Nintendo confirms Donkey Kong Bananza was made by the Super Mario Odyssey team

Nintendo has kept its lips sealed on what development team is behind the soon-to-be-released Donkey Kong Bananza, until now, with the company publishing an interview with the team.

As many fans suspected, the team that worked on Super Mario Odyssey "were central to Donkey Kong Bananza's development." While this was suspected by many after seeing footage of Bananza, this is the first time Nintendo has confirmed the news publicly. The interview includes comments from Kenta Motokura, a producer for Bananza; Kazuya Takahashi, a game director; Wataru Tanaka, another game director; Daisuke Watanabe, an art director; and Naoto Kubo, the sound director.

Motokura explained that Koizumi-san, the Senior Executive Officer and Senior General Manager of the Entertainment Planning & Development Division at Nintendo, approached the team behind Super Mario Odyssey and said the company wants to make a 3D Donkey Kong game.

3

The team recognized that with each iteration of Donkey Kong, it came with some kind of innovation, whether it be stage composition in the older games or unique visuals in the Super NES games. So, they wanted this Donkey Kong game to also feature a unique innovation. This would be destructible environments.

The team landed on this after speaking with the creator of Donkey Kong, Miyamoto, who put great emphasis on Donkey Kong's moves, such as Hand Slaps, blowing on things, and his general strength. The team worked the greatest parts of Donkey Kong into their new innovation, eventually landing on a completely destructible environment, and granting Donkey Kong the ability to transform.

"Smashing lots of terrain and collecting gold fills up the Bananergy gauge, allowing Donkey Kong to perform Bananza transformations, in which he powers up by transforming into different animal forms. This idea emerged while we were searching for Donkey Kong's ability change. We were discussing how it might be fun if, once he transforms into a powerful Kong Bananza, he could deal out destruction in different ways, not just with regular punches, but with charge punches, piercing punches and the like.

In Mario's case, he progresses through the game by powering up and becoming bigger or using special abilities, but in this game, Donkey Kong can transform anywhere by harnessing the power of Bananza transformation. Being able to transform anywhere lets him chain together his destruction, which is the concept of this game. We thought that this chain of destruction would be compelling as an action game. And so it became one of the key gameplay elements we focused on in this title," explained Takahashi

"Development began when Koizumi-san (5) approached our team and said, "With an eye to expanding the Donkey Kong franchise further, I'd like the team that's been working on 3D Mario games to create a 3D Donkey Kong game." The Donkey Kong series started with an arcade game created by Miyamoto-san (6). It featured a lot of things that were innovative for arcade games at the time, such as narrative-based gameplay and stage composition with varied design.

Later on, we had success with the Donkey Kong Country series (7) developed with Rare Ltd. (8), and I think those titles also represented a significant innovation as Super NES games with unique visuals. So this time around, tasked with developing a Donkey Kong game ourselves, we decided we were going to aim for another big innovation," said Motokura