Donkey Kong Country

Donkey Kong Country is a 1994 side-scrolling platform game developed by the British studio Rare? and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, known in Japan as Super Donkey Kong.¹⁵ It follows the gorilla Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong as they travel across Donkey Kong Island to recover a stolen banana hoard from the crocodilian King K. Rool and his army of Kremlings.¹⁵¹⁴ The game reintroduced Nintendo’s oldest character in a new form and revitalized sales of the aging SNES, going on to become the second-best-selling game on the system.¹⁴

The project marked the first time Nintendo entrusted its flagship simian to a third-party studio, and the first entry in the character’s history not to be directed or produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, though he was involved in the project.¹² Rare secured the rights after impressing Nintendo with a tech demo showcasing its capabilities on Silicon Graphics? workstations; following lengthy discussions, Nintendo acquired a 25% stake in the studio and handed it the Donkey Kong license.¹² The game reinvented the character while keeping recognizable hallmarks such as the red necktie, a design that would set the precedent for his subsequent appearances.¹²¹⁵ The credited staff included Tim Stamper, Gregg Mayles, and Steve Mayles on design, with music by David Wise, Eveline Fischer, and Robin Beanland.¹⁴

Graphics and technology

Donkey Kong Country’s central innovation was its visual technique: characters, enemies, objects, and backgrounds were modeled in 3D on Silicon Graphics hardware, then converted into 2D sprites and background layers the 16-bit SNES could display.¹⁸ The result was a fluid, CG-like appearance unlike anything gamers had seen on the console in 1994, giving the side-scrolling action a three-dimensional sense of depth.¹³ The tropical environments made use of effects including rain, mist, snow, and day-to-night transitions, with a translucency effect suggesting water in the underwater stages.¹⁸ Many of the sound effects were built from recordings of real animals.¹ Nintendo mounted an intense marketing campaign to promote the game, including a VHS tape titled Donkey Kong Country: Exposed, hosted by comedian Josh Wolf, distributed through Nintendo Power.¹²¹⁴

Gameplay

The player guides Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong through some 40 levels of running, jumping, and swinging, dispatching enemies by rolling through them, pouncing, or tossing barrels.¹²¹ Each character has distinct attributes: Donkey Kong is stronger and heavier, able to defeat larger enemies, while Diddy is faster and can jump higher.¹¹³ The two form a tag team, switching at any time, and the player only loses a life when both have been hit.¹² Each stage carries its own theme — swimming underwater, riding mine carts, swinging from vines, or being launched from barrel-cannons.¹ Secret passages lead to bonus games where players earn bananas and extra lives.¹¹¹ In several levels, players can ride animal friends including Rambi the rhino, Enguarde the swordfish, Winky the frog, Expresso the ostrich, and Squawks the parrot, each with unique abilities.¹⁴⁸ Other members of the Kong family aid the player from the overworld: Cranky Kong — the aged form of the original arcade Donkey Kong — offers hints, Candy Kong operates save points, and Funky Kong provides transport.⁶¹⁵ Two-player modes let players cooperate in a Team mode or race for the fastest stage times in a Contest mode.¹² The journey ends aboard the pirate ship Gangplank Galleon, where Donkey Kong defeats King K. Rool and reclaims his hoard.¹⁴ Critics singled out the brutal difficulty, particularly the unforgiving mine-cart stages, and the comparatively weak boss battles.¹²⁶

Lineage and legacy

The game descended directly from Nintendo’s own Donkey Kong?, the 1981 arcade platformer in which the gorilla — himself inspired by the Hollywood King Kong — appeared as the villain kidnapping a girlfriend.⁸² After a decade in which the ape had been benched following the poorly received Donkey Kong 3, Nintendo rebooted the character, moving him from the construction zone to the jungle and recasting him as a hero.² Rare, an English studio that had already turned heads with Battletoads, Marble Madness, and Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, revolutionized the property by adding new characters and features such as barrel blasting, banana collecting, and beast riding.¹⁰² Its structure and controls drew on the Mario template, including the convention of the run button doubling as the item-pickup button and the borrowing of rideable animal friends akin to Mario’s Yoshi.⁶⁷

Donkey Kong Country’s cutting-edge pre-rendered 2D graphics and deep platforming helped keep 2D games relevant during the mid-1990s rush toward 3D, and its success is credited with paving the way for later 2D outings by Nintendo mascots such as Mario, Kirby, and Yoshi.² It launched a series of sequels — Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (1995) and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! (1996) on the SNES — as well as numerous spin-offs, and directly inspired the Donkey Kong Land handheld series for the Game Boy.¹⁶¹⁵ The series was later revived by Retro Studios? with Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010), itself described as a reboot of the SNES series that was in turn a reboot of the arcade brand.⁵¹⁶ The game’s visual style and design were adapted to the Game Boy as Donkey Kong Land in 1995, and the original was ported to the Game Boy Color in 2000 and the Game Boy Advance in 2003.⁹¹⁴

Reception was near-universal acclaim on release, and the game sold over nine million copies worldwide.¹²¹⁴ Its reputation later drew a backlash: Miyamoto himself criticized the gameplay as “mediocre” and cited the series as proof that players would buy a game for its looks alone, and outlets including Electronic Gaming Monthly and GameSpy later placed it in “most overrated” features.¹²⁷ Retrospective reviews nonetheless rated it highly, with GameSpot scoring the Virtual Console release 7.7 and Nintendo Life 9 out of 10.¹⁶

David Wise’s soundtrack, with contributions from Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer, was widely praised for coaxing a richer variety of sounds than had emanated from a console before, and was later likened to the Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s of video game music; it was released on a standalone CD.²³⁷ Wise, a self-taught British composer who joined Rare in 1985, remained with the studio’s Donkey Kong work until 2009.²³

The game has been re-released repeatedly, appearing on the Wii, Wii U, and New Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console, the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System – Nintendo Classics service for Nintendo Switch Online from July 15, 2020.¹⁵¹⁸ It was removed from the Virtual Console without notice on November 16, 2012, in the United States and November 25, 2012, in Europe.¹⁴

Donkey Kong Country (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoCompleteNintendoComplete