On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the first Donkey Kong Country, one of the members of the original development team explains some curiosities.
Donkey Kong Country is now twenty-five years old. The British video game Rare, originally released on SNES when the company worked under the protection of Nintendo, is a project well remembered by lovers of the then emerging scene of two-dimensional platform titles. One of the members of the original team has now revealed some curiosities about the development of the project that dared to change its dimension, Donkey Kong 64.
Because not everything is what it seems or everything is what was initially planned. Donkey Kong 64, launched at the end of 1999 and with the Pak Expansion incorporated, was the first approach of the character to 3D in its own saga, but at first it was going to be a 2.5D platform, more similar to what we had seen in the original trilogy for the 16-bit machine.
Donkey Kong 64
So much so that, during the development as a 2.5D game, they decided to restart the work completely to get into the three dimensions. Mark Stevenson, a member of that team mostly made up of English programmers, explains that "it was a monumental job, a massive game, a huge amount of work." To which he adds: “It was in development for about three years; the team that created DKC3 started with it after the game was launched, but after about 18 months the development restarted, the team changed from being more like a 2.5D platform to what it ended up becoming; more in the line of the structure of Mario and Banjo in open 3D levels that had many uses ”.
Because the idea was to make "a format of levels with structure from A to B", but it was not feasible enough from the renewed point of view of production. Continuity was not a viable option at that time.
All in all, Donkey Kong 64 is the sixth best-selling video game of all time on Nintendo 64 with some 5.79 million units globally. Last year 2017 they discovered a new secret in the game; Seventeen years after its original release.
