Sharing the screen was Dixie Kong, who was alluded to as Diddy's girlfriend.

The famous ape, who Shigeru Miyamoto had originally made to resemble Bluto from Popeye, was passing the torch to his younger pal Diddy Kong. The biggest change in the Donkey Kong Country sequel is the lack of Donkey Kong. This was a long way from its pre-Nintendo days when Rare was best known for Battletoads. The British development studio, which had been formed by the brothers Chris and Tim Stamper around a decade prior in 1985, was given the freedom to experiment with the massive video game franchise. “I think the success of the first one gave us some sort of trust - even though we had a huge amount of trust in the first game,” he said. Mayles told Retro Gamer that he couldn’t “remember much communication” with Nintendo at all during the development of Diddy’s Kong Quest. After all, it was Nintendo’s characters that had allowed Donkey Kong Country to become a best-seller, right?

When a big company gets into a creative partnership with a smaller company, and the smaller company is doing most of the work, it can be easy for the bigger party to start imposing demands. Rare found that success had its perks, like the boss leaving you alone. The game easily stands apart from its predecessor. If you’re a paid Nintendo Switch online subscriber, you can play both right now by downloading the Super Nintendo Entertainment System app. That’s how wrapped up Donkey Kong Country: Diddy’s Kong Quest is with its predecessor. “Everything happened so fast,” Mayles recalled. Brainstorming for a sequel began even before the first game’s sales had registered. Relatively early on in the development of the first game, the team realized they had more ideas than could fit in a single game.

Speaking to Retro Gamer in 2018, the game’s Producer and Co-Designer Gregg Mayles said that “the pressure was on ourselves.” For Rare, ideas for a second game emerged during the development of Donkey Kong Country.

The company proved that it could more than hang with Sonic and the rest of the upstart Sega Genesis gang.įor Nintendo, domination through one game could only mean one thing: domination through more games. Thanks to a then- unique partnership with the British video game developer Rare, the game had cutting-edge graphics and a breakneck pace that players found irresistible. In 1994, Nintendo needed Donkey Kong Country to be a hit.

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