The Donkey Kong Country fanbase is one of the most overlooked factions of the gaming community. Odds are that anybody who played Nintendo games during the 16-bit era spent some time with Donkey Kong Country or one of its two (even more brilliant) sequels. Yet rarely is DKC discussed in the wild outside the context of it being nothing more than a technical showpiece of its era. By 1994, the character of Donkey Kong was a nearly forgotten mascot of the bygone 80s arcade golden age. Rare reinvented the character for the 90s generation by replacing the original arcade Donkey Kong (who becomes Cranky Kong) with his his son (the now all-grown-up DK Jr.) and completely moving the characters into their own jungle paradise – a world far removed from the girders, pie factories, toadstools, and fat Italian plumbers of the Mario universe. Suddenly Donkey Kong was no longer simply an evolutionary step for the Mario brand, but rather a full blown franchise in its own right.
Donkey Kong Country was a collaborative effort between Nintendo and Rare to save the Super Nintendo from the threat of an early retirement. The 32-bit consoles were looming on the horizon and the N64 was years away. Nintendo needed something that could not only push the SNES ahead of the then leading Sega Genesis, but also to keep people from abandoning 16-bit in favor of the new (yet still uber expensive) Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The answer was to fool people. Early 3D polygon console games looked like trash, but the simple fact that they were 3D was enough to make most people swoon over them. What they lacked in art direction, they made up for in dimensions.
Donkey Kong Country did something different. The Super Nintendo couldn’t display high quality 3D visuals, so Rare cheated the hardware. Rare developed a system where they rendered high-end CG graphics via super computers, then took high quality snapshots of those renders and compressed those graphics into sprite layers and displayed them within the SNES’s 256 color parameter. It was a simple trick, but nobody else had thought of it yet. The Genesis was older tech than the venerable SNES. With its limited 64 color palette, there’s no way Sega could get away with a similar ruse, not to say that they didn’t try (Vectorman and Sonic 3D Blast). Nintendo’s pre-rendered graphics were a lie in a sense, but they were a beautiful lie that starved off 32-bit and gave the SNES the two best years of its life. Some gamers actually believed Rare had pulled off a hardware miracle and that this was happening in real time (you could fool people like that back in frontier times before anybody had internet access).
By the time Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest came out in 1995, most players had figured out Rare’s little secret and realized that the graphics were an illusion, but they bought the sequel anyway. DKC‘s instant success may have been built on a foundation of ACM pre-rendered visuals and waxy early 90s CGI, but beyond the initial graphical wow factor, players fell in love with DKC because they discovered a game that swept you away with its majestic art direction, symphonic audio magic, memorable stage design, and silky smooth flow of gameplay, all with a simple self-referential charm second to none.
Rare didn’t just use their programming trickery to shock and wow people. They built a world that sucked you in. Suddenly the characters in Donkey Kong’s new world came to life in a way not yet seen before in games, and that had more to do with Rare’s talent for creating and animating lovable characters and believable worlds than the tech they used to do it. It’s easy to forget just how good these games were. Donkey Kong Country 2 easily ranks equally alongside (or above, depending on who you ask) such supposedly untouchable classics like Yoshi’s Island or Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
When Rare produced DKC2, they realized that the “wow” effect would be gone from the first game, so they did everything within their power to blow the walls off both their game design talents, as well as produce a game with an atmosphere more rich and encompassing than most anything else from the era. From the beautiful yet deadly brambles in the sky, to the broken down island amusement park, or the haunting windy well shafts with the sounds of pick axes slamming away at crystals in the endless rock face, DKC2 was a magical game in every respect. Many fans, however, remember it best for delivering one of the most eclectic game soundtracks ever conceived, courtesy of 8-bit musical stalwart David Wise.
Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble had the misfortune of launching in the wake of Super Mario 64. It got buried in the press and forgotten at retail, which is a tragedy because DKC3 arguably set the most unique tone of the trilogy. The first game was a jungle adventure set in the island of Donkey Kong Country. The sequel was a swashbuckling rescue adventure set aboard the mechanical decaying and mobile Crocodile Isle. DKC3 took on a northern Canadian look and feel with stunning mountain lands and lakes slowly being taken over by Kremling industry and pollution. It was also easily the most challenging of the three.
Beyond the Super Nintendo trilogy, the Donkey Kong Country brand was retired and followed by a series of spin-off titles that never truly recaptured the magic. Donkey Kong 64 was hyped as the 3D coming out party for the franchise, yet it failed to recapture the indescribable atmosphere and tone of the originals and wound up falling more in line with the collect-a-thon gameplay and comical style of Banjo-Kazooie.
After Rare’s sudden departure to Microsoft, Nintendo was left flailing with the decision of where to take the franchise without the studio that had created it. For the studio’s first title, EAD Tokyo took a crack at DK with Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, but the game served to do nothing more than completely polarize the fanbase. New fans accepted Jungle Beat as a quirky bongo banging alternative to traditional platforming. Longtime DKC fans however took offense to Nintendo’s decision to cast aside every single element of the beloved Rare formula. Diddy Kong? Gone. The Kremlings? Vanished. The majestic new age Enya-styled synth soundtracks? Replaced with thumping Japanese jungle pop. According to Jungle Beat Director Yoshiaki Koizumi, that decision was intentional. He didn’t feel that “the past look of Donkey Kong was fresh enough for today” and that, “The only thing Donkey Kong needs is to be the best, and become king of the jungle.”
Considering the game’s release timetable, that comment and the decision to throw away the entire DKC brand in favor of something radically different probably had more to do with Nintendo attempting to distance themselves from Rare’s legacy after their dirty breakup in 2002. Perhaps Nintendo wanted to lay their own Eastern stamp on the character and in a sense “reclaim it” after Rare’s departure. Whatever their reasoning for casting aside the DKC universe, it didn’t work. Jungle Beat bombed hard in North America. The “New Play Control” budget release for Wii didn’t do much better. Most agreed that something was missing, but critics couldn’t quite pinpoint exactly what it was.
After that failure, Donkey Kong was relegated to niche appearances in Mario sports games until a quiet comeback began in 2005 when small time Japanese studio Paon took a crack at the DKC brand with a Game Boy Advance title titled DK: King of Swing. Building off the foundation of the NES classic Clu Clu Land, King of Swing was controlled with only the L & R buttons. DK propelled himself throughout stages via momentum by swinging on wooden pegs. It was an entirely new gameplay mechanic, yet the style was certainly Donkey Kong Country in spirit. Even with no marketing at all, King of Swing became a moderate success. Seeming to be trying to keep the characters in people’s minds, Nintendo commissioned a DS sequel titled DK: Jungle Climber that added on to the formula and brought back the classic pre-rendered visual style. It seemed the public was getting ready for a return to form.
That long overdue return arrived in the middle of the E3 2010 media briefing when Nintendo unveiled a direct sequel to the DKC trilogy in the form of Donkey Kong Country Returns. Suddenly the past 15 years of disappointments were erased alongside DK’s cheesy “toothy” grin most commonly associated with the disliked Jungle Beat incarnation of the character. The majestic jungle landscapes, the pirate ships, Cranky Kong’s cynical and self-referential humor, the sense of exploration, and most importantly, the traditional 2D gameplay were all present and accounted for. In the trusted hands of Retro Studios, the Donkey Kong Country brand seems ready to finally receive the long deserved critical praise that has escaped it for so long.
For a time in the 90s, the DKC brand carried the torch for Nintendo while the Mario series went into a five year hibernation phase building up to its 3D reinvention, and people didn’t miss Mario one bit with three of the best platformers ever made to fill the void. Donkey Kong Country Returns is set to continue that leading legacy this month, day and date, on the sixteenth anniversary of the original 16-bit classic, only this time, the fans will finally realize what they’ve been missing all these years. Welcome back DK.
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