Donkey Kong Country | Code Like It's 198x

At 8.30 on the first morning of the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Nintendo of America’s chairman Howard Lincoln stepped up to the company’s stand and let a demonstration run. Edge reported “gasps from awestruck onlookers as they watched what they thought was the world premiere of the first Ultra 64 game”. Then Lincoln delivered his line: “The game you have been watching is Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo.”

The trick was in how the pictures were made. Rare had built every character, platform and background as a 3D model on Silicon Graphics workstations, rendered them, and then squeezed the results into the ordinary sprites and tiles of a four-year-old 16-bit console. Donkey Kong Country went on sale in November 1994 and, by Nintendo’s count, sold seven million copies worldwide in its first six months.

Fast facts

Developer: Rare, Twycross, Warwickshire.
Publisher: Nintendo.
Platform: Super Nintendo; Japanese title Super Donkey Kong.
Released: United States, 21 November 1994 (the date Edge gave in advance); Britain later that winter at £59.99.
Cartridge: 32 megabits.
Director: Tim Stamper. Game design: Gregg Mayles.
Music and sound: David Wise, Eveline Fischer and Robin Beanland.
Sales: seven million in six months (Nintendo, 1995); more than 9 million in all, by later counts.

From a boxing demo to Donkey Kong

By late 1994 Rare was advertising for staff to work in its “world class Silicon Graphics studio” at Twycross, developing for Nintendo’s next console, the Ultra 64. In the story Nintendo told at the CES, the Super Nintendo game came out of an “unintended discovery” during those Ultra 64 experiments. Edge noted by December that this story “has now become part of the game’s mythology” and was being pushed hard in the marketing.

Rare’s own account starts with a fight. When Nintendo Magazine System visited Twycross at the end of 1994, Tim Stamper explained that Rare had built a rolling demo of SGI-rendered characters boxing each other, to show that its technology could work on the Super Nintendo. Nintendo was impressed enough to ask Rare to make similar renders of its Donkey Kong character. Chris Stamper later told the same story from his side: Nintendo’s Genyo Takeda saw the boxing demo on a Silicon Graphics workstation and asked what it would look like on a Super Nintendo, “so into the evening and the next day we had two of our engineers work on taking the 24-bit true colour imagery and converting it to SNES.”

The brothers’ company had been making Nintendo games since the NES (the Stamper brothers entry tells that story), and Donkey Kong was Nintendo’s character, not Rare’s. Shigeru Miyamoto, who created him in 1981, sent over sketches of how he thought the main sprite might look, and Rare stayed in constant contact with him during development. Diddy Kong and the Kremling villains were Rare’s own inventions. In America the project was, Edge noted, “very much Nintendo Of America’s baby”, under its product development manager Tony Harman.

How it was made

The levels themselves were planned the cheap way. Nintendo Magazine System found that each section had been drawn on yellow sticky notes and stuck on a big sheet of paper.

Everything else went through the workstations. Rare used Alias PowerAnimator on Silicon Graphics equipment, and told Edge it had “the third largest SGI network in the world, after Boeing and George Lucas’ Industrial Light And Magic”. A character started as a wire-frame skeleton with movable joints. The animators studied the apes at Twycross Zoo, tested each animation, gave the model a skin and then rendered it one body part at a time. Trees for the forest and snow levels were built from branches cut from Rare’s own firs and scanned in, and the mine levels used real corrugated iron. Edge counted more than 6,000 rendered frames of animation.

Nintendo’s name for the process was ACM, “Advanced Computer Modelling”, which Edge glossed as “Nintendo-speak for pre-rendered 3D animation”. It was a marketing term for the whole method, not a separate piece of hardware or a compression scheme, and Nintendo soon used it for other games made the same way, such as DMA Design’s Uniracers.

A popular story says Rare’s workstations were the same machines that made the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. The period press says something narrower: in early 1995 Edge reported that PowerAnimator, the software, had been used on films including The Mask and Jurassic Park as well as on Donkey Kong Country.

Fitting renders into a Super Nintendo

The workstations rendered in 24-bit colour, about 16 million shades. The Super Nintendo cannot show that. Nintendo’s Super NES Development Manual gives sprites (“OBJs”) eight palettes of 16 colours each, chosen from 32,768, and each sprite is drawn with just one of those palettes. That is where Rare’s in-house tools came in. Edge described knocking the renders down to “256 — or even 16 — colours per sprite using optimised colour tables”, and Nintendo Magazine System said the 16-million-colour images were compressed down to 128 colours: eight sprite palettes of 16. With “some clever compression routines”, in Edge’s words, everything fitted on one 32-megabit cartridge.

The console was drawing sprites and tiles the way it always had. The difference was where the pictures came from, which is the same idea behind pre-rendered backgrounds on later CD machines.

Sound

The music and effects were by David Wise, Eveline Fischer and Robin Beanland, according to the credits Edge printed. Nintendo Magazine System reported that Wise used a compression technique developed at Rare to make the most of the 64K of memory set aside for music and effects at any one time. The ape noises came from Mark Betteridge, a Rare programmer on Killer Instinct, who was apparently good at impersonating apes. Total! called it “the grooviest game soundtrack in years”.

Reception

The graphics convinced almost everyone. The gameplay divided the critics. Total! called it “the game of the year” and “the yardstick by which future platformers (and even games in general) will be measured”. Edge was cooler. Its December 1994 preview found the visuals “a majestic achievement”, but said the game “boasts virtually the same play mechanics that Mario pioneered on the NES”, with animal rides, secret levels and moving platforms. It concluded that “Donkey Kong Country may look a great leap into the future but its feet are planted safely in the tried and tested past.” Edge had raised the same doubt after the CES, and a reader wrote in to thank it: other magazines had not been “honest or responsible enough to mention the lack of vision in gameplay”. Super Play also had mixed feelings, and observed that other magazines were scoring it in the high nineties.

Sales

Nintendo spent heavily. Edge reported a US marketing budget of $10 million. In Britain, under pressure from retailers, Nintendo cut the price by £10 to £59.99 before release and hoped to sell more than 200,000 copies. Super Play reported that the British box included a limited-edition CD.

The results were large. GamePro reported more than four million copies sold in the first five months. By July 1995 Nintendo Power was calling it “the biggest video game hit ever” with seven million sold worldwide in six months. In Japan it had sold 2.6 million by March 1995, according to Edge’s Japanese correspondent. By early 1996 Edge put global sales “north of 7.5 million”. Later counts put the lifetime total at about 9.3 million.

The success changed Rare’s relationship with Nintendo. In mid-1995 Total! reported that Nintendo had bought “an all important 25% stake in Rare following the success of Donkey Kong Country”, and Edge described it as a “multimillion dollar” deal. Nintendo’s share later rose to 49%.

Sequels and later versions

Rare made two more Super Nintendo games, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (1995) and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble (1996), and the Donkey Kong Land games for the Game Boy. It converted the first game for the Game Boy Color in 2000 and the Game Boy Advance in 2003.

After Microsoft bought Rare in 2002, the series went back to Nintendo. Retro Studios revived it with Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii in 2010 and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Wii U in 2014, for which David Wise returned to write the music. The original game has been re-released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console services, on the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017, and on Nintendo Switch Online from 2020.

Sources

Edge issue 12, September 1994, pp. 43–44: Summer CES Prescreen (Lincoln’s announcement, the “unintended discovery”, Tony Harman, PowerAnimator on Silicon Graphics equipment, the third-largest SGI network, 6,000+ frames, 24-bit renders cut to 256 or 16 colours per sprite, one 32-megabit cartridge, release date 21 November). The same issue’s CES report glosses ACM as “Nintendo-speak for pre-rendered 3D animation”.
Edge issue 13, October 1994: $10 million US marketing budget.
Edge issue 14, November 1994: ECTS report (UK price cut by £10 to £60, hoped-for 200,000 UK sales); issue 14 letters page on “the lack of vision in gameplay”.
Edge issue 15, December 1994: Rare’s recruitment advertisement (“world class Silicon Graphics studio”, Ultra 64 development). Pp. 44–45: Prescreen (the discovery story as “mythology”, “majestic achievement”, “feet are planted safely in the tried and tested past”) and credits: director T. Stamper, game design G. Mayles, music and sound D. Wise, E. Fischer, R. Beanland.
Edge issue 17, February 1995: PowerAnimator used in The Mask, Jurassic Park and Donkey Kong Country.
Edge issue 23, August 1995: Nintendo’s 25 per cent “multimillion dollar” deal for Rare.
Edge issue 24, September 1995: 2.6 million sold in Japan by March.
Edge issue 30, March 1996, p. 58: global sales “north of 7.5 million”.
Nintendo Magazine System issue 28, January 1995: visit to Rare (Tim Stamper and the boxing demo, compression to 128 colours, Miyamoto’s sketches and involvement, Diddy Kong and the Kremlings, post-it planning, Twycross Zoo, scanned trees and corrugated iron, David Wise’s compression technique and the 64K sound memory, Mark Betteridge’s ape noises).
Total! issue 36, December 1994, p. 36: review (£59.99; “game of the year”; soundtrack). Total! issue 42, June 1995: Nintendo’s 25% stake in Rare.
Super Play issue 25, November 1994: price cut to £59.99. Issue 27, January 1995: UK review (Super Donkey Kong in Japan, limited-edition CD, other magazines’ high scores).
GamePro issue 90, March 1996: more than 4 million in the first five months.
Nintendo Power issue 74, July 1995: “seven million copies sold worldwide in six months”.
Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, Rare feature: Chris Stamper’s account of Genyo Takeda and the boxing demo (quoted from the Screenager website); Rare’s release list (Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 in 1995 and 1996, Game Boy Color 2000, Game Boy Advance 2003).
UGVM issue 4, January 2003: Nintendo’s 49% stake in Rare.
Nintendo, Super NES Development Manual, Book I, “Object (OBJ)” chapter: eight OBJ palettes of 16 colours from 32,768.
Wikipedia, “Donkey Kong Country” (web, secondary): lifetime sales of 9.3 million; the Virtual Console, Super NES Classic Edition and Nintendo Switch Online re-releases; Returns, Tropical Freeze and David Wise’s return. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_Country