In the mid 1990s, Nintendo could already see which way the wind was blowing. The sprite-based consoles of the 8-bit and 16-bit era were on their way out, and pushing polygons was the way to go. But the company, which had just weathered an intense war with rival Sega, wasn’t technologically equipped to bring 3D graphics home even as PC gamers were coming to expect it. Their solution? Team with one of their most trusted developers on a game that would re-invent a franchise character and give a shot of adrenaline to the aging Super Nintendo.
Great Apes
Nintendo’s ascent to video game domination began with 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong. In hindsight, the game doesn’t look like much – players guide a squat little man through four distinct stages of jumping, climbing and avoiding obstacles to rescue his lady friend from the titular primate.
But in the early 80s, Donkey Kong did a lot of stuff before anyone else. The game’s linear narrative made players feel like part of a story with a beginning, middle, and end instead of repeating the same tasks over and over again at increasing difficulty. Adding jumping to platform navigation created a verb that has been present in action videogames ever since. Of course, that squat little man would become Mario, the company’s mascot character.
Donkey Kong saw a few arcade sequels, but by the late 80s Mario had eclipsed the ape, going on to star in his own franchise that moved him out of the construction site and into the Mushroom Kingdom. But a mysterious experiment by a British studio would see the big guy return in a visually distinctive way that would change everything.
An Old Friend
Twycross-based developers Rare had developed a strong relationship with Nintendo over the course of two console generations. Originally calling themselves Ultimate Play The Game, Stamper brothers Tim and Chris saw the lifespan of the ZX Spectrum, their preferred platform, coming to an end. After getting a peek at the Famicom, they imported a console from Japan and reverse-engineered it (a feat Nintendo had claimed could never happen) to produce some demos to show.
Obviously, Nintendo executives were flabbergasted that these upstarts had cracked their code, but they saw the skill and work ethic of the Stampers and their team and wanted to tie them down. While most Western Nintendo licensees were restricted to releasing a limited number of titles a year, Nintendo gave Rare an unlimited budget to put out as many games as they liked.
Rare would release nearly 60 games for the NES and Game Boy in half a decade. Most were solid but unspectacular, with a lot of licensed game show adaptations and arcade ports, but a few stood out. Snake, Rattle & Roll was an oddball isometric platformer, and Battletoads a nail-hard side-scrolling brawler with exaggerated characters. Working conditions at Rare were intense, with many employees putting in 60 hours or more a week to keep up productivity.
Tiny Triangles
Early video game consoles worked by drawing bitmapped sprites – collections of pixels that could be plotted on-screen to represent players, enemies, collectibles, and the like. The NES could display 64 four-color sprites at a time, while its successor could do 128, with 16 individual colors. Even as console hardware developers upped the ante for bitmap graphics, PC studios were going a different direction.
Games like Wolfenstein 3D put players inside environments made of three-dimensional polygons that could be explored from a first-person perspective. Using 3D models instead of 2D sprites allowed designers to create objects that could be freely scaled and rotated, viewable from any distance or angle – like objects in the real world. The technology was primitive, but it was quickly recognized as the next evolutionary step forward in gaming.
Arcade games would also start using purpose-built hardware to bring polygons to quarter-munchers. Sega led the way with games like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA that were more immersive and realistic than their sprite-based competitors. 1994 would also see the next wave of consoles land in Japan, and both Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s first PlayStation were built from the ground up to push polygons.
The SNES had Mode 7, which let developers scale and manipulate a single background graphic (seen in games like Pilotwings), but no capability to move more than a single object. With the aid of the Super FX chip – a powerful processor inside the cartridge that some said was beefier than the base console itself – Nintendo released Star Fox in 1993. That game was revolutionary, but the cost of the chip, which had to be included separately in every game to use it, made it prohibitive to use the technology and only a few other Super FX games were released. The path to 3D on the SNES would have to come from somewhere outside the box.
More Power
The transition to 16-bit development didn’t come easily at Rare. The tools and tricks the company had developed for the NES weren’t applicable to games that were more graphically and mechanically complex. In addition, Japanese developers had a significant head start with the hardware and were already releasing high-quality titles that were several orders of magnitude better than the NES’s janky launch lineup. They didn’t have anything ready for the SNES’s 1991 launch, or even the year after. 1993 saw two Battletoads games that were solid but not spectacular.
They’d keep releasing NES games until 1993, but by then they were very aware that their main money train was coming to an end. They needed to find a way to distinguish themselves on the 16-bit system, and the answer was in Silicon Graphics. Rare bought two extremely high-end workstations from the Mountain View company, which had already been in negotiations with Nintendo to design the processor for the upcoming Nintendo 64.
The workstations cost nearly $120,000 apiece – a huge investment for Rare. But they could produce graphics that looked like nothing else on the system, 3D shapes that had perfect mathematical gradients and could be warped and scaled in millions of ways. The team kicked around ideas before settling on a boxing game, and started developing assets to prototype. These weren’t going to be 3D in-game, of course – they’d be rendered as 2D sprites and manipulated and displayed that way. But the smooth gradients and precise curves were striking and distinctive.
When their Nintendo liaisons came by Twycross for a visit, they were dazzled by the new technology but didn’t think boxing was the way to go, especially since Genyo Takeda’s R&D3 team was about to wrap Super Punch-Out. Instead, they made a bold move and handed off one of the company’s most valuable characters to the British team: Donkey Kong.
Making The Ape
Nintendo had only released one mascot platformer for the new console: Super Mario World, which shipped on launch day in Japan. That game was a quantum leap forward in terms of complexity and graphical quality, taking the familiar gameplay of the franchise and expanding it along multiple axes. A sequel was put into production in 1991, but Yoshi’s Island – as it would eventually become – would take four years to complete, leaving Nintendo with a serious gap in their release schedule.
Nintendo decided to go with Donkey Kong as the protagonist, because he didn’t have as much narrative baggage as Mario but possessed brand recognition, especially in the States. Rare went to the zoo to study how apes moved around, only to find that their lackadaisical stride just wasn’t suited for a fast-paced video game. They instead modeled Kong’s stride on a horse’s gallop. Taking a cue from Sega’s mascot, Kong could roll into a ball and smash through enemies, as well as clap his hands to knock them out.
When Nintendo representatives flew in to check on the game’s progress, they immediately realized that one of Rare’s hallmarks was on its way to sinking the whole enterprise. Anybody who played Battletoads knows that they made games that were often too difficult for their own good, and DKC was turning out the same way. The Stampers revised the game’s flow so that players could get into a groove of constant movement – again, much like Sonic – that carried them through levels while testing their reflexes.
The Silicon Graphics workstations that Rare was using to make the graphics for Donkey Kong Country were state-of-the-art in 1993, but that doesn’t mean much. The time it took them to render 2D sprites from 3D models was massive, with the company leaving the machines running overnight to export a single model. They also produced enough heat that Rare’s building was a balmy 90 degrees all day long.
Donkey Kong Country was by far the most intense project Rare had undertaken to that point, with the company committing a dozen people to getting it done. It was the first game they’d ever made with more than one programmer, creating a number of workflow challenges. Advertisements for the game when it came out boasted “18 man-years” of labor that went into creating the adventure. It was a huge bet on a system that was already on its way to replacement at Nintendo.
Donkey Debut
Donkey Kong Country was a smash hit. Buoyed by a saturation marketing campaign, it moved over nine million copies, becoming the second best-selling title on the Super Nintendo and breathing new life into the aging system. Vindicated by the project’s success, Rare would quickly knock out Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest, bringing the sidekick into the lead role and pushing the gameplay more towards exploration and away from speed.
That game would also be a tremendous hit when it released in 1995, selling over four million units. 1996 saw the third installment, Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble!, which offered more of the same. By that point, though, the SNES was already starting to struggle. Nintendo would release a bargain-priced hardware redesign the next year, as well as their final first-party game. The Nintendo 64 would launch that same year, letting the older console know its time was just about up.
Looking to squeeze every penny of value out of the Silicon Graphics workstations, Rare would also use them to produce the fighters for 1994’s Killer Instinct, which was originally released in arcades before being ported to the Super Nintendo. That game would help Nintendo transcend its family-friendly reputation as it moved into the next console generation (you can read more about Killer Instinct here).
Rare ported all three Donkey Kong Country games to the Game Boy Advance starting in 2000, where they enjoyed a profitable second life. Donkey Kong himself would stay in a place of prominence, joining Mario and crew in various titles like Mario Party, Mario Hoops and Super Smash Bros. His design has stuck to the style developed by Rare artist Kevin Bayliss, further cementing the unusual circumstances that let a Western company change the way a Japanese icon felt forever.
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