Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura has revealed that upon receiving his assignment to come up with a new 3D DK game, the first thing the team did was call on the OG Donkey Kong creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, for his take.
Speaking in an interview with IGN alongside Bananza director Kazuya Takahashi, Motokura says that following "the original impetus" from his boss, Yoshiaki Koizumi, the first port of call for the Mario Odyssey team was the office of the father of DK and Mario himself, to try and find the essence of the character and work out how to create the first 3D Donkey Kong platformer since 1999's Donkey Kong 64.
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"Mr. Miyamoto has experienced not only working on the Donkey Kong games that he was directly responsible for, but also worked alongside Rare on the Donkey Kong games that they created. And 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 and co. also tapped Mr. Koizumi for his expertise with the ape, as the Nintendo veteran served as director on 2004's bongo-fest Donkey Kong Jungle Beat on GameCube.
"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."
The interview, which confirms the game's producer and director after the Mario Odyssey team was revealed to be behind Bananza, goes into more detail about the genesis of the project, with Motokura mentioning how experiments with voxel tech on Switch 1 became the foundation of the upcoming Switch 2 game.
"When we realised 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."
While it feels fairly obvious to use all the resources at your disposal when assembling your design ideas for a new game, it's still nice to know that Shigsy hasn't ascended to a marble-floored office in Nintendo HQ, not to be disturbed while he takes calls about theme parks and movies in his Mario t-shirt/sports jacket combo. It's good to hear younger devs can still knock on his door for advice, although we imagine he's not opposed to hitting the shop floor from time to time, either. Those tea tables aren't going to upend themselves.
Looking forward to DKB? It's out next week, so not long to go!