Nintendo on Donkey Kong Bananza: Miyamoto’s original design was the basis for DK’s new look, 2D and 3D Donkey Kong game branches planned

What’s so apparent in fantastic deep dives like these is that the process of constructing a truly cohesive, transformative, responsive, delightful, and inspiring piece of interactive entertainment/escapism with this sense of grandeur is STAGGERING, especially as their scope has ballooned and teams grow in size (even given the advancement of creation tools). It can be easy to lose sight of that and the fact that it’s practically magic that creative visions in video games can be focused and executed at this scale and quality

When you consider things like the effort to disguise the voxels, the assigning of properties to the voxels that create unique interactions, focusing on tactile and powerful game feel to mirror the character ideally, attention to detail paid to all sound design and the ways the environments can impact SFX and music, focusing on compelling authored design within a space that is almost completely mailable and destructible, and arriving at Pauline so organically and naturally, one this is clear: Nintendo are guilty of plenty of surprising and frustrating choices, but they do not take for granted the resources and time afforded to them. It’s quite the opposite