The Super Play Top 100 was the 1990’s SNES culture magazine’s final ranking of the platform’s catalogue, mere months before the publication ended. This regular monthly feature takes a look back at each title, how it fared back then and how it fares now. This month, I can hardly believe my eyes.
Game Title: Donkey Kong Country
Developer: Rare
Release dates:
18th November 1994 (UK)
21st November (USA)
24th November (EU)
26th November (JPN)
In 1994, the Super Nintendo entered middle-age. The Sega Mega Drive had Sonic zipping around across three adventures, with a fourth imminent, Sony was on the verge of releasing its-then mysterious “PlayStation,” and kids like me were starting to wonder a little if the Super NES was more embarrassing than their dad’s attempt at karaoke. On the platform front, things were getting a little stale. Enter Donkey Kong Country, a game that basically rolled up, peeled a banana, and said: “Relax, Nintendo’s still got it.”
Rare, the once upon a time (and what a time) Nintendo-owned British videogame studio, somehow convinced Nintendo that buying some insanely expensive Silicon Graphics workstations was a good idea. Out popped Donkey Kong Country’s graphics—pre-rendered 3D models squashed into 2D sprites. It looked futuristic in ’94, the way CD-ROMs and rollerblading did. Nintendo hyped this with a multimillion dollar marketing campaign with 2.2 million VHS tapes to showcase the inspiration, research and technology going into such a project. Imagine Netflix forcing you to watch an advert for bananas in the mail—that’s the level of commitment here.
The plot? Donkey Kong’s banana hoard gets stolen by the croc folk gang known as Kremlings (political? you decide), led by King K. Rool. That’s it. Shakespeare it ain’t. But the game itself? Slick platforming, tag-team buddy mechanics (DK and the newly introduced Diddy), and levels that made kids throw controllers across living rooms. The minecart stages alone probably caused more broken TVs than footballs ever could.
David Wise wrote the music like he was composing the score for a melancholy nature documentary about the ocean. “Aquatic Ambience” remains the perfect lo-fi beat to chill and contemplate your mortality to. For a game about monkeys jumping on crocodiles and mounting rideable Rhinos, it did not need to go this hard, but bless David for it, because the soundtrack remains S-Tier perfection. But what did Super Play have to say, to ensure its inclusion in the top 100 games of the Super Nintendo?
“It’s interesting to note that when Nintendo gave the licence to produce a game on their behalf, they chose not to let them have Mario to play with, but Donkey Kong - a character with nowhere near the same amount of kudos nor following as the platform-pounding plumber. Did they not trust our Warwickshire-based chums to turn in an effort to do Mazza justice? We could pontificate all day. What’s important is that Rare did a decent job, especially when you consider at the same time they created a new era of SNES graphics to boot.”
Peculiar praise indeed for what is easily, for my money, one of the best platform games of the 16-bit generation, and would have expected a much higher place on the list. It feels more like an entry that was possibly forgotten about, particularly considering the scoring a placement of its first sequel…….
The quality of Donkey Kong Country can be debated until the end of time. It has its tough moments for sure, and assuming your controller survived those mine cart levels, you probably enjoyed it more than hated it. But there is no doubting DKC’s legacy. It sold over nine million copies. That’s Michael Jackson levels of numbers, but with barrels. It went on to be the third highest selling game for the platform.
Suddenly this small UK studio was the cool kid on Nintendo’s block. Without DKC, we might never have gotten GoldenEye 007 or Banjo-Kazooie. We certainly wouldn’t have been spoiled by not only two sequels on the SNES, with the third being one of the final titles of the platform’s lifetime, but also the Donkey Kong Land series for the Game Boy, DKC-inspired condensed adventures for Nintendo’s flagship handheld. Rare’s culminating Donkey Kong effort would be 1999’s Donkey Kong 64, merging the world of DK with the 3D Banjo Kazooie blueprint. All of these would be released over the space of just five years. The nostalgic millennial in me will always retain a heavy heart for the moment Nintendo put Rare to pasture with its sale to Microsoft in 2002.
At a time when everyone was drooling over potential polygons, DKC made pixel graphics look brand new again. It basically extended the SNES’s lifespan while Nintendo prepped the N64. Sega panicked and reactively made Vectorman, while Naughty Dog cited DKC as an influence when inventing Crash Bandicoot. New character, flip from horizontal to vertical, and that’s about it. And helped birth the guy who says “Whoa!” every time he dies. Gotcha.
Donkey Kong Country was the game equivalent of that kid who shows up to school in brand-new sneakers the day before picture day. Was it mostly about looks? Yeah. Did the gameplay secretly hold up anyway? Absolutely. Even today, it’s one of the SNES’s crown jewels—proof that sometimes you really can judge a book by its banana-yellow cover.
Look out for the Donkey Kong Country: Redux for a deeper look at Super Play’s review, plus the reviews of other UK videogame magazines of the time. This was a big release so is sure to be the biggest redux yet!