It has now become clear that the promising Donkey Kong Bananza came about thanks to Nintendo executive Yoshiaka Koizumi approaching the Super Mario Odyssey team and asked them to consider working on a 3D Donkey Kong game. The Super Mario Odyssey team then decided to approach the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto to get some ideas, as naturally Mr. Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, so this made perfect sense. Here’s how the team decided Donkey Kong Bananza’s core gameplay.
“For him, a lot of things that came up were the unique actions that a really strong character like Donkey Kong can engage in, things like the hand slap or blowing his breath,” Motokura explained.
“And I also spoke to Mr. Koizumi who had served as the director on Jungle Beat. And for him, one thing that was a really important distinguishing characteristic from a character like, say, Mario, is that Donkey Kong has these longer, stronger arms. So we took all of these distinctive features of Donkey Kong as a character and tried to think about how we could bring them to play in a new game.”
“When we realized the compatibility of Donkey Kong’s distinctive characteristics, being strong and having these large long arms, and the possibility of voxel technology, we saw that this was a good match that led us to the idea of pursuing destruction as core gameplay in this title.”
