Nintendo has given fans a rare peek behind its development curtain, with a glimpse at how upcoming Switch 2 platformer Donkey Kong Bananza would have looked on Switch 1.
As previously revealed by IGN, Donkey Kong Bananza originally began as a Switch 1 project, before Nintendo realised the game's destruction-heavy action required better hardware with beefier technical specs.
Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura has now confirmed Bananza switched from being in development for Switch 1 four years ago, back in 2021, after running into technical "challenges". To illustrate his point, Nintendo has published a couple of comparison images, showing how the game looked running on Switch 1, compared to its Switch 2 counterpart.
"We originally began developing Donkey Kong Bananza on Nintendo Switch, but we ran into some challenges," Motokura said, as part of a new Ask the Developer Q&A. "I think it was around 2021 when we started to think about moving development to Switch 2."
"It was clear that the memory available on Switch [1] would struggle to handle that load," added programming director Wataru Tanaka, "and we felt that manifesting the huge volume of terrain that we did in this game might have been unachievable on that platform.
"With the move to Switch 2, we gained not only more memory but also greater processing capacity. That gave us the freedom to incorporate gameplay ideas we'd previously abandoned because they were too demanding. When we got down to trying it, we discovered that not only could it handle the heavy processing requirements, but it also ran at 60 fps."
As seen in the above screenshots, the move to Switch 2 enabled Nintendo to add many more objects to Bananza's levels, multiplying the number of things DK can destroy. And, of course, the improved processing power of Switch 2 ensured the game's destruction elements was handled more easily, with fewer frame-rate drops (although some, Nintendo has acknowledged, are still present).
Bananza's voxel-based destruction is an evolution of the interactive terrain found within a few levels of Super Mario Odyssey, though Nintendo has said its 3D Mario team only began experimenting with the technology halfway through Odyssey's development.
Still, head to Odyssey's Luncheon Kingdom to play with cheese rocks, or the icy drifts Mario can plow through in the game's Snow Kingdom, and you'll see the precursors to Bananza's voxel-based destruction at play.
When moving to work on Bananza, its development team initially used the Rayman-like disembodied arms of Super Mario Odyssey boss Knucklotec and stuck them on a Goomba to roughly simulate the kind of gameplay they wanted for Donkey Kong. Nintendo has published a look at this too — see above — which is fairly stunning to see. Already, this powered-up Goomba is capable of ripping off chunks of the environment with its bare, disembodied hands, and hurling said chunks into other parts of the environment to create holes.
"In Super Mario Odyssey, there’s a boss called Knucklotec who attacks Mario with giant hands," Tanaka explained. "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. Those actions felt surprisingly satisfying, and we got a sense that this destruction-based gameplay could be a compelling core mechanic."
"The results of our tests showed that destruction-based gameplay could work, and it was a good match for Donkey Kong’s enormous strength," Motokura added. "We felt that the concept and the core gameplay had clicked into place."
Elsewhere in the same Q&A, Nintendo discussed how Bananza will be something of a template for the character's 3D platforming future games, splitting DK's appearances in 2D and 3D titles.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
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