With a week left until we’re playing Donkey Kong Bananza, you’re going to be seeing plenty of insights and interviews involving the Nintendo dev team and how they came together to make this potential “Game of the Year” contender for the newly released Nintendo Switch 2. One such interview came from IGN, where the game’s producer, Kenta Motokura, revealed the actual origins of the title. Apparently, it was a personal request from exec Yoshiaki Koizumi, who had a hand in many Mario games in the past, and oversaw Odyssey. Motokura stated:
“I would say the very original impetus for the development of Donkey Kong Bananza was when my boss, Mr. Koizumi, approached our team and asked us to consider working on a 3D Donkey Kong game. And that’s when we realized we really needed to know more about Donkey Kong, so we went and spoke to Mr. Miyamoto, the original creator of the character. And Mr. Miyamoto has experienced not only working on the Donkey Kong games that he was directly responsible for, but also worked alongside Rare on the Donkey Kong games that they created. And for him, a lot of things that came up were the unique actions that a really strong character like Donkey Kong can engage in, things like the hand slap or blowing his breath.
And I also spoke to Mr. Koizumi who had served as the director on Jungle Beat. And for him, one thing that was a really important distinguishing characteristic from a character like say, Mario, is that Donkey Kong has these longer, stronger arms. So we took all of these distinctive features of Donkey Kong as a character and tried to think about how we could bring them to play in a new game.”
At that same time, a programmer for Nintendo was looking to push voxel technology to make more destructible environments, and DK’s strength would be a perfect way to destroy such environments and thus, a match was made in gaming heaven.
Oh, and yes, they did hear about the Wreck-It Ralph connections on social media, but it was unintentional, as Pauline wasn’t meant to be in the game initially.
