Nintendo has revealed in a new interview with IGN that Donkey Kong Bananza was originally planned for the Switch 1.
Producer Kenta Motokura and director Kazuya Takahashi explained that the game was being built on Switch 1 with the same voxel technology used to create the destructible environments. However, upon learning about the Switch 2, the team shifted development over to the new console to take full advantage of the increased specs.
It wasn't just the added power, however. The team were also keen to see how the new mouse controls could be implemented in the game. As demonstrated in the Direct presentation last month, you can used the mouse controls during multiplayer to initiate Pauline's vocal blasts.
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Here's exactly what the team said:
Motokura: So this game originally began its development cycle on Nintendo Switch 1 and at the time, we were still using voxel technology and thinking of lots of different ideas for applications. But when we learned about the Switch 2 development, we realized that the best implementation of these ideas and technology would be on Nintendo Switch 2.
Takahashi: And when I was previously talking about the importance of the continuity of destruction, that was something that we could expand on and have a longer continuous play experience with that kind of concept on Nintendo Switch 2. So this allowed us to engage in creating really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware. And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this? Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them and that was something that was best done on Switch 2.
But it's not really even just the processing power of the Switch 2 that I think attracted us and gave us some interesting possibilities. There was also the device itself that offered things like mouse control, which you can use in co-op play for a second player to control Pauline's vocal blasts or DK Artist, a mode where you can sculpt a large set of voxels.
If you remember, it was also confirmed that Mario Kart World had originally started life as a Switch 1 project. As revealed in an Ask the Developer session over at Nintendo, the development team stated that "it was difficult for us to incorporate everything we wanted" in the Switch 1 version, and so shifted the project over to the Switch 2; a move that supposedly provided "a ray of hope".
Donkey Kong Bananza is certainly shaping up to be something pretty special, and we can't wait to dive in properly when the game launches on 17th July 2025.