Yep, you are not mistaken — Kirby is now a Grammy winner… or at least a cover of a Kirby song is now a Grammy winner.
The 8-Bit Big Band’s rendition of “Meta Knight’s Revenge” from the 1996’s SuperNES game Kirby Superstar won Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella in this year’s Grammy awards.
The award was given to Charlie Rosen & Jake Silverman, who arranged the cover, which largely followed the original but added a heavy jazz influence through its instrumentation.
The 8-Bit Big Band is a 30 to 65 member jazz-pop orchestra that specializes in covering and putting their spin on popular video game music. The group has previously covered songs from other video game soundtracks such as “Fourside” from Earthbound, “Zelda’s Lullaby” from The Legends of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and “Still Alive” from Portal. The group’s Grammy-winning song currently sits on more than 127K streams on Spotify.
It’s not every day that video game music gets nominated for a Grammy, let alone any major award ceremony. The pink spherical Nintendo character has been rising in popularity on social media, especially since the release of Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the Nintendo Switch.
Recently, fans have been obsessed with the pink Nintendo character thanks to a TikTok video that showed Kirby outside of multiple Target stores.