I don’t know if this small-yet-immutable fact blows your mind like it did mine, but last week marked one year since the release of Donkey Kong Bananza on the Nintendo Switch 2. Oh, how much the videogame industry has changed in just twelve short months…
Bananza was once a pipe dream. Eleven years ago, when I lost over a week to the surprise Virtual Console re-release of Donkey Kong 64 on the struggling Wii U, I had very little hope of glimpsing a properly three-dimensional DK game anywhere near the horizon. The critically-acclaimed and commercially-ignored DK Country: Tropical Freeze was barely a year old at the time, and insofar as the once-prolific Nintendo mascot had any future prospects, they appeared to be strictly 2D (Little did I know the Kong was about to endure a considerable major release drought worse than I could have imagined).
And so I latched onto that 2015 shadow-drop hard: the murky legal waters of Microsoft-owned Rareware development assets had long made the concept of a retro Rare release on a modern Nintendo platform seem like a pipe dream, and even the general concept of a sudden “out-now” release was still pretty new to the videogame space. It was an exhilarating dive. I came out the other side of a 20-hour play time blur and landed at my PC, eager to write about the game from the angle of exploring its most widely-accepted criticisms.
At the time, the makings of a wave of nostalgia-powered “3D collect-a-thon” revivals were gathering momentum within the indie scene, and so it felt apt to ask “Did DK 64 Kill the 3D Collect-a-thon Platformer?” The short answer was, as you might expect, no; the game’s occasionally over-ambitious design shortcomings merely made it an excellent scapegoat during a time of turbulent transformation in the industry.
Yet there was a fair amount left unsaid about the game in that article, and much more has changed for Nintendo’s oldest mascot in the years since. We have just witnessed the second official re-release of the game on the Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 just over a month ago, and within the context of the mid-2020s, this curious former black sheep of both Rare’s platformer catalogue and Nintendo’s Kong plans suddenly seems like much less of an oddity. I’m also a decade older now, so there’s that too.
And so, for the second time this year, I have defied a core part of my personality by dropping all the 2026 games I’ve been trying to juggle in favour of a decades-old title I know extremely well, in the hope of gaining some new insights by experiencing it within a vastly different modern context. With Nintendo just weeks on from its second direct re-visitation of Starfox 64, and an even more significant third take on Ocarina of Time steadily approaching, I find myself revisiting a game to which I have already dedicated an entire article. I did not think I would be in this position, but life, much like Nintendo, will do weird shit.
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Vagrant Rant 