Retro spotlight: Donkey Kong Country

One of the SNES' most important games, and the center of a possibly imagined controversy.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

1994 was a pivotal year for Nintendo. The Sega Genesis, powered by the introduction (and follow-up releases) of Sonic the Hedgehog, had gone from possessing just a single-digit percentage of the market share in the United States to leading Nintendo in it. They outsold not just the SNES, but everything else on the market, too. This was a weird position for Nintendo to be in, given their complete dominance of the previous console generation both in North America and in Japan, but they weren’t finished yet. They had an ace left to play, and that was Donkey Kong Country.

Donkey Kong Country did not turn the tide of what has been dubbed “the console wars” all on its own. Sega, for one, did plenty to squander their lead of the market: while there were some initial strong sales for add-ons like the Sega CD and 32X, in the end, this fractured userbase split the console manufacturer’s attention too much. When the 32-bit Sega Saturn launched, Sega too quickly slowed the manufacturing and support of the Genesis, which was still plenty popular in North America and in PAL territories, even if it never quite thrived in Japan. Donkey Kong Country, though, is representative of why Nintendo ended up pulling out victory in the 16-bit era in the end. They, and third-party developers, continued to support the SNES into the 32-bit generation: this support, and the success that arose from it, is what allowed Nintendo to turn their efforts toward a 64-bit console while they capitalized on the continued popularity of their 16-bit machine and the handheld space Sega would also begin to distance itself from soon.

Donkey Kong Country would end up being the third-best selling game on the SNES, with 9.3 million copies sold. It also had an SNES bundle where it was the pack-in game, so some of those 9.3 million copies included the console to play it on, which, you know, probably resulted in the purchase of other games. Like Donkey Kong Country 2 (5.15 million), or Donkey Kong Country 3 (3.51 million), or any of the 16 million sellers that released after the original Donkey Kong Country did. (The range on those best sellers, by the way, is from Derby Stallion ‘96’s 1.1 million to Tetris & Dr. Mario’s six million.)

It’s pretty easy to imagine a scenario where Nintendo doesn’t have a game as popular as Donkey Kong Country to roll out at the time that Sega was overtaking them in the United States, which was the chief battleground between the two console manufacturers. And losing too much momentum in this era was perilous, considering Sony’s dominant entry in the market with the Playstation, and what we now know ended up happening to Sega when they lagged so far behind that even the brilliance of the Dreamcast couldn’t save them. Maybe Square decides to end their relationship with Nintendo earlier than Final Fantasy VII because the SNES isn’t thriving enough to justify releasing titles like Chrono Trigger on it, nor does it make sense to spend development time and resources on something like Super Mario RPG so late into the system’s life cycle. Again, Donkey Kong Country alone isn’t why we ended up with the timeline we did, but its nearly 10 million in sales — more than all but one Sega Genesis/Mega Drive title, the pack-in Sonic the Hedgehog — played more than a small role in what would come after.

That it was Donkey Kong Country at all was something of a surprise. Donkey Kong was at the heart of Nintendo’s arcade success in the decade before, but it was also the launch pad for the character that would bring Nintendo into living rooms around the world: Mario. Donkey Kong and his family were often villains, not heroes, antagonists for Mario (and also an exterminator named Stanley) to deal with. The 90s were a new decade, though, and Nintendo was in need of a new franchise: finding a new way to utilize Donkey Kong’s name made all kinds of sense.

It wasn’t actually Nintendo’s idea to bring Donkey Kong into the 16-bit era, though. That was Rare’s ask, one Nintendo acquiesced to. Nintendo had been impressed with Rare’s technological achievements on the SNES, and their ability to pre-render 3D models as sprites in 16-bit games, so they purchased 25 percent of the company and told their new second-party developer they could have their pick of Nintendo’s own characters to make a game using their 3D tech. Rare chose Donkey Kong, and in their cheeky Rare way, made a show of how this wasn’t your father’s Donkey Kong any longer in the game’s intro:

Cranky Kong — who we’re all in agreement is the original Donkey Kong from the arcade games and NES ports — is shown sitting on steel girders like from the levels of his game, listening to music through a crank record player. Suddenly, the music changes, an extremely 1990s boombox drops in, the all-black background of the 80s games disappears, replaced by a pre-rendered jungle island background, and a younger, energetic Donkey Kong arrives on the scene in Cranky’s place.

A little irreverent to Nintendo’s history, yes, but also not-so-subtle nod that things were going to be different under Rare. And take note that the intro doesn’t end there, either: Cranky has a trick up his sleeve, as he knows a thing or two about how this world works even if he’s at first shown to be stuck in his past, and he blows Donkey Kong up with a barrel of TNT for his impudence. Cranky, too, is the source of hints in Donkey Kong Country: you have to respect the knowledge and experience of your elders, after all. And to Cranky’s further credit, he starred in his own killer video game in 1994, as well: Donkey Kong ‘94 for the Game Boy. Maybe it doesn’t have the impact of Donkey Kong Country… but it’s also the far better game of the two. The old man still had one left in him.

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For decades, there was a story going around that Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the original Donkey Kong, didn’t like Donkey Kong Country. Was Miyamoto “feuding” with Rare as the sequel to Super Mario World was being developed? Miyamoto’s team did go in and completely redesign the art direction of Yoshi’s Island while everyone was wowed by what Rare was pulling off with DKC, after all. That’s pretty unlikely, considering Miyamoto worked closely with Rare on this project in the first place. He’s literally Miyamoto: he was a force of nature within Nintendo 30 years ago, too, and one with a ton of influence, as well as being the creator of the franchise Donkey Kong Country was going to be a subseries of. So, Miyamoto saying, “Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good” never seemed all that realistic, especially not only where a journalist could hear it, but during an interview.

And yet, the quote and its attribution persisted. Thanks to some digging at Retro Mags, we can see that the quote first appeared in print in 2001, in issue 93 of Edge Magazine, which cited Steve Kent’s 2000 book The First Quarter for it. Kent also used the quote in another book, 2001’s The Ultimate History of Video Games, where he said in a footnote that he heard it while interviewing Miyamoto and Stamper. The now-defunct 1up used the quote in a 2006 article to support their claim that none of the three Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES were “especially fun to play.” A fun thing these writings all claim is that the quote originated in an article published in Electronic Games magazine in 1995, which, inconveniently, there was no scan of to corroborate the claim. Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi got his hands on a copy of that issue of Electronic Games in 2019, though, and the quote wasn’t in there like it had long been claimed to be. Curious, right? Why did the claim that it was in there even exist, then?

So, what we’re left with is an author claiming Miyamoto said this to him with Rare founder Tim Stamper right there in the room, but apparently there’s no one to corroborate this long-lived claim, no existence of the quote itself outside of its use in a footnote in a book, and Miyamoto himself even seeming perplexed by the existence of this idea that he doesn’t like Donkey Kong Country: in a 2010 interview with IGN, Miyamoto said that:

The first point that I want to make is that I actually worked very closely with Rare on the original Donkey Kong Country. And apparently recently some rumor got out that I didn't really like that game? I just want to clarify that that's not the case, because I was very involved in that. And even emailing almost daily with Tim Stamper right up until the end.

Is it possible that Miyamoto was annoyed at the insistence that his project, Yoshi’s Island, had to look better, that this is what mattered in a game, and it was because Donkey Kong Country was being praised for looking like it released on a more powerful system than the one it was on? That’s entirely possible, and believable, even: I’ve got to imagine that when you’ve got the string of hits Miyamoto did, and your bosses tell you to go back and try again because they’re more impressed with someone else’s work, that you would be a bit touchy about it. Does it seem likely that Miyamoto bashed a game he worked closely on, though, one that brought his creation into a new decade, at a pivotal time for Nintendo in the console wars? That’s a little harder to believe, given everything we’ve ever heard from the guy over the years about video games. A mistranslation? A joke taken seriously? It’s all pretty strange, no?

Maybe it’s because there’s some truth to the quote, real or not, even if it doesn’t necessarily apply to Donkey Kong Country: there are plenty of games out there that lack substance or creativity or fun, but are pretty to look at. And there are plenty of games that don’t have much going on in the looks department, but they are a blast to play. Maybe this is just a quote we want to be real, given it has real utility, and also because we’re all messy gamers who love drama. But whether it is real, well, you’d have to ask Miyamoto and Tim Stamper directly, and hope their memories are better than those who said it was in that issue of Electronic Games all this time.

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Nintendo knew how important Donkey Kong Country was, so, before its release, they shipped out a VHS tape to Nintendo Power subscribers promoting the game. Donkey Kong Country: Exposed was a short behind-the-scenes video that showed off gameplay footage and interviewed members of the Nintendo of America Treehouse staff in Redmond, WA, and it’s also so incredibly 1994 that it’s amazing Jay and Silent Bob don’t make an appearance in there.

Host Josh Wolf is wearing a vest over a t-shirt, with a backwards hat and long hair, which was the style at the time. Tim Stamper’s extremely British tone and cadence on the phone only enhances the Extreme 90s America of the cuts and background music and decision to put high-energy metal in there as a lengthy transition. It’s a work of art, really.

I don’t know about you, but this gambit worked on me. I was eight years old at the time and had an SNES, with many of the games I owned coming by way of my parents guessing at what I’d enjoy, and the rest taken care of by trips to Blockbuster Video. I needed Donkey Kong Country after watching this video, though. I needed to play those mine cart levels. I’d get it, and I’d play it again, and again, and again: Mine Cart Carnage is still a tense joy to this day, helped in part by this ending that requires either working reflexes, excellent timing, or just pure muscle memory.

The shooting from barrels, too, was often a tense affair, never as much as in Snow Barrel Blast, where your vision is increasingly obscured as a blizzard approaches from the background over time until it overtakes you while you fly through the air out of a cannon, but even early on in the game there’s some challenge to be found if you care to test your reflexes and timing. The below is from the game’s first world, the one that introduces lengthy barrel segments, and while you can wait and wait for the perfect time to fire yourself from a barrel cannon, you can also just do this:

It still feels great to experience all of that, nearly three decades later. A real credit to the energy and care Rare put into their first turn with Donkey Kong. Swinging from ropes, finding the many, many secret rooms full of goodies, the various animal friends, the trails of bananas leading you to the exit, signifying the path of the stolen hoard, the music — the music! It all just feels and looks and sounds so good. Sure, it looked its best on a nice CRT on original hardware, and you should probably add scanlines in the present on modern screens, but the “it hasn’t aged well” thing, to me, feels like more of a relic from around 20 years ago, when everything that wasn’t pre-HD 3D polygonal models post the blockier N64/PS/Saturn era was all the rage.

Now, the entirety of the game isn’t quite as good as you might remember — it’s somehow a game that takes less than two hours to play but manages to overstay its welcome — but the stuff that works, works. Donkey Kong Country might not have been included in the top 101 Nintendo games series here, but it’d make an expanded version in spite of its “oh my god stop sending obstacles and fish I can’t even see after me” late-game faults because the positives, in the end, far outweigh those negatives. There’s a reason it sold like it did, a reason it ended up being so vital to Nintendo’s efforts to stick with Sega in this hardware and software battle: it’s a good game, and one that’s stuck around like it deserves to.

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