Donkey Kong is one of Nintendo’s most famous characters. The smash hit 1981 arcade game that made the company, kicked off Shigeru Miyamoto’s future of innovation, and introduced the world to Mario, bears Donkey Kong’s name. The big ape is as close to Nintendo’s historic creative heart as you can get if you’re not called Mario.
But oddly enough, Nintendo very rarely makes Donkey Kong games itself. Donkey Kong Bananza, due for release on July 17 and made by the Super Mario Odyssey team, will be the first Donkey Kong game in over 20 years to be produced by one of the company’s in-house studios in Japan. Beginning with 1994’s Donkey Kong Country, the character was tended to by Rare for many years. Retro Studios has taken care of him more recently in games like Tropical Freeze. Other developers like Namco and Paon have done stints.
The good news for DK fans — and anyone looking forward to Bananza — is that when Nintendo does turn its own hand to a Donkey Kong game, it invariably rules. The last time it happened was 2004’s GameCube game Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, an amazingly physical platform gaming experience designed to be played with the Donkey Konga bongo accessory. Thumping the bongos and clapping to jump and pound really helped players channel the character’s simian energy.
The talented team that made Jungle Beat went on to create the classic Super Mario Galaxy games; there’s a sense in which, by assigning the current 3D Mario team to work on Donkey Kong, Nintendo is repaying a debt to the character that’s long overdue.
Ten years before Jungle Beat, a Miyamoto-led, in-house team made a Donkey Kong game that can legitimately stand among NIntendo’s all-time great platformers. But it’s not cited as often as any number of Mario titles, or even as Rare’s Donkey Kong Country series. It would be a stretch to say it’s forgotten, but in terms of Nintendo’s glittering history, it’s certainly underrated.
I’m talking about Donkey Kong for the Game Boy, often referred to as Donkey Kong ’94, and currently available as part of Nintendo Switch Online’s retro collection. It’s an inspired, devious puzzle-platformer that takes the original arcade game as a basis and then, in one of the great fake-outs in gaming, extends it past its original ending with 100 more levels that keep twisting the gameplay into new shapes.
You can read Donkey Kong ’94 as a thought experiment by Miyamoto, in which the great designer imagines a world in which he hadn’t created the freewheeling, scrolling worlds of Super Mario Bros. Instead, he mutates the Donkey Kong arcade game in a different, more cerebral direction, creating compact levels where slower, more precise platforming is combined with puzzle-solving and a constant barrage of new mechanics.
Usually, the levels require reaching a key, picking it up, and getting it to a door, which sounds simple enough. But the key, if dropped, warps back to its original position, and the small layouts are intricate and non-linear, with out-of-the-way bonus items and crawling enemies who can sometimes be picked up and thrown in the style of the North American Super Mario Bros. 2. Levers change the arrangement or movement direction of platforms; switches create ladders or platforms that can be placed wherever you like, but only exist for a limited amount of time. Sometimes, enemies are platforms, and platforms are enemies.
Mario has no dash button, which can make him feel stolid to control compared to his own game series. But he’s actually surprisingly athletic. Donkey Kong ’94 expanded his repertoire with a couple of new moves that would eventually make their way into mainline Mario games via Mario 64: a standing backflip, and a side somersault if you jump while changing direction. Other moves didn’t make the jump, like Mario’s ability to spin around overhead bars and slingshot himself off them.
Donkey Kong ’94 is historically important to Mario games, but it isn’t a Mario game any more than the original Donkey Kong arcade game is. It’s a strange, superb offshoot that begat its own distinct lineage in the form of the Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, which iterated on its platform-puzzle gameplay to diminishing returns, without ever matching the constant invention of its design. Despite its crude Game Boy graphics and brutal old-school gameplay, it’s still more rewarding to play than any of its descendants.
While Donkey Kong had yet to become a playable protagonist in 1994, his Game Boy game is a persuasive vision of what might have been if Nintendo had ever thrown its full weight behind the Donkey Kong franchise — and it’s auspicious for the developer’s belated decision to do so with Bananza. It’s also telling that the redesigned DK of Bananza looks a lot more like the oafish ape who grins from Donkey Kong ’94’s box art, and makes a pixelated grimace as he chucks barrels at Mario in-game. Nintendo is finally ready to reclaim its first star.
