Donkey Kong Country

• 1. Introduction

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  Donkey Kong Country made its public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, which ran from the 23rd to the 25th of June 1994. Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln saved it for the finale of the company's presentation. He gave no hint of the hardware behind it. Many people in the room assumed they were watching a preview of the upcoming Nintendo 64. Only at the very end did the truth come out: this was a game for the aging Super Nintendo. Gregg Mayles, the lead designer, remembered the audience falling into stunned silence before it burst into applause.

  The game itself is a platformer in which the gorilla Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong chase the crocodile King K. Rool and his army of Kremlings after the theft of the Kongs' banana hoard. Behind that simple chase sits a stranger story. A small British studio working out of a farmhouse had found a way to make a 16-bit console look like the future. How did a studio best known for a handful of NES games talk Nintendo into handing over one of its oldest characters? What did the team endure to squeeze film-quality pictures onto a cartridge? And why did a game that sold in the millions later become one of the most argued-over titles of its era?

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• 2. A Risky Purchase

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  In 1985, the brothers Tim and Chris Stamper founded Rare, a studio built to chase the growing Japanese console market. They had earlier run a British computer game company called Ultimate Play the Game. Nintendo had turned down their attempt to form a partnership in 1983, so Chris Stamper spent six months studying the hardware of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rare then proved the machine could be reverse-engineered and showed tech demos to Minoru Arakawa, president of Nintendo of America. Impressed, Arakawa granted the studio a developer licence. Rare went on to make more than 60 NES games, including the Battletoads series.

  When the Super Nintendo arrived in 1991, Rare chose to slow its output. Around 1992 it put its NES profits into Silicon Graphics Challenge workstations running Alias rendering software, which could build 3D models. Each machine cost £80,000, a serious gamble for a studio of that size. The purchase made Rare the most technologically advanced developer in the United Kingdom. A year later, Nintendo itself partnered with Silicon Graphics to design the Super Nintendo's successor, the Nintendo 64.

  The workstations had been bought with that future console in mind. Then Rare found that the same technology could serve the 16-bit Super Nintendo. The studio tried it out with Battletoads Arcade, released in 1994, and began a boxing game called Brute Force. At that moment Nintendo was locked in a console war with Sega, and wanted an answer to Sega's Aladdin from 1993, whose graphics came from Disney animators. On a trip to Europe, Lincoln heard about Rare's experiments. Nintendo sent representatives, among them chief technology officer Genyo Takeda, and asked whether Brute Force could run on Super Nintendo hardware. The Stampers produced a working build in two days.

  Tim Stamper then looked at the digitised footage in Mortal Kombat from 1992 and proposed a platform game built from pre-rendered graphics. For a subject, Nintendo offered Donkey Kong, a franchise that had been mostly dormant since the unsuccessful Donkey Kong 3 in 1983. Licensing it seemed to carry little risk. Nobody agrees on who asked whom. Some sources say Nintendo offered its catalogue and the Stampers picked Donkey Kong. Mayles and his brother Steve recalled that Nintendo requested a Donkey Kong game. Shigeru Miyamoto, the character's creator, said Rare approached Nintendo because other developers were busy with Mario and The Legend of Zelda.

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• 3. Pixels from Models

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  Development began in mid-1993 with a team of 12, the largest Rare had ever assembled. Nintendo was sceptical, worried that the new look would make the game hard to play. At an early demo for Nintendo staff in Japan, Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi felt the game "looked too 3D". Mayles said Miyamoto backed Rare and gave his approval. Nintendo codenamed the project "Country", after Rare's home in Twycross, and that name grew into the title. Rumble in the Jungle, Monkey Mayhem, and Donkey Kong and the Golden Bananas were also considered.

  Miyamoto had directed or produced every earlier Donkey Kong game, but he was busy with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Rare said he still supplied crucial input. Otherwise Nintendo, usually fiercely protective of its properties, left Rare largely alone. Programmer Brendan Gunn said the Stampers worked to shield the team from outside influence.

  The technical heart of the project was a compression method that Nintendo and Rare called Advanced Computer Modelling, or ACM. Pre-rendered 3D art had appeared before on a mainstream home console, in the 1993 Finnish Amiga game Stardust, but Rare's method packed far more detail and animation into each sprite for the same memory. The team feared competition from DMA Design's Uniracers, also released in 1994, until they learned that only the player character was pre-rendered.

  Artists modelled each character using PowerAnimator, adding textures, then built the animations and rendered them frame by frame before compression. A single Silicon Graphics screen took up more memory than an entire Super Nintendo cartridge. Mayles called splitting the backgrounds into tiles "the bane of the project". Models took hours to render, so computers ran overnight. Sometimes an artist would switch off a colleague's machine mid-render to claim the processing time. Nintendo supplied research material on apes, barrels, and caves, while Tim Stamper kept urging the team to add weather and lighting effects.

  The workstations needed a massive air conditioning unit to avoid overheating, yet the team worked through the summer heat with no relief of their own. According to Gunn, they put in twelve to sixteen hours a day, every day of the week. Rare spent 18 months on the game, and said it logged 22 years of man hours, the most for any game at that time. Pressure came from the Stampers and from Nintendo's race with Sega to finish before Thanksgiving.

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• 4. Meet the Kongs

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  Kevin Bayliss was handed the job of redesigning Donkey Kong, and he wanted a character who looked believable enough to pound his chest. His first sketch was blocky and muscular, which made it easy to animate. Then Nintendo faxed over reference material, and the design turned more cartoonish. The final eyes came from his earlier work on Battletoads. Miyamoto suggested the red tie and left the rest to Bayliss.

  Diddy Kong began when Rare looked for a mechanic similar to the power-up system in Super Mario games. Mayles said: "We thought a second character could perform this function, look visually impressive, and give the player a feeling that they were not alone". Diddy was conceived as a reworking of Donkey Kong Jr., though Bayliss disliked the original character. Rare did not want Diddy to share Donkey Kong's build, so Bayliss based him on a spider monkey and made him agile. Nintendo judged the change too drastic and asked Rare to rework him or present him as new. Mayles chose a new character.

  Naming him was a struggle. Candidates included "Diet Donkey Kong", "Donkey Kong Lite", and "Titchy Kong". Rare settled on "Dinky" but switched to "Diddy" because of legal problems.

  Real gorillas turned out to be poor models. Rare staff spent hours recording the animals at nearby Twycross Zoo, which they later called "a complete waste of time". The animals moved too slowly for a fast game, and their sounds were too quiet for a microphone. The team based Donkey Kong's run on a horse's gallop instead, and programmer Mark Betteridge supplied the voice clips for both Kongs. Rare also made Cranky Kong the original arcade Donkey Kong, now aged, but kept that out of the game and marketing for fear Nintendo would object. Only the instruction manual says so.

  For the villains, Mayles said the team pitched Wario, but Nintendo wanted original characters. Rare recycled the Kremlings from Johnny Blastoff and the Kremling Armada, a cancelled adventure game, and their name is a play on the Moscow Kremlin. Rare's original story ran to 15 pages. Nintendo had it condensed to fit inside an instruction manual.

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• 5. Designed on Post-it Notes

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  Mayles named Super Mario Bros. 3 from 1988 as the main influence on the level design. He wanted a game that was accessible yet flowed smoothly for expert players, so objects were placed to let a well-timed player keep moving without stopping. Speedrunning did not yet exist as a concept, but he said "the way the game was designed definitely supports it". Level locations drew on the films Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

  The team planned levels on Post-it Notes. They imagined set pieces such as swinging ropes, sketched every variation they could think of, and then pieced the notes together. Barrels became a central mechanic as a nod to the original arcade game, and hidden coins and balloons added depth.

  The resulting game has 40 levels, reached from a world map, and the player can swap between Donkey Kong and Diddy at will. Donkey Kong is stronger, while Diddy is faster and more agile. If one is hit, he runs off and the other takes over until the player frees his partner from a barrel. Levels range from jungles and underwater reefs to mines, mountains, and factories, with minecarts, barrel cannons, and ropes. Animal buddies lend special powers: Rambi the rhino charges, Enguarde the swordfish stabs, Squawks the parrot carries a lantern, Expresso the ostrich flies, and Winky the frog leaps high. Candy Kong runs a save point, and reaching 101 per cent completion unlocks a different ending.

  Little was cut. Gunn's one regret was that Donkey Kong walks along dotted lines on the world map rather than paths, a fix that time ran out for. A collectible that would flee or hide from the player never made it in, but it became the basis for the Jinjos in Banjo-Kazooie from 1998.

  When Nintendo reviewed the near-finished game, it told Rare to lower the difficulty for a broad audience, reasoning that the secrets would still challenge hardcore players. At this stage Miyamoto made last-minute suggestions, including Donkey Kong's terrain slap. Nintendo's Kensuke Tanabe then flew to Twycross to localise the game alongside the Rare team.

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• 6. The Sound of the Island

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  David Wise started as a freelancer and assumed his music would be swapped for something by Koji Kondo, since Donkey Kong mattered so much to Nintendo. Rare asked him for three jungle demo tunes. These were merged into "DK Island Swing", the track for the first level. Miyamoto liked it, and Wise was hired for the full score. He composed from a former cattle shed, apart from the rest of the team, with Tim Stamper dropping by now and then. Before writing each piece, he was shown the artwork and played the level it belonged to.

  The Super Nintendo's SPC700 sound chip limited him. He wanted the sound of a 1940s jazz big band, specifically the Glenn Miller Orchestra, but the chip could not deliver it. He "used a lot of small samples and made the soundtrack very synthesised" to work around the limits, and he entered the music by hand to save memory. His colleague Grant Kirkhope said Wise's command of the hardware let him "make it do things that people hadn't heard before". Wise also wrote lyrics for every melody, though The New York Times noted that "no one is really meant to hear them".

  The underwater theme, "Aquatic Ambience", took five weeks. A recent breakup had left Wise feeling as if he were drowning, and he channelled that into the piece. He still names it his favourite and the game's biggest technological accomplishment in audio. The boss theme took cues from the Nine Inch Nails song "March of the Pigs", while K. Rool's theme borrowed from sea shanties, barrel organ music, and Iron Maiden. For the title screen, Wise remixed Nintendo's original Donkey Kong theme to show how far the character had come.

  Eveline Novakovic wrote seven tracks, including the world map theme, on her first Super Nintendo project. Wise taught her the hardware as they worked. Funky Kong's theme came from Robin Beanland, who wrote it for an internal progress video about Killer Instinct. Nintendo then used it in a promotional trailer, and Tim Stamper liked it enough to keep it. A soundtrack CD called DK Jamz reached North America in November 1994, making it one of the earliest video game soundtrack albums released in the United States.

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• 7. The Marketing Blitz

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  Nintendo spent US$16 million promoting Donkey Kong Country in America alone, according to the Los Angeles Times. Major games of the time averaged about US$5 million. Hardcore Gaming 101 called it a "marketing blitzkrieg". Advertising stressed the graphics, often noting that Rare's workstations had helped create the dinosaurs of the 1993 film Jurassic Park. It also pitched the game against Sega's Mega-CD and 32X add-ons, to remind buyers that it ran on existing hardware.

  Subscribers to Nintendo Power received a promotional VHS tape, Donkey Kong Country: Exposed, hosted by comedian Josh Wolf. It toured the Treehouse, the Nintendo of America division where games are tested, and included tips and interviews with Tim Stamper. Nintendo World Report wrote that it was probably the first time most people outside Nintendo learned about the Treehouse.

  In October 1994, Nintendo ran a campaign on the online service CompuServe, an early example of a major game company using the internet to promote a product. It offered downloadable video samples, a trivia contest with 800 entrants, and an hour-long chat attended by 80 people, where Lincoln, Arakawa, and marketing vice-president Peter Main took questions. Kellogg's cereal boxes carried character art and a prize giveaway from November 1994 to April 1995.

  The release landed a month after Sonic & Knuckles on the Mega Drive. The Los Angeles Times framed it as a duel between two mascots, each with a Hollywood-sized budget and a headline technology. Hardcore Gaming 101 remembered that the game "was everywhere" and that for kids, "November 20th seemed like the eve of a revolution". USGamer added a harder truth. With Sony's PlayStation and the Sega Saturn on the horizon and the Nintendo 64 not due until 1996, the game served as Nintendo's "bluff" that the Super Nintendo could hold its ground.

  The game reached the UK on the 18th of November 1994 and North America on the 21st, two weeks ahead of schedule. It sold over 500,000 copies in a week and a million in the United States within two weeks, a record at the time. In its second week the game grossed US$15 million, more than the top film, The Santa Clause, at US$11.5 million, and the top album, Miracles: The Holiday Album, at US$5.2 million. It sold six million copies in its first holiday season, grossing US$400 million worldwide. Lifetime sales reached 9.3 million copies, making it the third-bestselling Super Nintendo game and the bestselling Donkey Kong game.

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• 8. Verdict and Aftermath

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  Entertainment Weekly wrote that the game "is to most 16-bit games what most 16-bit games are to their Atari forebears." Electronic Gaming Monthly called it "one of the few games that is actually as good as the hype". Several magazines gave perfect scores, and critics praised the visuals, the music, and the variety of play. Reviewers often set it beside Super Mario World. Time put it second on its list of the best products of 1994, behind the Chrysler Neon, and it was the only video game on that list. In 1995 it became the first game to win the Favourite Video Game award at the Kids' Choice Awards.

  The mood turned in the early 2000s. Eurogamer observed that disliking the game had become fashionable, and it was frequently called one of the most overrated ever. Critics accused it of putting style over substance, and USGamer blamed the "flimflammery of its visuals" set against "the relative mundanity of its actual game design". A rumour grew that Miyamoto scorned the game and created the hand-drawn look of Yoshi's Island as revenge. In a 2000 interview he spoke warmly of Rare. The author Steven L. Kent attributed to him a 1995 remark that gamers would tolerate mediocre gameplay if the art was good. In 2019 the historian Frank Cifaldi checked the interview and found no such quote.

  The commercial effects were large. In April 1995, Nintendo bought a 25% stake in Rare, later raised to 49%. Rare became the first non-Japanese second-party studio, and grew from 84 staff to over 250. That partnership produced GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Conker's Bad Fur Day. IGN wrote that the game "saved the SNES", and Official Nintendo Magazine argued that by arriving just 12 days before the PlayStation's Japanese launch, it persuaded buyers that an immediate upgrade was unnecessary.

  The game's influence ran wide. Naughty Dog's founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin named it the primary influence on Crash Bandicoot in 1996. Sega commissioned Vectorman in response. The New York Times compared the soundtrack to the Beatles' Revolver, and "Aquatic Ambience" was called "the 'Eleanor Rigby' of video game music". Donald Glover sampled it in his 2012 song "Eat Your Vegetables", and Wise approved.

  Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002, and the series then went quiet until Retro Studios revived it with Donkey Kong Country Returns in 2010 and Tropical Freeze in 2014. Wise, who had left Rare in 2009, came back to compose the score for Tropical Freeze.

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