I’ve made it clear on multiple episodes of the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast that there are certain franchises that should’ve gotten new entries on the Nintendo Switch that just…didn’t. One of the biggest is Donkey Kong, who had his Wii U game, Tropical Freeze, ported to the Switch, which sold very well, and then nothing. Then, when the June Nintendo Direct came out, they revealed that Donkey Kong Country Returns from the Wii era was getting an HD remaster, and many were like, “Why can’t we just have a new game?”
The sad irony is that we almost did have a new Donkey Kong title, as one was being worked on in 2016 by Vicarious Visions. They were going to go big with it, and had some good pre-production work in before Activision decided to pump the brakes on it so they could focus on Call of Duty. That ticked off a lot of people on the dev team, and Nintendo fans, too! Fast forward to now, and a concept art piece from the title dropped online.
Concept art leaked by a user on Reddit for canceled Donkey Kong game developed by Vicarious Visions (Blizzard Albany).
While it doesn’t show much, it makes me wonder what could’ve been, and how well this game could’ve sold on Switch. Maybe we’ll get something on Switch 2?
