u/PokingDogSnouts

Thought I'd give a reminder, as well as an additional bit of extra news, regarding the upcoming end of the DK Challenge—a limited-time event that partly takes place within the games on Nintendo Classics. The event, now running for nearly three months, concludes September 1st, 2026, at 12:59am PST / 3:59am EST.

To take part, you do require a Switch 2, as well as a basic Nintendo Switch Online subscription. 15 of the challenges are spread throughout each of the 2D Donkey Kong games on the NES, SNES, and Game Boy. They do trigger while playing normally, but you can also access them directly through the "DK Challenge" section of the Nintendo Switch Online hub (that's the red icon on the HOME Menu). This way even lets you retry instantly (and rewind...)!

The other 24 challenges are a part of Donkey Kong Bananza—making for a total of 39 challenges, with each giving you a digital collectible card.

39 digital cards, and a 39-card physical set... You can probably expect them to look just like these, then.

Nintendo's news article on the new physical card set notes that every single challenge (Bananza included) must be completed before the deadline, to qualify—and that it also comes with a case. The offer is valid for the US only. Anyone making the cut will receive information on how to redeem their reward by early October.

If you don't have Donkey Kong Bananza, however—don't fret! There are a couple of lesser rewards you might be interested in... We're talking icon designs!

So, it's not much... but... Okay—I honestly find these fairly ugly.

The three icon designs here, are earned through:

• Completing any challenge (for the silhouetted DK)
• Completing all Nintendo Classics challenges (for arcade DK, grasping Pauline)
• Completing all Donkey Kong Bananza challenges (for Bananza DK, with child Pauline)

They'll be distributed in September, once the event has ended. All in all—they're really not much to look at. I think the Donkey Kong series has many superior art pieces that could've been used... like, perhaps, those iconic Rareware renders on the cards?

Still—an interesting little event this turned out to be! Though, I could've done without it pushing me to purchase a $70 game that hasn't seen one sale, yet (I didn't bite, by the way). Anyone starting now, will truly have their work cut out for them... I hear those Bananza challenges aren't easy. Now, let's see if the future holds anything more to come, from this challenge set-up... ★

She’s said her friend, who is also buying into it, hired a private investigator and that it seems to check out as legitimate, but I got an odd feeling being shown the developer’s projections for what the houses will look like, and it all being AI-generated. Their Instagram page, while having real videos of the land itself, also contains even more blatant AI use. I know lots of companies use AI, nowadays, but the “anyone can generate this” nature of the imagery rung alarm bells deep in the pit of my stomach. I have no idea how to verify if the development itself is real or not, though. She is going there in October to see the land, in person.

I found their website, afterwards, and while it doesn’t seem heavy on AI like the Instagram page was, I just want to ease my worries about this. It would be a ton of hard-earned money she’d waste on this, supposing it turns out to be a scam. Has anyone heard of this? Or can anyone please help me figure out if this is a well-intentioned project?

Nintendo has really been treating fans of its classic games, this month—as, only a week ago, we received two never-before-released Virtual Boy titles! Now, yet another major update makes its way to Nintendo Classics. This one's for the Switch 2 users. It's the return of gaming's most famed and most mustached hero, in his second 3D adventure ever:

Only Mario's second foray into 3D, this game chose the unique setting of an Italian-inspired island.

Released July 19th, 2002 in Japan, and August 26th, 2002 over in North America—Super Mario Sunshine had the gargantuan task of following up a game as groundbreaking as Super Mario 64. Whilst utterly beloved at the time—in the years since its release, its reputation has become a bit more divisive. However! In spite of any issues some may have with the game, it remains an incredibly unique adventure, as worthy of the Super Mario name as any other.

Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi (with Kenta Usui as his co-director) after an astounding stint, deeply involved with masterpiece after masterpiece (Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask), this game would follow in the footsteps of those predecessors, continuing to experiment with new ideas to push its respective genre forward. Any fan of 3D platformers owes it to themselves to give this game a play. If I may inject my own bias, for a moment... To me, this game bests Super Mario Galaxy. I said what I said~

Begin your lovely island vacation, with flights departing tonight! Don't forget your reading and listening material:

• Super Mario Sunshine Instruction Booklet
• Super Mario Sunshine: The Official Nintendo Player's Guide
• Super Mario Sunshine Original Soundtrack (Nintendo Music • YouTube)

Please discuss your feelings on the game in the comments! Were you there at the time this one came out? How did it compare to Super Mario 64, in your eyes? How would you rank it in the overall Mario lineage? And what are your thoughts, as you make your way through it, now?

Isle Delfino... Mamma mia~ ♡

[deleted]

Like the Virtual Boy or not—this is a momentous occasion for fans of Nintendo's output, and for gaming history and preservation, as a whole. It's not often Nintendo opens up its vault of cancelled projects. Preceded by Earthbound Beginnings (a cancelled, but fully complete, 1991 localization of the Famicom game, Mother) and StarFox 2 (similarly ready to go in 1995, but canned)—we now have third and fourth additions to the list of Nintendo projects that were finished, planned for release, did not see the light of day for decades... but, finally, were given their chance to shine. These are the Virtual Boy games Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper (changed to D-Hopper for the promotional material concerning this release, but seemingly intact within the game).

Both games were readied as part of a second wave of Virtual Boy titles, meant to reverse its sinking fortunes in late 1996. Unfortunately, by August of that year, Nintendo must have seen the writing on the wall, and outright canceled all further Virtual Boy product releases and development. It was over. These games have never leaked. Exactly 30 years later, and they are being made available for the very first time.

Dragon Hopper had finalized US box art and an ESRB rating, before being unceremoniously cancelled in 1996.

Dragon Hopper nearly came to the Virtual Boy, courtesy of Intelligent Systems—the wizards behind Fire Emblem and Paper Mario. Taking the role of Prince Dorin, the game is a jumping adventure seen from an overhead perspective, to take advantage of the Virtual Boy's unique display capabilities.

Zero Racers, initially titled G-Zero, was intended to be the second game in the wider F-Zero series. Due to its cancellation, two of its characters—Jody Summer and James McCloud—instead debuted in the later F-Zero X. This racer opts for wireframe 3D graphics, but carries the same high stakes as its SNES predecessor.

The new screen color customization allows for altering the tone of red, as well as other options that mimic the Game Boy's display.

With this update, also comes the screen color customization feature teased in the reveal trailer, back in January. That trailer showcased three different color options that altered the Virtual Boy's distinct tone of red, into either green, yellow, or gray. With the recent footage, those options are seemingly joined by two new ones, that appear to take after the original Game Boy's stylings—the dull green of its original display, and the muted reds that appear when playing original Game Boy cartridges on a Game Boy Color.

Please be aware that, in order to play the Virtual Boy library, you'll not only need the Expansion Pack tier of Nintendo Switch Online, but either the cardboard model or replica Virtual Boy accessories.

Does anyone here plan on checking out this previously untrodden chapter of Nintendo history? Please share, if you do!

Always some exciting activity surrounding these collections! Nintendo is finally looking to quench the summer thirst of all those who missed out on the Super Mario 3D All-Stars limited-time release, by making Super Mario Sunshine more widely available.

We also have two long-fabled games that never saw the light of day, on their original platform… the Virtual Boy, an unfortunately doomed product that Nintendo ended support for, only five months after its 1995 release in Japan. These are D-Hopper (formerly known as Dragon Hopper) and Zero Racers—a game set within the F-Zero universe.

This update for the Virtual Boy – Nintendo Classics collection will also add screen color customization—allowing you to change its infamous (and eye-searing) blood-red hue to various other colors. Originally shown off as being green, yellow, and gray—new screenshots seem to suggest there may be more options available that make the game screen less black, as well, and more Game Boy-like.

This may be the final Virtual Boy update, as it makes good on all the games promised in the initial reveal, and leaves us at 17 total titles. To recap...

Due on August 4th:

• Zero Racers • (Nintendo)
• D-Hopper • (Intelligent Systems)

Due on August 13th (exclusively on Switch 2):

• Super Mario Sunshine • (Nintendo EAD)

I've attached the new mini-trailers in the comments section!

Now, we wait.

"How high can you get?"

Nintendo's still answering that question... originally posed to the players of Donkey Kong, Nintendo's first major hit game. That game now celebrates its 45th anniversary, as it was released to arcades on July 9th, 1981.

Nearly half-a-century later, and Nintendo remains completely synonymous with video games. They've positioned themselves as the Disney of the interactive entertainment sector—and are even encroaching upon Disney's turf, now that both Super Mario movies have cleared the top 20 highest-grossing animated films ever.

But, where did this whirlwind of runaway success actually begin? Well, it's certainly no secret, at this point. The Mario franchise technically begins right here, with this game—which puts you in control of the Italian carpenter, for the first time ever... as you dash, climb, jump over gaps and obstacles, and use a power-up to bash away baddies—just as he would in all successive entries of the series.

A game-this-monumental's origin story is practically legend, by now... But, let's retread it, for the folks who perhaps haven't heard it, yet—with the benefit of rare interviews from nearly all members of the development team, spliced together to tell a clearer story of its conception.

Now—to start—let's take you back, to the early 1980s...

The world of games had seen a big shakeup. Atari's dominance was beginning to waver, with an influx of Japanese companies—following the lead set by Taito's Space Invaders—entering the playing field and iterating heavily on the shoot-'em-up genre. Nintendo was then one of many: first creating outright copies, and then introducing small twists on the formula. But, they had yet to truly stand out.

Following Space Fever and Space Firebird—their next arcade shooter, Radar Scope (also set in space), saw them climb up the charts in Japan. Encouraged, they decided it would be the game to launch their American subsidiary with. But, Americans didn't take to it in the same way as the Japanese. As the year 1980 drew to a close, thousands of unsold cabinets lingered in Nintendo of America's warehouse, and this emergency at the onset threatened to wipe out their fledgling presence in the West.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, tasked with saving the venture, already had a trusty right-hand man he could turn to... And, it's probably not the one you're thinking of...

>Gunpei Yokoi, Producer: "Around that time, a game someone at the company had made didn’t sell well, and we had about 3,000 unsold arcade boards lying around. So I received an order from our company president, asking if I could make a new game using the remaining circuit boards. What was I supposed to do with them? I was given this request just at the critical moment when I’d assumed all we could do was get rid of them. At that time, I already had my hands full with designing the Game & Watch series, so I began the project with a pretty carefree attitude, having decided that out of the 3,000 unsold boards I had before me—if I managed to sell even just a few of them, like 1,000 or so, I’d be doing the company a favor, as it was, anyway."

Gunpei Yokoi was the man who, in the 1960s, had changed Nintendo's fortunes and direction as a company. A tinkerer, inventor, and engineer—but originally hired as a mere maintenance technician, just to adhere to Japanese law—his creations were noticed by President Yamauchi, and subsequently turned into products. The Ultra Hand began it all, in 1966... 15 years later, he was the head of his own division, Nintendo R&D1. The recently successful Game & Watch line was his brainchild, and Yamauchi saw him as something of an adopted son.

But, there's another figure crucial to this game's development. Someone whose name I'm sure we all know.

^(Note: These interview quotes have been spliced together from multiple sources, to tell the story of the game's creation.)

>Gunpei Yokoi: "In those days, Mr. Miyamoto’s job was package design."

>Shigeru Miyamoto, Director and Artist: "I designed labels for mah-jong, stencils for Japanese playing cards, the Block Breaker machine, the illustration on the arcade Space Firebird cabinet, the design for the Sheriff arcade cabinet... Yeah, I had a hand in every aspect of design.

>In between those projects, I also proposed plans for many different games, but they were all rejected. It was my desire to work in planning, but since I had some design skills, I was given a lot of that kind of work… I sat in the same room as the graphic designers, but given the chance, I knew I wanted to work on game planning…

>When Gunpei Yokoi was working on the Game & Watch, he realized that graphics would be more important in the next generation of games. So he came to my section looking for staff who could draw. I jumped at the chance. So each of us submitted a game plan, and Yokoi picked mine."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "I called him over one day and told him, 'Let’s make a Popeye game for Game & Watch!', and so we began ironing out the concepts. But due to the aforementioned circumstances, we instead decided to put it out on the remaining circuit boards as quickly as possible."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "We could make a new game, insert the program, and use the same circuit board and cabinet.

>Nintendo was considering obtaining the license for Popeye and making a game with those characters. It would have featured Popeye dodging Bluto's barrels, while trying to reach Olive and rescue her. Popeye would start off weak, but if he ate spinach, he would temporarily get strong. I drew some mock-up images depicting what I thought the game would look like, and I figured that even if we ended up not being able to get the license, we could just swap out the characters. That was how the basic structure of Donkey Kong was created.

>It was the first game I directed under the guidance of producer Gunpei Yokoi, who created the Game & Watch. Every game I made, up to Mario Bros., was done in the same way (with me directing, and Yokoi guiding and producing)."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "There was an episode in the cartoon show for Popeye, in which Olive was sleepwalking and wandered around a construction site. Whenever she was about to lose her footing, miraculously enough, another platform would come out of nowhere and support her, and this left quite an impression on me. So we figured by using a construction site as the setting, there would be all kinds of things we could do, and thus chose that as the setting for our Popeye game.

>Once we had established that the game would be set at a construction site, Mr. Miyamoto suggested, 'Let’s make it a game where there are barrels falling from above, and the player has to dodge them.' At that time, he had a simple gameplay idea, which was that whenever a barrel fell, the player could get on a ladder and avoid it. Once the barrel had passed, the player would get off the ladder and then back on the platform to continue climbing."

With the first drafts of the characters and the game design complete, Nintendo outsourced the programming to software engineers working for Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd. This was because they had yet to build up their own arcade programming muscle. That would come later.

>Hirohisa Komanome, Programmer: "From our perspective as the programmers, the Donkey Kong project began rather abruptly. On April 6, 1981, then-manager Mr. Masayo Oka instructed Minoru Iinuma, Mitsuhiro Nishida, Yasuhiro Murata, and myself to stop what we were working on and assemble together in the meeting room, where we were ordered to begin this new project. He explained that the purpose of this development was to use up the large amount of leftover PCB (printed circuit board) inventory and create a new game that made the most of the hardware capabilities. He then made a copy of the game plans Nintendo had sent over, and handed them to us.

>At this point, no one dreamed that a mere three months later, Miyamoto's game idea would become the smash hit, Donkey Kong. A rough schedule was also decided at this point: the development was to be completed in mid-June… giving us only two and a half months! The next three months (the development went about a half-month over schedule) would prove to be an incredible challenge for all four of us."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "I did make a point of phoning a few friends to tell them that I probably wouldn’t be in touch for two or three months. The company housing I was living in at the time was nearby across the river. So every day I was just going back and forth between work and home.

>The head office back then was in Toba-kaidō, and there was also a factory for making Japanese playing cards. You need a boiler to make playing cards, so we used water boiled there for the adjoining bath facility as well. The people who worked at the card factory would clean themselves up in the bath after work. No one was there at night, so I could use it at my leisure. It was a lifesaver. And it was effective in making time for gathering my ideas."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "Miyamoto's game proposal was at that time called Popeye's Beer Barrel Attack Game. The sketch showed the character of Popeye as the player and Olive as the girl, just as the name implied. With Popeye and Olive, you would naturally expect the antagonist to be Bluto. However, the mock-up sketch featured Kong (a gorilla). Being close in shape to a human, a gorilla had been chosen to make it more interesting and add a humorous touch."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "Initially, Donkey Kong was not a jump game. It was originally an athletic game, and the levels would have featured things like see-saws and other devices which the characters would use to move up and down. First, we created a slope for the barrels to roll down. Then that gave us the idea for the ladders, to dodge the barrels. At first, that was the whole game: just climbing ladders."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "In the first draft game plans, when a barrel rolled down, the player had to climb up to a nearby escape ladder (a short ladder with a break in the middle) and wait for the barrel to pass by. At the top of the escape ladder, you could grab a hammer and smash the barrels. However, it was pointed out that this was basically a 'running away game', which was stressful."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "It would obviously get frustrating after a while, and so I told him to make it so that the player could jump over the barrels, when they rolled towards him. This led to the idea of creating a 'jump' button."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "The PCBs we had to use for Donkey Kong then were equipped with a joystick and one button. If all you were doing was climbing ladders, you only needed the joystick, but that felt boring to me. We had a hard time deciding whether that button should be used for jumping over the barrels, or for swinging a hammer to break them. The planning docs had the same note written there: 'button to be used for jump or hammer'."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "At first, we had doubts as to whether the idea of jumping over barrels using a button would really work, but once we actually tried it, we discovered that it was pretty effective, and decided to implement it."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "I remember that there were few games back then that incorporated jumping as a basic movement of the player. We therefore considered this unique jumping movement as the 'centerpiece' of this game. Being the main attraction, we wanted the jumping to feel more realistic. So we decided to use actual physics to realistically calculate the trajectory and arc of the jump.

>Unfortunately, video game PCB hardware back then used the z80 chip for the CPU, which did not have floating-point arithmetic instructions. Although integer multiplication instructions were available, they couldn't be used because they took too much processing time. We thus had to use second-order derivatives, which required only bit shift and addition calculations. Mr. Nishida created the program and adjusted the parameters.

>This calculation is used all over the place, including the trajectory of Mario's jump and the way a barrel bounces as it rolls off the steel girders. It's what makes Donkey Kong such a richly expressive game."

With Mario's famous jumping maneuver firmly in place for the first time in history, the controls were cemented. Next, they'd have to tackle the design of the levels. Miyamoto's blueprint was rough around the edges, in this regard, as well...

>Hirohisa Komanome: "In the initial plans, the first stage would repeat numerous times, and only the final stage had a different layout."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "Pretty early on, we had decided that Popeye would go on the bottom of the screen, and Bluto would be on the top, thus establishing the framework for the game. With that aside, how are we to make the player realize that he has to get Popeye to the top of the screen? First, if we were to show the player a scene in which Olive is kidnapped when they first glance at the game, they’d probably have Popeye go after her."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "A fun game should always be easy to understand—you should be able to take one look at it and know what you have to do, straight away. It should be so well-constructed that you can tell at a glance what your goal is, and, even if you don't succeed, you'll blame yourself rather than the game. These were the kind of issues I discussed with Yokoi-san."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "But Mr. Miyamoto and I thought very hard about what we should do in the event that, even then, there were users who couldn’t tell how to move their character.

>So, we came up with this idea: once the player has jumped over a falling barrel that had come from above, next we’ll have a fireball appear from behind and chase after them. We figured that, if chased from behind, the player would climb upwards, no matter what. Like this, we have attempted to explain how to play the game within the confines of the game screen."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "In addition to the barrels, other characters such as the 'ojama-mushi' ('Bother Bug', localized as 'Fireball' in English) try to stop Popeye.

>Our first impression of this game proposal was that it was 'like Crazy Climber and Pac-Man added together and divided by two'. Dodging barrels while ascending the steel girders was similar to the gameplay of Crazy Climber, where you climb the front of a building while dodging falling obstacles; likewise, the way the ojama-mushi blocked your path reminded us of Pac-Man."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "We thought that we could work with that concept. It was at that point when we tried to make the screen scroll and were told: 'That board doesn't scroll!' As we wanted the game to be played on at least four connected screens, we simply referred to that as 'scrolling'. The technical supervisor at the time asked us what on earth we were thinking: 'One screen is plenty for a regular game! But you're making four separate screens! You might as well ask us to make four different games!'"

>Hirohisa Komanome: "A popular game in those days was Scramble, a shooting game by Konami. The way the stage scenery unfolded, as the screen scrolled left to right, was very fresh for its time. For Donkey Kong, therefore, instead of just monotonously repeating the first stage, we decided that we needed unique stages. We made a list of the various equipment and items that exist at construction sites, and thought about how we could use those elements as part of the stage design. We also wanted the stages to be designed in such a way that would make good use of the jump action."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "On the second stage, we had vertical lifts and we were concerned as to how the player would be able to get on them. Jumping seemed like an easier way to get onto the see-saws."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "As a result of these considerations, we decided to have a four-stage loop: this would also coincide with and convey a clearer sense of story development, in the classic kishōtenketsu style. We then decided on certain characteristics for each stage: the first stage would be a barrel dropping game, the second stage a maze game (the conveyor belt stage), the third stage a jumping game (the lift stage), and the fourth stage would be the climax.

>After the above determinations were made, we held further discussions with Miyamoto about how to make the game more interesting, and then we drew up the actual game planning docs for Donkey Kong. At this point, it had only been 10 days since we started the development."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "We would later discover that we wouldn't be able to get the rights to use the characters, after all. It [was] a technological problem. We could not depict or draw the character of Popeye using the circuit [board] in those days, properly. With no other options, we decided to keep the content of the game as it was, and just change the characters."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "There [was] a technological limitation on the number of dots which [could] be used to depict pictures. The number of dots that [could] be used [was] 16 x 16, and I mentioned that Popeye cannot be depicted quite well in such a limitation."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "Mr. Miyamoto created the character, Mario. He said he was thinking about how he should change Popeye, and decided that since the setting for the game was a construction site, that he would make a character wearing a work uniform."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "At that time, when games made overseas used human characters, they were always rendered with life-like proportions. Or sometimes it would be six heads tall. And as they just didn't resemble human figures, I was absolutely convinced that they'd been designed by people who couldn't draw!

>But I thought: 'I know how to draw!' That's why I started by saying: 'Right, let's draw something that actually looks like a person's face!' So I drew the eyes, the nose, the mouth and…"

>Gunpei Yokoi: "He was also the one who gave the character a mustache."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "When I was younger, I used to enjoy comics, and drawing comics, as well. And among the comics that I read, some were Italian comics. And if you think about it, the big nose and the mustache is not a facial feature that's characteristic of Japanese people. And so I think that my connection to those Italian comics—probably I drew on that inspiration, when we first drew the character.

>I had confidence in my drawings. The way development worked at Nintendo then, was that the programmers and hardware designers were in control of the game development process, and from my point of view, their drawings and art were terrible. So, if I was going to do it myself, I had to do that part very well. However, I was a rather analog person and did not know anything about technology. So, I learned how the screen was displayed from an in-house engineer. That's how I started doing pixel art.

>However, when I put my sprites onto the TV screen, they were slightly stretched horizontally. You see, the ratio of a TV screen is not an exact square, but 4 to 3. So, I made a piece of graph paper with the same ratio as the TV, drew a circle on it with a compass, and drew a barrel on it. Those were the kind of crude techniques by which Mario was born.

>The original Mario was a 16 x 16 pixelated image. Before you know it, you've used up 8 x 8 pixels. But if you draw a nose, then a mustache—you don't really know if it's a mouth or a mustache, and it saves pixels. You don't have to draw a mouth, which makes a big difference. You only need one pixel for the chin and if you draw two vertical pixels, you've got eyes that hopefully look quite cute. Also, because you can't fully draw hair, by making him wear a hat, you can reduce the hair to only a couple of pixels.

>But, when you come to draw the body using the remaining pixels, there's a limit to what you can do. Furthermore, because we wanted him to run properly, we needed to animate him and we were only able to use three different frames for this. When Mario is running he moves his arms, but in order to make that movement easier to see, I thought it would be best to make his arms and his body different colors. So I wondered whether there was a type of outfit that was like that…

>So, that's how we ended up giving Mario overalls. Fortunately, the game was set on a construction site, so we thought we had no other option but to make him a carpenter!"

>Gunpei Yokoi: "At first, though, we simply referred to the character as 'Ossan' (Translator's note: a slightly derogatory Japanese word for a middle-aged man, meaning something along the lines of 'pops')."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "To me, he isn’t middle-aged—he’s a young man, maybe 24 or 26 years old. The story is about Mario’s pet, Donkey Kong, kidnapping and escaping with his girlfriend, so he’d likely be a young man, and unmarried. But people often say he’s older, with some saying he looks about 40."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "After that was prepared, at the end of April we began working on the programming flowchart, and by the end of May, we began the actual coding.

>Unlike today—back then, the software development environment left a lot to be desired. Because computers were very expensive, there was only one computer available for the development, and we used this one machine for everything from punching the program source to debugging on the target machine. Since the four of us shared this machine, each of us had to be efficient with our debugging, and we basically worked in shifts, setting up a schedule of usage time.

>The development machine at that time was called MOSTEC (I have forgotten the exact name). There was no hard disk, and it had a proprietary OS that used 8-inch floppy disks (I think it was a single-sided, single-density, 128-kilobyte disk). Those floppy disks cost 3,000 yen per disk, and I remember they were difficult to purchase.

>Collision detection turned out to be a major problem in programming Donkey Kong. In the past, one only needed to check the collision between moving sprites—but in the case of Donkey Kong, due to the screen composition, it was necessary to check collisions not only between sprites, but also with the steel girders that made up the background. This not only increased the number of targets for collision detection, but also posed a problem with the different address structures of the two screen layers (sprite and VRAM).

>Miyamoto also offered up various ideas and points of improvement. The most memorable of these, for me, was a change to the fourth stage. Originally, the stage would end by dropping a bell on Kong's head and knocking him out. Miyamoto had the idea of making it more comical by having all the structural joints in the building be removed so the girders would collapse, and Kong would fall and be knocked out that way."

>Gunpei Yokoi: "The cutscene showing Donkey Kong climbing to the top of the screen originally wasn’t in the game. This is because at first it was a Popeye game, and so anyone playing it already understands his relationship to Olive and Bluto. But since it isn’t really clear who the antagonist is in the case of Donkey Kong, we had to show Kong as a villain somehow. And so we figured that, if we show the players a scene of Kong kidnapping a girl and then climbing upwards, when we quickly cut to the next screen and Kong is at the top, they should immediately understand to climb up after him."

Speaking of this lady character, who would eventually be named Pauline—the sound emanating from her cries also underwent some drastic changes. But, before we get into that—allow me to introduce the man responsible for Donkey Kong's sound effects.

>Hirokazu Tanaka, Sound Designer: "When I joined Nintendo, there was no Mario, Game Boy or Game & Watch. There were only arcade games, like Space Invaders. Nintendo also made playing cards. There weren’t that many people in development, like 17 or 18 people. It was a free and friendly environment.

>We were all just doing what we were good at. In my case, it was sound. I never thought about how it might affect the world. None of us did. We may have had a feeling of dread—that without this, Nintendo was over.

>I worked on making simple circuits on synthesizers. So the sound for shooting a missile or crushing an enemy was achieved by assembling hardware, not software. The basics of a synthesizer are, first, you have a transmitter. Then you control the frequency of the transmitter through different circuits. Back then, you’re working with resistors and capacitors. They act as parameters to change frequencies and other elements of sound. It was just about adding and removing these parts over and over.

>In this game, I created the sounds of Mario jumping, like 'boiiing!' And the sound of Mario as he walks like this [imitating the sound effect]. With older games, you’d have only one sound effect used over and over. But if you listen to the sound of Mario walking, there are subtle variations. Before, there was only one sound per action. But by using the curve on the charge-discharge of a capacitor, I tried to change the sound according to the timing of his steps. It was just a matter of tinkering with the circuit, but it was a challenge. It’s kind of cute, right?"

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "At first, the lady that Donkey Kong kidnaps was shouting, 'Help!' She yelled, 'Help! Help!' and when Mario executed a good jump, she would praise him by saying, 'Nice!'"

>Hirokazu Tanaka: "For the princess in the game, I tried using voice synthesis so the princess could say, 'Help!' But Yamauchi-san’s daughter happened to be there one day, and he asked her if it sounded like 'help me' and she said 'no'. That was the end of it. I still remember the feeling."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "Some in the company were worried the pronunciation might be off, so we had a native English speaker who was an English conversation teacher listen to it, and that person thought she was talking about seaweed. It sounded like 'kelp'. We couldn’t change the pronunciation at that point, so we stopped her from talking and changed 'Help!' to Donkey Kong growling, and 'Nice!' to 'deedle-lee-deet-deet'! The blip sounds were a great success."

>Yukio Kaneoka, Composer: "When you’re creating something as simple as sound effects, you often try out sounds thinking they’ll be really good, only to find out it’s rather bland. Or in the opposite sense, sometimes the program will cause the sound effect to playback in a really weird way, which actually turns out to be cool."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "The blip sounds would be catchy when someone was walking past the front of an amusement arcade. What we were attempting with voices didn’t work, but in the end it was good. Because of this experience, thinking highly about sound effects became engraved as one of the key elements of my creative process."

Miyamoto wore many hats on this game's development. Besides his professional background in industrial design, he also poured his skills as a once-aspiring manga artist into drawing all the graphics for the game. His multi-talented influence extended into coming up with several of the short musical interludes that bookend the levels. Composer Yukio Kaneoka was responsible for the rest of the game's music.

>Yukio Kaneoka: "When writing the music, the typical workflow is: first, compose on the keyboard, then write out the sheet music, then code that notated music into the program.

>At Nintendo, there’s often clashes of opinion between the planners/designers who write the story, and the musicians. For example, the designers might be hoping to have comical music for their comical game, but the musicians might feel like a pretty melody is actually more effective."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "I did the opening music and then the end of it, as well. I grew up watching a lot of cartoons and anime, so I just had this image that at the beginning, there's always this dramatic music to start things off—that's where the dramatic [sings tune] came from. And then for the ending, I play guitar a little bit, and so the end song I put together as a bit of a parody of a song I used to play on guitar."

>Yukio Kaneoka: "At the time in animation, you had stuff like Superman and Popeye, and the main styles of music were either dramatic or comical. Deciding to add a pretty melody to an animated feature must have been something of an adventure, I think. But it turned out to be really fitting, and it opened new vistas for music in animation.

>Likewise, with Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., I wanted to embark on a similar kind of adventure by adding a pretty melody, but there was a lot of resistance at first from the designers. I ended up making them put it in, though. [laughs] Later, many people came up to me saying how much they liked that music, and how it sounded different from other game music. That made me happy."

With each element of the final game beginning to solidify, the programming team had their hands full in implementing all of it, before the debugging phase begun.

>Hirohisa Komanome: "There were, in fact, a mountain of changes and additions. Ultimately, we kept making small changes and additions right up until the game was about to be shipped in July. We crammed in every element that we thought would make the game more interesting, and I remember it being a very challenging exercise in programming. Later, all these changes caused a number of bugs, that plagued the programmers to the very end."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "I'm disliked by the programmers. Of course we decide the main, important aspects of the game beforehand—but as the development goes on, there are lots of small details we update. So they say about me, 'Hey… if you work with Miyamoto, you'll never know when you're done. Watch out, you'll find yourself overloaded with a mountain of work at the end!'"

>Yukio Kaneoka: "There’s many people at Nintendo who won’t be satisfied until things meet their personal standards, even if someone else says, 'Oh, I think that sounds good enough.' When I hear people say that Nintendo’s games are fun, or they’re very high quality, I think it’s owed to the fact that we have such perfectionists working here."

>Hirokazu Tanaka: "We spoke of Miyamoto-san earlier. He was just so incredibly obsessive with things. He was always like that. Games were always on his mind. From morning to night. Even on his days off. It may have been a relatively simple game, but he obsessed on a single dot on one of his characters. And on the game itself, he was really relentless. That level of commitment taught me a lot."

>Hirohisa Komanome: "In early June, we started debugging. Finally, after all these changes and bug fixes, the resulting program did not fit into the initial estimate of 16 KB (a large size for those days), so the next step was to reduce and shorten the program. This inevitably meant removing something from the game, and it was a real headache deciding what to cut. After weathering these many hardships, the program for Donkey Kong was at last completed. ROMs were shipped for the location tests in late June."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "The testers at the plant in Uji would keep playing Donkey Kong after work hours and wouldn’t go home. [laughs] At the time, we would test using the tabletop arcade cabinet, and the joystick would slip from the testers' hands when they played fun games. Right in the middle of gameplay—slip! [laughs] That happened a lot during shooting games, and it did while playing Donkey Kong, too. Watching that, I thought, 'Oh, this might be a hit.'

>Your body moves a lot when you’re playing a fun game. The feedback at that time became a sort of standard for me, and when we made Super Mario Bros., the response from the testers was extremely similar to when we made Donkey Kong, so I said to Takashi Tezuka, 'Something incredible might happen.'"

One aspect that was in contention until the very end was the naming used for the game's main duo. Nintendo of America was baffled by the decision to name the game Donkey Kong—but Miyamoto held his ground.

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "We wanted to give the game a name that would suggest a silly gorilla, so we called it Donkey Kong. 'Donkey' is the name of an animal, but looking it up in the dictionary, we found it can also mean 'someone stupid'. So we suggested that to NOA, and they said no. They said 'donkey' just didn’t say 'stupid' to them.

>Strange, isn’t it? [laughs] They said it didn’t make sense—but it makes an impression, so I decided to push through the name Donkey Kong. One year later, everyone was using that without a second thought, so I figured any name is okay, because people get used to it. Anyway, I realised that impact is important, and that’s something else that Donkey Kong taught me."

Mario's name similarly wasn't cemented until the very end of development—appearing only in marketing material like the game's flyer, whereas the cabinet's instructions called him "Jumpman".

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "I dubbed Mario 'Mr. Video', and I told everyone how I want him to be used in Nintendo games for many, many years to come.

>My plan was to use the same character in every video game I made. I thought the way Hitchcock cropped up in all the films he directed was really cool! [laughs] Or take manga artists like Osamu Tezuka and Fujio Akatsuka, who have the same character popping up in a variety of different works. I think I was probably influenced by that at the time.

>I felt that I had come up with a pretty solid character, which is why I thought: 'Right, I'll keep using him from now on!' That's why I decided a solid, imposing name like Mr. Video would work best. But thinking back, I don't think I should have gone with that name. If he had been called Mr. Video, he might have disappeared off the face of the earth." [laughs]

>Gunpei Yokoi: "When we sent the finished character design to Nintendo of America, there was talk that the character greatly resembled an employee working there named Mario, and before long, the name stuck."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "When we sent the game to the U.S. to sell the Donkey Kong arcade games in America, in the warehouse that Nintendo was operating out of in America at that time, there was somebody related to that warehouse whose name was Mario. And the staff at Nintendo in America said that the character looked like the individual named Mario. So they started calling the character Mario, and when I heard that, I said, 'Oh, Mario's a great name—let's use that.'"

With the game ready, and all the characters in place, it was time to see if the risky gamble paid off.

>Hirohisa Komanome: "In July, the ROMs for mass production were shipped. All told, the entire development was completed in just three short months."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "After Donkey Kong was completed, I heard that it was not well received by the sales staff. When President Yamauchi finally decided to release it, he called me and said, 'You did a good job.' I was so happy and moved."

Despite trepidation from all around them, the game's ultimate success cannot be understated. Rather than create a game that only moved the unsold couple thousand cabinets, Donkey Kong ended up clearing over 132,000 lifetime units—becoming an instant classic and catapulting the trio of Nintendo, Mario, and Donkey Kong into video game icons. Nintendo of America flourished with the success, purchasing land to sculpt out new headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The game was ported to many home platforms of the time, with Coleco buying the exclusive rights to handle the various versions.

The game received two further arcade sequels, and Nintendo also used the familiarity of the plucky Mario character to expand the platforming principles hit upon in Donkey Kong, leading to Mario Bros., and the seminal Super Mario Bros., with each successive hit growing the reputation of Nintendo's new star designer, Shigeru Miyamoto.

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "For us, the most important thing in making a game is that we make a game that's unique—something that no one else has created, and something that no one else can create; something that's uniquely Nintendo.

>We were told that everyone thought that it wouldn't succeed. But, because the game did so well—even today, based on that experience, when somebody tells me, 'Oh, that name is too strange; it won't work,' I get very convinced and say: 'Yes, I've thought of something that is very unique! This is going to do well.'"

>Hirohisa Komanome: "Although I was involved in the development of Donkey Kong—in truth, I'd had almost no experience with video games before joining Ikegami. I remember that Shigeru Miyamoto at that time had never developed a video game before, either. Donkey Kong was therefore a game created by people who were not experts in video games, who pooled their knowledge together. There's a sort of freedom that comes from that inexperience, and it was this, along with a bit of extra 'flavor' that we imparted to Donkey Kong which made it break the existing mold of arcade games and become a smash hit."

>Shigeru Miyamoto: "My vision of Mario has always been that he's sort of representative of everyone. He's kind of a blue-collar hero. And so, that's why we chose these roles for him that were things like carpenters and plumbers.

>I think that Mario became so popular, because the actions in the Mario games are something that are innate to humans everywhere. Everyone is afraid of falling from a great height. If there is a gap that you have to cross, everyone is going to try to run to jump across the gap. These are things that are uniquely human and are a shared experience across, really, all people.

>And I think because of the simplicity of these experiences, as well as the interactive nature of controlling the character and seeing the response on the game screen—that's what really resonated with people and made Mario such a popular character.

>Kids these days spend a lot of time studying process and methods, but they don't think about the results, at all. As a result, their imaginations are lacking when it comes to thinking about precisely -what- they want to achieve. They end up blindly acting without having any idea of what they're doing is supposed to lead to.

>Imagination is extremely important, no matter what you do. I'm always telling my own kids this—to first envision the result you want to achieve, then take action."

Donkey Kong (1981) Arcade Staff

Nintendo Co., Ltd.

• Executive Producer: Hiroshi Yamauchi
• Producer: Gunpei Yokoi
• Director, Designer, Artist, Composer: Shigeru Miyamoto
• Composer: Yukio Kaneoka
• Sound Design: Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka

Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd.

• Programmers: Hirohisa Komanome, Minoru Iinuma, Mitsuhiro Nishida, Yasuhiro Murata
• Manager: Masayo Oka

^(Interview Sources:)

^(1: Shigeru Miyamoto —) ^(Game Maestro, Vol. 1) ^(• 2000)

^(2: Shigeru Miyamoto — Iwata Asks,) ^("New Super Mario Bros: Volume 1") ^(• 2009)

^(3: Shigeru Miyamoto —) ^(NPR,) ^("Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto on the Origins of Nintendo's Famous Characters") ^(• 2015)

^(4: Shigeru Miyamoto —) ^("Nintendo Classic Mini: NES Special Interview – Volume 1: Donkey Kong") ^(• 2016)

^(5: Gunpei Yokoi — Takefumi Makino, Gunpei Yokoi,) ^(軍平横井ゲーム館) ^(• 1997)

^(6: Hirohisa Komanome —) ^(bit,) ^("Donkey Kong: A Record of Struggle") ^(• 1997)

^(7: Yukio Kaneoka —) ^("Yukio Kaneoka – 1985 Developer Interview") ^(• 1985)

^(8: Hirokazu Tanaka — Red Bull Music Academy,) ^("Hip Tanaka") ^(• 2014)

This is something that went very much under the radar, when it was somehow shared by Jeph Perez, over on Bluesky, a little over one year ago.

The only known cartridge containing development progress for the SNES version of Dream was owned by Tim Stamper—co-founder of Rare—who creatively oversaw, and created artwork for, many of their classic games, like Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie. He teased this cartridge's existence back in mid-2015, with a goose-chase that culminated in Rare themselves releasing a video featurette at the end of that year, showing off the DKC team's incredible pre-rendered style, being put to use on an ambitious-looking adventure game. What was missing from this reveal, however, was this SNES incarnation's sound and music.

At the time (in late 1995), David Wise was still in the composer's chair—before he was dragged off to create his splendid soundtrack for Diddy Kong Racing. And now, we can directly hear two of the tracks he created for this masterpiece-that-never-was.

Take a listen to the first tune in the attached video, complete with a rough introductory sequence, that already was presenting the game in an exultant, forward-looking style. Jeph Perez was also able to get his hands on and share David Wise's theme for the first level, in a feat he could only divulge as being the result of "extreme good fortune".

I hope you've enjoyed this small glimpse into a potentially masterful SNES title that we, unfortunately, never got. However—seeing as this did eventually evolve into Banjo-Kazooie—I'd say we more than received a worthy trade-off for it.