When Donkey Kong Bananza was first announced, speculation immediately set in that it was being made by the same team that made Super Mario Odyssey. That turned out to be true, which led to further speculation that the game had originated as Super Mario Odyssey DLC or a sequel, only later going on to star Donkey Kong. That part, we’ve just learned, is not true.
In an interview with IGN, Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura, who also served as director on Super Mario Odyssey, shared Bananza’s origin story. As he explained, it was Nintendo executive Yoshiaka Koizumi who approached the Odyssey team and asked them explicitly to consider working on a 3D Donkey Kong game.
When Motokura told me this, I asked if he knew why Koizumi had done this, as there hadn't been an internally developed Donkey Kong game since Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat over 20 years ago. Motokura didn’t want to speak for Koizumi, but he did suggest: “Because Nintendo does have a lot of characters to choose from, we're always considering what would be good timing to create a new game with a certain character to most pleased customers. But of course, that's just my best guess. You'd really have to ask Mr. Koizumi for the real answer.”
Regardless of reasoning, the Odyssey team had its mission. To start, they approached Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto to get some ideas.
“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 explained.
“And I also spoke to Mr. Koizumi who had served as the director on Jungle Beat. And 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.”
While all this was going on, a programmer on the Odyssey team was experimenting with voxel technology. Voxels are essentially the 3D equivalent of pixels, and this programmer was playing around with ways to let players manipulate their environment using them. As an example, this tech was used on a smaller scale in Super Mario Odyssey in the Luncheon Kingdom, where Mario can dig through cheese, and in the Snow Kingdom to crunch through snow drifts. But this programmer was taking it a step further, finding ways to let players throw voxels around, or dig holes through them.
It was this, combined with discussions about DK’s strength and abilities, that led to the core destructive mechanics of Donkey Kong Bananza, Motokura said.
“When we realized 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.”
We spoke to Motokura and director Kazuya Takahashi about a number of topics related to Bananza, including the game’s place in the Donkey Kong “canon” and the necessity of releasing on the Nintendo Switch 2. You can read our entire interview in full right here, and check out our hands-on preview of the game here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
