhope. "So this just happened, thanks to everyone for pinging me," Kirkhope says while sharing the clip on Twitter. "Unbelievable!" In response to a comment suggesting that he was "finally reaping" his career's rewards, Kirkhope says "I wish," and simply laughs at another comment suggesting that somebody involved should've called him first.

It's not clear exactly how the Banjo-Kazooie track ended up on the broadcast, though it's easy to imagine a 30-something member of the production team leaning on childhood nostalgia to select the song. Whether Microsoft was involved in licensing the song for the broadcast is another question. I've reached out to both NBC Sports, which runs the Sunday Night Football broadcast, and Rare, the now-Microsoft-owned studio behind Banjo-Kazooie, for additional information, and will update this story if I learn more.

This certainly isn't the first time Kirkhope has sat on the sidelines as his work appears before a global audience, however. The uncredited appearance of his infamous DK Rap, from Donkey Kong 64, in the Super Mario Bros Movie left him "so pissed" that he still hasn't watched the film.

Banjo-Kazooie is still one of the best N64 games of all time.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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