Donkey Kong Country
Donkey Kong Country[b] is a 1994 platform game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). It is a reboot of Nintendo's Donkey Kong franchise and follows the gorilla Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong as they set out to recover their stolen banana hoard from the crocodile King K. Rool and his army, the Kremlings. The single-player traverses 40 side-scrolling levels as they jump between platforms and avoid obstacles. They collect items, ride minecarts and animals, defeat enemies and bosses, and find secret bonus stages. In multiplayer modes, two players work cooperatively or race each other.
This article is about the video game. For the TV series, see Donkey Kong Country (TV series).Donkey Kong Country
After developing Nintendo Entertainment System games in the 1980s, Rare, a British studio founded by Tim and Chris Stamper, purchased Silicon Graphics workstations to render 3D models. Nintendo sought a game to compete with Sega's Aladdin (1993) and commissioned Rare to revive the dormant Donkey Kong franchise. Rare assembled 12 developers to work on Donkey Kong Country over 18 months. Donkey Kong Country was inspired by the Super Mario series and was one of the first home console games to feature pre-rendered graphics, achieved through a compression technique that converted 3D models into SNES sprites with little loss of detail. It was the first Donkey Kong game neither produced nor directed by the series' creator Shigeru Miyamoto, though he contributed design ideas.
Following its announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1994, Donkey Kong Country was highly anticipated and backed by a major marketing campaign that cost $16 million in America alone. It was released in November 1994 to acclaim; critics hailed its visuals as groundbreaking and praised its gameplay and music. Its quality and design were favourably compared to the Super Mario series. Donkey Kong Country received several year-end accolades and set the record for the fastest-selling video game at the time. With 9.3 million copies sold worldwide, it is the third-bestselling SNES game and the bestselling Donkey Kong game. Following the success, Nintendo purchased a large minority stake in Rare, which became a prominent second-party developer for Nintendo during the late 1990s.
Donkey Kong Country re-established Donkey Kong as a popular Nintendo franchise and helped maintain the SNES's popularity into the fifth generation of video game consoles. It is considered one of the greatest video games of all time and has been ported to platforms such as the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and digital distribution services. Rare followed it with two sequels for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (1995) and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! (1996), and the Nintendo 64 game Donkey Kong 64 (1999). After a hiatus, during which Rare was acquired by the Nintendo competitor Microsoft, Retro Studios revived the series with Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010) for the Wii and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (2014) for the Wii U.
Release[edit]
Marketing[edit]
Lincoln unveiled Donkey Kong Country at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, which took place from 23 to 25 June 1994.[55] The unveiling was the finale of Nintendo's conference and did not reveal that Donkey Kong Country was a SNES game until the end of the presentation, fooling the audience into believing that it was for the upcoming Nintendo 64. Gregg Mayles recalled the audience was stunned in silence before bursting into applause.[29]
As one of the flagship games of Nintendo's Play It Loud! promotion,[26] Donkey Kong Country was backed by an exceptionally large marketing campaign—"marketing blitzkrieg", as Hardcore Gaming 101 put it.[5] According to the Los Angeles Times, Nintendo spent US$16 million on marketing Donkey Kong Country in America alone; at the time, major games typically had an average marketing budget of US$5 million.[56] Marketing materials emphasised the revolutionary graphics—often noting that Rare's SGI workstations had been used to create the Jurassic Park (1993) film's dinosaurs[57]—and positioned Donkey Kong Country as a direct competitor to Sega's Mega-CD and 32X platforms to remind players it was not for next-generation hardware.[58]
Nintendo sent a promotional VHS tape, Donkey Kong Country: Exposed, to subscribers of the magazine Nintendo Power.[10][58] Exposed, hosted by comedian Josh Wolf, provides a "behind-the-scenes" glimpse of the Treehouse, the Nintendo of America division where games are tested.[10][58] Nintendo World Report wrote that Exposed was "probably the first time most people outside of Nintendo learned about the [Treehouse]" and the promotion allowed players to see the game for themself at home, rather than having to learn about it secondhand from a magazine.[58] Exposed also features gameplay tips and interviews with localisers, playtesters, and Tim Stamper.[10][58]
In October 1994, Nintendo of America held an online promotional campaign through the internet service CompuServe. The campaign included downloadable video samples of the game, a trivia contest in which 800 people participated, and an hour-long online chat conference attended by 80 people, in which Lincoln, Arakawa, and vice-president of marketing Peter Main answered questions. Nintendo's CompuServe promotion marked an early instance of a major video game company using the internet to promote its products.[59] Nintendo gave away Donkey Kong T-shirts as a pre-order bonus,[57] and partnered with Kellogg's for a promotional campaign in which the packaging for Kellogg's breakfast cereals featured Donkey Kong Country character art and announced a prize giveaway. The campaign ran from November 1994 to April 1995.[60] Fleetway Publications published a promotional comic in the UK in 1995.[61]
A soundtrack CD, DK Jamz, was released via news media and retailers in November 1994,[62] with a standalone release in 1995.[63] It was one of the earliest video game soundtrack albums released in the United States.[64] A promotional, competition-oriented version of Donkey Kong Country was sold through Blockbuster Video. Its changes include a time limit for the playable levels and a scoring system, which had been used in the Nintendo PowerFest '94 and Blockbuster World Video Game Championships II competitions. It was later distributed in limited quantities through Nintendo Power. The competition version of Donkey Kong Country is the rarest licensed SNES game; only 2,500 cartridges are known to exist.[5]
Post-release[edit]
Aftermath[edit]
In April 1995, following Donkey Kong Country's success, Nintendo purchased a 25 per cent minority stake in Rare,[24] which increased to 49 per cent over time.[25] Rare was the first non-Japanese studio to enter such a relationship with Nintendo, making them a second-party developer; Nintendo published Rare's subsequent games and allowed them to expand its staff from 84 to over 250 and move out of the farmhouse to an advanced development site elsewhere in Twycross.[24] Rare was one of the first developers to receive Nintendo 64 software development kits and decided to start spending more time developing fewer games.[24][30] Nintendo and Rare's partnership produced acclaimed Nintendo 64 games such as GoldenEye 007 (1997), Banjo-Kazooie (1998), Perfect Dark (2000), and Conker's Bad Fur Day (2001).[24][25]
A proposed Game Boy port of Donkey Kong Country was repurposed as a separate game, Donkey Kong Land (1995), after the programmer Paul Machacek convinced Rare that it would be a better use of resources and expand the potential audience.[100] Rare began developing concepts for a Donkey Kong Country sequel during production,[101] and Nintendo green-lit the project immediately after the success.[102] Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, released in 1995, features Diddy rescuing a kidnapped Donkey Kong from K. Rool and introduces Diddy's girlfriend Dixie Kong. Diddy's Kong Quest was designed to be less linear and more challenging,[103][104] with a theme reflecting Gregg Mayles' fascination with pirates.[104] Like its predecessor, Diddy's Kong Quest was a major critical and commercial success.[105]
Other teams at Rare used Donkey Kong Country's technology in the fighting game Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Land, Donkey Kong Land 2 (1996) and Donkey Kong Land III (1997), which attempted to replicate Donkey Kong Country's visuals and gameplay on the handheld Game Boy.[26] Following Diddy's Kong Quest, the Donkey Kong Country team split in two:[53] one half began working on Project Dream, a role-playing game that used the Donkey Kong Country technology,[h][106] and the other on Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! (1996).[53] Rare followed Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! with Donkey Kong 64 (1999), the first Donkey Kong game to feature 3D gameplay.[26] In 2002, Rare was acquired by Nintendo's competitor Microsoft and the Donkey Kong rights reverted to Nintendo.[25][102]