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After spending over a decade as a plus one to Mario’s many parties and sports outings, Donkey Kong is back to leading star status with the upcoming Switch 2 title, Donkey Kong Bananza (out July 17). It’s a big deal for a few reasons: not only is it the first 3D entry in the franchise since 1999’s Donkey Kong 64, it’s also the first time ever that DK himself is headlining a launch title for a new generation of Nintendo hardware.
With that, there’s plenty of weight on the ape’s shoulders, but the developers at Nintendo are confident that DK is up to the task. Created by the internal team that previously worked on 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey — both one of the original Switch’s best games and an all-timer in the Mario catalog — and sporting a fresh redesign of the character, Donkey Kong Bananza aims to live up to the pedigree of both Nintendo franchises. And by all accounts, it’s swinging in the right direction.
But what goes into reimagining Donkey Kong for a modern generation? Rolling Stone recently spoke with the game’s developers to discuss Kong’s new look, bringing back Pauline, and the complex process of designing the perfect feeling punch.
Reinventing Kong
The first thing players will notice upon booting up Donkey Kong Bananza is that its titular ape looks pretty different. Although DK has sported multiple styles before (and the name’s been used for different characters entirely), his core aesthetic has remained mostly the same since the series’ first reboot in 1994’s Donkey Kong Country.
While his grandfather Cranky Kong went fully nude in the 1981 arcade classic, and his dad (DK Jr.) sported a white unitard, Donkey Kong III has the series’ most recognizable look. Wearing a now-iconic red tie and less cartoonish design with more angular and mischievous features, DKC’s version of Kong has been a staple for over 30 years.
But now he’s received an overhaul. The new version of DK retains the red tie but can also rock a sweet pair of overalls (he’s a working man after all), and has a more expressive, goofier veneer on full display.
When designing a new take on the storied character, the developers wanted to ensure that they paid respect to the long history of the character, which dates to the earliest days on Nintendo games. “One thing we knew is that we wanted to be very sensitive to the original image of the creator, Mr. Miyamoto, for this character,” says producer Kenta Motokura. “But we also wanted to pull out some unique features. You know, he’s sort of a fun and goofy character at times, too.”
But it’s not just DK creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s original vision that informed the new aesthetic. The developers had to take into account the perspective of multiple generations of fans to find the sweet spot. “Because this is such a long history for the Donkey Kong series, I really feel that everyone brings their own feelings of what Donkey Kong is to them,” Motokura says. “So, what we really wanted to express in this more recent design of Donkey Kong is all of those different associations, all of those feelings that people have with the character over its long history to come out in its appearance in this new design.”
One key aspect that more recent fans of the Donkey Kong Country series might not think about is the fact that DK himself might live on a jungle island, but he also coexists and interacts with different cultures and species. After all, the first DK saw Mario scaling an urban construction site to save his girlfriend, Pauline. “Another place that I would say we took inspiration from — the arcade version of Donkey Kong — in this case, was just in noticing that this was a world inhabited both by humans and by Kongs.”
And while the team debated on how much of the human world and more Donkey Kong Country-specific wilderness to include, one character addition was non-negotiable for Motokura: “One thing I wanted to make sure we definitely included was Cranky Kong. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fan, personally, but I wanted to make sure he was included.”
Destruction is king
While Donkey Kong games have genre hopped over the years, from the bread-and-butter platformers to rhythm games (and even a math-based edutainment), the core appeal is clear: it’s all about action.
But Donkey Kong’s idea of action is different from, say, Mario’s. And although the developers had previously found ways to make Super Mario Odyssey shine through its protagonists acrobatics, according to the game’s director, Kazuya Takahashi, Bananza required something very different.
“Super Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong Bananza both have this very large play area where you are experiencing a lot of platform-based gameplay. Now, with that premise in place, I will say that one big difference is that Donkey Kong Bananza takes, as its core gameplay, this theme of destruction,” Takahashi says. “And we want to use that to allow the player to destroy an area and [find] an interesting element, and then destroy a little bit more, and find another — so that there is a continuity of destruction in that gameplay that leads them to new play experiences.”
Like Odyssey, Bananza’s environment is made up of dozens of sprawling levels that are all fully explorable for secrets, challenges, and collectibles. But unlike Mario, whose main mode of action is jumping, DK interacts with the world by using his fists. Punching serves as the game’s primary verb, allowing DK to just knock out foes, but explore the densely packed terrain by tearing through the earth itself like a primate excavator.
Pretty much everything in game is discovered by tearing up the terrain, but that also presented its own challenges. Once underground, how would players be able to see what they’re pummeling?
“One thing we hit on during development was the fact that we would need an underground camera, something that worked a little bit differently, because you’re digging, you’re going down, and you’re going to have parts of your periphery that would normally block a camera view,” Takahashi says. “But we wanted the player to still be able to look around, so we needed some tech breakthroughs in order to make that happen.”
A voxel-filled world
But part of seeing what’s being destroyed is also knowing how the various pieces are reacting to damage, or in many cases, interacting with each other. “Now, we’re talking mostly about level design, but I also want to give a shout out to the programmers, because I think they had quite a difficult challenge ahead of them as well,” Motokura says. “From their perspective, we had this idea of how we wanted the levels to work, but the first thing we needed was a system to make those kinds of levels; we needed the tools.”
To bring the world of Bananza to life, the developers focused on utilizing voxel art for all its destructible bits. Think of voxels as three-dimensional representations of matter, akin to pixels but bigger. The blocky characters and universe of Minecraft is all built of voxels, as are the levels of classic games like Q*bert. Here, they make up the debris unearthed and thrown about — from chunks of sand or dirt to globs of lava and snow.
Whenever players punch a wall of dirt, it will gloriously explode into hundreds of little voxel chunks; materials themselves can also be ripped up to throw or ride on like a surfboard. For many puzzle-solving sections, it’s essential to think about how different materials can be combined to change the environment.
“Every time you get to a new layer of the game, you also have the opportunity to encounter new voxel types and see the way that they interact with one another,” Takahashi says. “For example, if you talk about an icy biome in the game, it wasn’t just because we wanted there to be somewhere in the game that was cold. It was really the interactions of the voxels that we’re thinking about. What if you had lava voxels in this icy world? How would they interact with different parts of it? And that leads to lots of new discoveries.”
Making a perfect punch
While creating a complex ecosystem of voxel materials is its own technical feat, one of the most challenging aspects of development came from designing the game’s most basic (and frequent) verb: DK’s punch. Given that players will be punching nonstop for the duration of the game (seriously, it’s hundreds of times per minute), it’s essential that the action remain satisfying not just to stave off boredom but consistently find tactile moments of joy that always feels good.
“It starts with the moment you press the button. What sort of reaction are you seeing from Donkey Kong on screen? That’s a place where I spent a lot of time paying attention to,” Motokura explains. “And so that responsiveness was something that [we] considered quite a bit. For example, because this is an action that you repeat many times, it helps to have a little bit of variation. That first punch is going to be a little bit different from the next one. Your successive punches will become faster.”
But there’s more to a good punch than the fluidity of its movement or inertia. The main crux of gameplay needs to encompass all the system’s overlapping design elements and maximize them for all senses.
“Another place that comes into play here is the sound design. You need sound effects that are going to be really good to hear each time, because you’re going to be hearing them so often. [We] did some really fine adjustments was on the camera shake and the controller rumble that you experience when doing a punch,” Motokura adds. “You consider how many different elements go into making a good punch, and that they all need to be adjusted relative to one another, we can say that the development cost, the time that you spend working on just one punch, could be quite high.”
Team Pauline
Since its reveal, one of the biggest outstanding questions for fans is, “What the hell is going on with Pauline?” Nintendo’s original damsel in distress first appeared in the 1981 game, kidnapped by DK for Mario (then called Jumpman) to rescue. Since then, she took a decades-long sabbatical before returning in 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey as a woman with much greater agency. As the mayor of the DK-inspired New Donk City, Pauline wasn’t just another princess, she was a career woman — multiple careers, actually — serving as a lounge singer who put on fully vocalized musical numbers in the game.
But the Pauline in Bananza doesn’t quite resemble the one we know. For one, she’s a child — and seemingly has no idea who Donkey Kong is. Nintendo reps remain mum on exactly how or why Pauline has reverted to kid form, or if this is even the same Pauline. It wouldn’t be the first time in the Donkey Kong series that different generations of characters share a name within a family tree.
But whatever her deal, the chibi-like iteration of Pauline retains her powerful singing voice. In-game, she acts as a sidekick to DK, riding on his shoulders throughout the adventure. Her voice can be used to open sonically sensitive doors or even trigger superpowered transformations for DK. Turns out, her inclusion in the game is what helped shaped many aspects of its design.
“Certainly, the idea of who Donkey Kong might be traveling with was something that we were thinking about in development from the very beginning,” Motokura says. “The idea of Pauline being on possibility for a traveling companion like this in the game came up, but it really was not until the game specifically called for her as a character that we made the decision.”
“I think that moment was when one of our concept artists created this image of Donkey Kong transforming into a zebra,” Motokura continues. “When we implemented this into the game, we also had the composer make music that was specific to this zebra transformation. Then we started to think, ‘This would be a really interesting time to have Pauline, as a character, singing.’ And so, we thought it really made a lot of sense, and we went back to the composer to make that request. That was a key moment where, once we had decided on that, a lot of other pieces started to fall into place.”
The inclusion of Pauline ultimately reoriented the game to incorporate more musical elements in its mechanics — something the Donkey Kong games have always been known for. “It really starts with Pauline being a singer herself,” Motokura says. “That is what introduced music as a key element to the world and drove a lot of these later design sessions. There is a connection throughout the series with music.”
To his credit, Donkey Kong himself is no stranger to tagalongs. In the Country series, he’s been paired up with his nephew Diddy Kong, among others. But the choice of Pauline adds something unique: She can speak. While previous allies remained nonverbal, relying on high fives and pantomimes, Pauline is a fully voiced character in Bananza, and adds a different vibe to the game, closer in line to famous girl-meets-ape dynamics like those seen in Godzilla vs. Kong or (to an extent) Wreck-It Ralph.
“Pauline, being a human character, one of the greatest merits of including her is that she speaks in a way that players would be able to understand and can be a little more empathetic or resonant for them,” Takahashi says.
But that doesn’t mean the developers have completely forgotten about DK’s best bud. While he was recently teased to make a cameo in Bananza, the baseball-capped simian is still on Takahashi’s mind: “Maybe you’ll see more of Diddy in the future.”
