Hero of Legend
Member
He's the leader of the bunch, you know him well, but he's been not around much to kick some tail.
It's true, DK once was a major player for Nintendo, and the main mascot of Nintendo's relationship with Rareware upon the release of Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo.
After Rareware was sold to Microsoft in 2002 just after the release of Star Fox Adventures on GameCube, DK has been tossed around to various devs, including Namco, Paon, and Retro Studios.
Namco got their Taiko team IIRC to create the Donkey Konga games for GC, using an all-new controller called the DK Bongos. As you would imagine, these were music games. There were 3 in total with the 3rd only ever being released in Japan.
Nintendo themselves would give DK one major go during this era. They tasked their then newly-formed team EAD Tokyo in 2005 to create an all-new DK platformer with the DK Bongos on GC titled Donkey Kong Jungle Beat.
Then in the same year, Paon, formed by ex-Data East folks, would start working on the series with DK King of Swing for the GBA. This was the first game to introduce the modern designs on the characters (I would imagine Nintendo did the redesigns themselves rather than Paon). Paon would next make a sequel in DK Jungle Climber on the DS, this time using a re-rendered art-style very similar to the original Country games on SNES. Finally in 2007 they finished on Wii a game that they started on GC called Donkey Kong Barrel Blast.
Right after in 2008, Nintendo decided to knock on Retro Studios' door and offer the IP to them after Retro had some key departures (which resulted in Armature Studio), and they accepted. This resulted in the release of Donkey Kong Country Returns on Wii in 2010. Retro would follow-up with Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze in 2014 for Wii U.
And DK actually had a special playable appearance in the Skylanders series starting with Superchargers as a gust star alongside Bowser, he even got his own figure.
But now we're coming up to 3 years after Tropical Freeze (time flies doesn't it?). It's not certain if Retro is making a 3rd DK (resulting in more outcries of Retro working on fucking Donkey Kong!
), but nonetheless we can still think about what could happen and what we'd want to see.Naturally we now have a dev team formed by folks very familiar to DK who would be the perfect caretakers of the franchise. You know them, you love them.
Playtonic seems to be the new Rare, and right now they're busy finishing up their Banjo-successor called Yooka-Laylee.
Playtonic has numerous folks who've worked on Rare's DK games such as the original DKC trilogy and DK64. Really I wouldn't have anyone else I'd rather work on DK than them personally.
There was also the rumor going around for the least 4 years about Monster Games being LONG at work on Diddy Kong Racing 2 for Wii, then Wii U, and now Switch. Well now that Monster's keeping themselves busy with Nascar games, the dream's basically dead, and some don't even think it ever was a thing. Well, maybe it will be a thing someday.
Of course Nintendo could always reconsider Climax's pitch for Diddy Kong Racing Adventure that was just unearthed a few days ago that was done back in 2004. So who knows, I'd be totally up for it, and they can work with Playtonic as well on it.
What do you think will happen with DK in the short term? I'm still shocked we never saw a true original entry on 3DS, just a port of DKCR with some added content.
Maybe we'll finally see a new TV show.
We must.
Thoughts?