Donkey Kong Bananza, launching next week, is a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. But that wasn’t always the case. According to the game’s developers, it was originally conceived as a Nintendo Switch 1 title.
Speaking to IGN in a new interview, producer Kenta Motokura told us that the game began its development cycle on Nintendo Switch 1. However, as the team developed the “voxel” technology that lies behind Bananza's destruction mechanic, it became clear that the best implementation of that tech would be on Nintendo Switch 2.
Director Kazuya Takahashi continued the explanation by referencing something called “continuity of destruction,” essentially a philosophy behind Donkey Kong Bananza where players are led to destroy a portion of the environment and receive a reward, which then reveals another area that can be destroyed for another reward, and so forth. Takahashi said the team felt they could expand on that philosophy on the Nintendo Switch 2.
“This allowed us to engage in creating a really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware,” he said. “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.”
Notably, another first-party Nintendo Switch 2 game, Mario Kart World, had a similar path to release. We learned ahead of its launch that Mario Kart World also began on Nintendo Switch 1, but was moved to Nintendo Switch 2 during development to better accommodate the open-world gameplay and 24-player multiplayer.
We spoke to Motokura and Takahashi about a number of topics related to Bananza, including how the game was first conceived, and why Pauline is 13-years-old. 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].
