I don’t want to keep harping on Rare but maybe I need to get this out of my system lol
Banjo-Kazooie was (for Rareheads) infamously known as Project Dream, starting out as a linear 3D game with one foot still in DKC territory (until those dev blokes beheld the boldness of Super Mario 64).
And I like to imagine that Nintendo, as a passive aggressive sort of revenge post-Bad Fur Day said to Rare “Oh, you don’t mind completely overhauling a game mid-production? Make Dinosaur Planet a Star Fox, please.”
And then finally they said, “hands off our monkey babies and good luck with Microsoft” before Donkey Kong Racing (featured on the back of the Gamecube box!) could see the light of day.
everything i know about donkey kong i learned on the DK vine and i don’t regret it at all, except for when my all-too-deep knowledge of Mr. Pants lore rears its ugly head.
still hate modern DK’s big toothy grin, it’s so grotesque
stop n swop being real is way worse than it never coming to fruition. i hate that it gives you xbox live avatars. what the fuck
when wikipedia was relatively new, a bunch of us DK Viners started writing extremely detailed pages about every Rare character. I got into a big argument in the talk page of Mr. Pants with someone saying that he was “not notable enough to get his own page,” which infuriated me to no end. what does notability have to do with reality?? it’s supposed to be an encyclopedia of everything, and that includes Mr. Pants’ origin story as a weird joke on the Rare website.
I still kinda hate Wikipedia editors because of that.
Good ol’ DK Vine. Miyamoto’s reference sketch, which probably took him minutes, is better than anything they came up with really.
The grotesquery of Rare’s animal mascots pales in comparison to their human character designs though. Killer Instinct, Blast Corps character renders, Jet Force Gemini, Grabbed by the Ghoulies…all bear that special brand of uncanny cartoonery from the country that also gave us Teletubbies, Mr. Blobby and locomotives with human faces.
I dunno, I have a lot fondness for the aesthetics of the donkey Kong Country trilogy. They all still look pretty great to me, and manage to convey tones and aesthetics that are really unique to this day.
Their other pre-rendered stuff I could take or leave, but few mascot platformers nail mood like the DKCs do.
lots of new stuff coming out from multiple mario prototype leaks including the fact that yoshi’s island was called “super mario bros 5” and “super donkey” internally
