Donkey Kong Country: No Country for Old Kongs

If you were a kid or teen in the 90s, you probably had one of the Donkey Kong Country games, at least here in the states. I took it as an article of faith as a child that Donkey Kong was as ubiquitous on Nintendo consoles as Mario and Link. It turns out this era in the mid-90s was more of an anomaly for Nintendo’s original mascot more than anything else, but the fact that I believed this to be true speaks a lot to how crucial this game was not only for the Super Nintendo, but for gaming history in general. It’s come to the point where I see the Seinfeld effect in real time around this game, a strong minority of people today consider DKC to be boring compared to other titles of its time like Sonic 3 or Yoshi’s Island precisely because of how influential DKC has been to 2Dish platformers. It also holds a lot of nostalgia for me as one of the first games I ever played period, and one of the first games I completed as well. 

But first, a little history on the titular character and the developer, Rare. Donkey Kong himself was loosely based around the Universal character King Kong which Nintendo won a very contentious lawsuit over (do not challenge these guys in court). In the late 1970s arcade games were all the rage across the world, and Nintendo wanted to get in on the action. They produced a couple of arcade flops like Radar Scope which pushed the company to the brink of financial ruin. With a huge inventory of radar scope cabinets and not much else, a young developer named Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with converting the cabinets into a new game. He teamed up with another relatively obscure employee, Nintendo’s head of engineering Gunpei Yokoi, to pull off this tall order. I’m sure these guys won’t become industry legends or anything!

Initially, Miyamoto wanted to rip off another classic American franchise, Popeye. They wanted to use the love triangle of Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl to make a simple game where you play as Popeye dodging obstacles to rescue Olive. They weren’t able to get the rights to Popeye, and so outside of copying King Kong to make the titular Donkey Kong character, the duo had to come up with original characters to fill the other two spots. They settled on the hero being a male plumber (because the game took place in the NYC sewer system) originally named Jumpan, later Mario (after Nintendo of America’s landlord), and the damsel in distress was named Pauline (later Princess Peach). Donkey Kong was an instant success in the US and Japan which quickly produced two sequels, Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. To make a long story short, when Nintendo eventually released their first home console to the US in 1985 they reused the Mario and Peach characters in a pack in game called Super Mario Bros that turned out to be a massive hit. This saw poor Donkey Kong fall by the wayside for almost a decade.

During this same time, Christopher and Tim Stamper were two brothers making hit games on the Zx Spectrum computer line in the UK. They owned a company called Ultimate Play the Game, but the Stampers saw the success of the NES in other countries (it notoriously did not catch on in Europe, probably because it came with a gun or something) and decided that this was the future. The brothers sold their company and established Rare before breaking the bamboo ceiling after successfully reverse engineering the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Nintendo was a very opaque company during their near monopoly days in the 80s, and Japanese companies were who they preferred to work with to develop games. However, the Stampers so impressed them by reverse engineering the console (which they said could not be done and was used to lock out third party companies that didn’t pay a hefty fee) that they immediately gave Rare a huge budget and said “make us a game!” I guess it’s better than getting sued!

Rare made a number of hits for the NES, most notably Battletoads, a beat em up game based on the very popular Ninja Turtles series. Still, while Rare stood out as one of the only European game developers for the NES, they would’ve been a footnote in history were it not for the Stamper brother’s vision. They decided to use their massive profits from the NES to purchase expensive 3D workstations from a company known as Silicone Graphics, most known for being the major underpinning of the future Nintendo 64. These workstations were seen as a novelty in the early 90s, but it was about to give Rare a huge edge in 3D game development. Rare developed a 3D boxing game demo which worked so well that it couldn’t be played on the SNES without a whole lot of technical gymnastics. Nintendo was once again so impressed that they actually bought a stake in Rare. Nintendo took the further extraordinary step of offering them their entire catalogue of characters to make a 3D game. The brothers ultimately settled on a revival of the Donkey Kong franchise.

The demo that would eventually become Donkey Kong Country took 18 months to develop at a time when games could be turned around in a third of the time. Some of the background research included multiple trips to the zoo! In order to simulate 3D graphics on a console that really couldn’t render 3D graphics, the playable characters, Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong, were digitized over pre-rendered backgrounds that gave the illusion of 3D. 

The gameplay itself was simple enough yet incredibly tight, you would walk from left to right across an entire level avoiding obstacles, climbing, jumping, or getting blasted out of barrels along the way. Notably, each level concept was designed by Rare on post it notes detailing each stage of the level before getting programmed into the game. After completing a series of levels you would come face to face with a boss. You could also collect bananas, similarly to Mario’s coins or Sonic’s rings, getting 100 gave you an extra life. DKC also had a killer soundtrack composed by David Wise who also did the music for the sequel. This soundtrack was so successful that songs like Aquatic Ambiance and Strickerbrush Symphony (from the sequel) have made it into pop culture. 

Anticipation for DKC was high in 1994. The game was backed by a sixteen million dollar budget, one of the largest at the time. The promise of 3D graphics on the SNES excited many, and the game ended up being a critical and commercial darling. Game journalists of the time felt that DKC more than any other title caused the SNES to reassert itself against the Sega Genesis after taking a beating to the Sonic franchise (and Sega writ large) from 1991-1993. DKC was released in the same year as Sonic 3, and it easily dwarfed it both in popular culture and in sales figures. The two sequels, Donkey Kong Country 2 (1995) and 3 (1996), would continue the “story” (the plot is real thin) and expand the amount of exploration and gameplay styles in the various levels. 

From there, Rare would go on to dominate many of our childhoods by coming second only to Nintendo as a developer on the Nintendo 64. I have cherished memories of playing all 3 titles, and even today hearing David Wise’s soundtrack takes me back to being a 5 year old kid jumping on Kremlings and drinking some abhorrent soda like Big Red. No SNES collection is complete without this game, and I still recommend it to anyone today. Sadly, this would be something of the zenith for our favorite bowtie wearing ape. The DKC franchise would get spiritual successors on the Wii and Wii-U, but we have not seen him on the Switch. Here’s hoping we see more of the Kongs in 2025!