A Goomba with hands, Original Switch graphics, see how Donkey Kong Bananza began

Donkey Kong Bananza is out this week, and Nintendo has released a new Ask the Developer instalment to talk about the game’s development and reveal some of the secrets and processes behind creating it.

In this latest instalment, we got a look not only at an early concept for the game—featuring a Goomba with hands—but also at how the game could have looked on the original Switch.

The core concept of destruction was actually decided before it was even determined that it would be a Donkey Kong game.

Tanaka:
No. Shortly after Super Mario Odyssey was released, we started running technical experiments with the idea of, “What kind of game do you get if everything in the environment is destructible?”.

Motokura:
We even tried sticking arms on a Goomba.

Tanaka:
That’s right, we did. (Laughs) In Super Mario Odyssey, there’s a boss called Knucklotec who attacks Mario with giant hands. The programmer who created him tried attaching those arms to a Goomba as an experiment. The Goomba could smash terrain, tear off pieces to use as weapons, and throw them.

There’s even a video of it, and it’s just as silly as you think. “The results of our tests showed that destruction-based gameplay could work, and it was a good match for Donkey Kong’s enormous strength. We felt that the concept and the core gameplay had clicked into place.”

As we now know, the game originally began development on the Nintendo Switch, but sometime in 2021, the team started to thinking about shifting to the Switch 2 when they couldn’t get it to look and run as smoothly as they wanted.

We first looked into how we could upgrade what we’d originally built for Switch to take advantage of Switch 2. One of the most obvious improvements was that we could place far more objects in the environment than before. Being able to place more objects in the terrain didn’t just enhance the game’s visual richness. More importantly, it increased the amount of things players could destroy, which amplified the exhilaration of being able to demolish anything and everything. That went hand in hand with the game’s core concept of destruction. It convinced us that this game would be even more fun if we developed it for Switch 2.

To prove it, Nintendo even shared an screenshot of the game what it could have looked like on that console. The glow up is apparent.

It wasn’t just how it looked, the feel of the game at 60fps is something the team really wanted.

As well as running at a smooth 60 fps, the core gameplay of smashing got way more satisfying. The physics of smashing involve lots of things all happening at once. Donkey Kong throws a punch, the terrain and objects break apart, and visual effects show debris flying outward. All of that is packed into a single moment. At 30 fps, we couldn’t fully capture everything that happens in that instant. But at 60 fps, we saw that sense of destruction coming through much more clearly. We thought to ourselves, “Now we’ve got something seriously satisfying!”. Not only did Switch 2 enable the game to run well, it unlocked the game’s full potential – no, it made the game possible.

A great peak behind the curtain at Nintendo, and you can read more in the Ask the Developer series interviews.