page_title: Donkey Kong 64
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Donkey Kong 64 / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Composer Grant Kirkhope
context_page_description: Donkey Kong 64 is a 1999 adventure platform game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. It is the first Donkey Kong game to feature 3D gameplay. As the gorilla Donkey Kong, the player explores the themed levels of an island to collect items and rescue his kidnapped friends from King K. Rool. The player completes minigames and puzzles as five playable Kong characters—each with their own special abilities—to receive bananas and other collectibles. In a separate multiplayer mode, up to four players can compete in deathmatch and last man standing games.
  Rare, which had previously created the Donkey Kong Country games, began working on Donkey Kong 64 in 1997, although production restarted halfway through the three-year development cycle. A 16-person team, with many members recruited from Rare's Banjo group, finished the game in 1999, when it was published by Nintendo in North America in November and worldwide in December. It was the first game to require the Nintendo 64 console's Expansion Pak, an accessory that added memory resources. The game's exceptionally large marketing budget included advertisements, sweepstakes, and a national tour.
context_section_description: Following its success with the Donkey Kong Country games in the mid-1990s, developer Rare built its next Donkey Kong game on its predecessors' gameplay but not as a direct sequel. Rare's Gregg Mayles led the effort to create Donkey Kong 64. Development began in 1997—shortly after the completion of Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! (1996)—for release on the Nintendo 64's disk drive add-on. It was transitioned for release on the base console after the add-on was delayed and eventually canceled. A team of 16 people worked on the title over the course of three years, and an additional eight members assisted in its later stages. Many developers transitioned from Rare's Banjo team, which had worked on Banjo-Kazooie (1998) and Banjo-Tooie (2000). Donkey Kong 64 was built atop the Banjo game engine.
  Rare conceived and originally designed Donkey Kong 64 as a traditional, linear platform game similar to the Donkey Kong Country games. The Nintendo 64 was still new, and at the time Rare did not have a common game engine. The linear version was developed for around 18 months, before being scrapped in favor of what would be the released product. While 3D graphics prevented Rare from reproducing the detailed pre-rendered graphics of the Donkey Kong Country series, they allowed the company to make characters more expressive. Producing satisfactory character models proved to be a challenge; lead artist Mark Stevenson noted that "[b]eing able to see this character from any angle, you'd make an animation, put it in the game, and you'd think it looked good side-on, but awful from every other angle!" Stevenson also noted that as 3D video games were in their infancy, the Donkey Kong 64 models were always going to look worse than the pre-rendered Donkey Kong Country ones. The models from the Country games were used as reference points, but their use was otherwise limited.
  The strong emphasis on collectibles was a design choice made at the request of Rare co-founder Tim Stamper to distinguish Donkey Kong 64 from Banjo-Kazooie. According to director George Andres, "I'd always go back to him and say 'Here's some' and he'd go 'No, more things'." Retrospectively, Andres commented that he should have reined himself in, pointing out that he would have, among other things, liked to unify the color-coded banana system. Rare also attempted to differentiate Donkey Kong 64 from Banjo-Kazooie through its variety of playable characters, cinematic set-pieces, and bombastic boss battles. Donkey Kong's coconut blaster was originally a realistic shotgun, which Rare changed at the request of Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto. According to Andres, Miyamoto was appalled when he saw Donkey Kong shoot realistic bullets at beavers during a prerelease demonstration. A scrapped feature, "Stop 'N' Swop", would have allowed data to be transferred from Banjo-Kazooie to Donkey Kong 64 to unlock in-game bonuses.
  Donkey Kong 64 was the first of two games to require the Nintendo 64's Expansion Pak, a console memory upgrade that shipped with the game. The upgrade was previously used to power optional, higher-resolution display, but in the case of Donkey Kong 64, it was marketed as improving the game's frame rate and rendering of objects at a distance. According to Rare programmer Chris Marlow, the company could not resolve a bug that occurred without the Expansion Pak and thus they were forced, at great expense, to bundle the game with the memory upgrade.  However, Stevenson called Marlow's story a "myth" and said that the decision to use the Expansion Pak was made early on in development. While such a bug did exist towards the end of development, according to Stevenson, "the Expansion Pak wasn't introduced to deal with this and wasn’t the solution to the problem." Nintendo said that the choice to bundle, rather than selling the accessory separately, would avoid consumer confusion.
  Grant Kirkhope composed the game's soundtrack, bringing it closer to the tradition of Banjo-Kazooie than to that of David Wise's Donkey Kong Country soundtracks. However, Kirkho
caption: Donkey Kong 64 composer Grant Kirkhope
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