Donkey Kong Country

Rare, now famous for their 64 bit hits such as Goldeneye and Diddy Kong Racing having done only a small amount of work on the Super Nintendo, were beavering away on the ‘end of 16-bit’ critic-silencer. Shown for the first time at E3 in an almost complete form, Donkey Kong Country blew everyone away.Using a technique called ACM (Advanced Character Modeling), Rare took Silicon Graphics rendered characters and put them frame by frame into the game. Although the game was more along the lines of Sonic the Hedgehog than Mario, it went absolutely ballistic and was a great ambassador with gamers and the press for the hidden power of the SNES.

In fact, initially people assumed that this was the first game on Nintendo’s next machine, it looked so much better than anything produced on the SNES thus far.

While the sequels sold well, they did not have the same impact as that first release, but they did serve to re-establish a character in Nintendo’s marketing arsenal.

It also sounded great, the jungle beats perfectly complementing the lush graphics, possibly one of the best soundtracks on the format.

Like other Super NES games before it, the two-player mode was frustratingly alternative, rather than simultaneous but Rare had already used most of the Super NES’ power running graphics and sound – simultaneous two-player may was have caused a console meltdown!

Incidentally, Miyamoto did not think a great deal of the game stating that “Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good.” Donkey Kong Country was given a “Player’s Choice” status in North America, signifying sales of more than a million. Certainly Miyamoto’s own platformers such as Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island had a great deal more depth but a graphical powerhouse was just what was required for the time and it sold accordingly.

An computer-animated television series was also developed in France which aired in France in 1996. Though many liberties were taken with the original game’s storyline, the show aired in the US in 1998 and many aspects of it were later incorporated in the Nintendo 64 title, Donkey Kong 64.