Thirty Years of Donkey Kong Country with Kevin Bayliss & David Wise

If there’s one game that I always look back fondly on, its Donkey Kong Country. It is and always will be a game that has a special place in my gaming heart. Its there not only from its revolutionary graphics and superb soundtrack, but because it was the first game that really introduced Donkey Kong to me. Yes, of course I had played the original arcade game, but it was this game that managed to place Donkey Kong as one of my favourite Nintendo characters.

Much of this boils down to the way Donkey Kong was animated, with his own set of characteristics shining through that animation, and I couldn’t stop myself from warming to him. I mentioned the soundtrack earlier, and this was the other important ingredient that gave Donkey Kong Country this atmosphere that I had only previously experienced with Super Mario World. Each track was phenomenal, containing pieces that the Super Nintendo shouldn’t of been able to create, and it still lives on as a seminal soundtrack. 

So I was very excited when I learnt there was to be a panel at EGX 2024 to celebrate its 30th anniversary with the team behind the game. Present were David Wise (composer), Kevin Bayliss (artist), Steve Mayles (artist), and designer Gregg Mayles. It was a wonderful panel filled with fascinating tales and concept designs from the development of the game. I was lucky enough to sit down with David and Kevin before the panel to have a chat about Donkey Kong Country, its influence, the soundtrack, Diddy Kong, and much more! 

I started the interview by reminiscing on how I bought Donkey Kong Country at Christmas time in 1994 and how I always think back to the game during the festive period. This led me to wonder what it was like for Kevin and David to have worked on a game that turned out to be so influential for so many.

David: Well, obviously, at the time, we didn’t know it was going to be quite as influential as it became. We were just enjoying ourselves working, and here we are 30 years later, talking to you about stuff we did decades ago. How amazing is that? 

Kevin: But it’s funny you say Christmas, because for us, it’s kind of a timeline there, but I can’t really remember. Obviously it took a year or so to develop the game, as it did for most of them. But for me, the memories were of Donkey Kong, me sitting in a room on my own, trying to fathom out how to use the software that ran on this SGI machine and fast forwarding and rewinding a video cassette of a gorilla that somebody kept in a basement in America. It’s the only reference material I could find. 

I started building this ape based on a few faxes and stuff that I got on my desk and a couple of sketches that I had passed to me. I spent my time building that model, and then it got handed over to the developer team after we did the demo. I don’t really think we gave it quite as much thought at the time when we were developing it. We knew it looked different and everything. And I knew it was a major IP, being Donkey Kong, but I certainly didn’t expect to be talking to somebody in a café in London 30 years later and sort of celebrating it. 

Obviously it was a significant game because of the rendered graphics, but I’m just really grateful for the opportunity that I had to work on it. And obviously the game was great, as most of the games that we at Rare produced, but it’s just really nice to have been a part of the history, and I think we’re very lucky to have had the opportunity. 

David: Yeah, absolutely. Very lucky. And also the same for me. I was just working out the software; I wanted the game to sound good, so most of the focus was trying to make it sound good rather than worry about what it might be like 30 years later.

Hearing Kevin talk about designing Donkey Kong got me curious about how it felt for Kevin to be given this task of redesigning a much loved and major Nintendo IP.

Kevin: To be honest, I mean, how old was I then?

David: 20 probably.

Kevin: Yeah, I was obviously a lot younger then, and so I had a different attitude towards everything, and I think I was very, very focused on fighting games. I really wanted to make a fighting game, and we’d have this SGI hardware, and I kept on banging on about making a fighting game for Tim and Chris Stamper. They were like, No, no, no, no, no, we’re not making one of those; that’s a fad that goes out of date. I just saw this opportunity with this SGI machine, so I started building fighting game characters. Tim had a machine of his own, and he started building the backgrounds because it was all kind of an exercise, really. 

And then we had a visit from Nintendo because of the Aladdin game that was soon to be released on the Mega Drive/Genesis. It looked incredible, and Nintendo needed something to give the Super Nintendo a bit of a kick and stand out. As Nintendo already had a share in the company at the time and we had built a good relationship with them, they came over to the Rare offices to take a look at this demo that we put together of my fighting characters; I think it was Jago and Combo. 

David: We’d had 2D games hadn’t we for some time, and all of a sudden that demo that Kev did looked as though you could put your hand into the screen and take out the characters because they were 3D and we’d never seen anything like it. So it was completely revolutionary what Kev had managed to do; it was like chalk and cheese. First of all, you’ve got static characters, and then all of a sudden you’ve got these 3D-looking characters that you could probably grab with your hands; that was the difference.

Kevin: We loved the way it looked, but there was also a slight element of doubt in that. Will everybody else like this? Is this too different looking to what Capcom obviously does so well? So Nintendo took a look at it, and then the next morning Tim came in. Well, it was in the afternoon after they had a meeting, and he said they loved it; they wanted us to do a game using this technology, and we’re going to go out for a meal now. I’ll speak to you later. So that was basically it, I went home, I probably carried on making characters and then the next day there was a fax waiting for me, which I’ve actually still got, and it was the first of a wad of faxes of materials sent by Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo of Japan saying, Well, we’re going to let you loose with redesigning the Donkey Kong character, and Tim says you need to do this, and I was like, really, all I want to do is this fighting game. 

So I spent a couple of weeks building DK, and then I handed it over to Greg. Greg took that away, and then he came back and said, Oh, we need another one; we need a monkey sidekick, so I thought about building Donkey Kong Jr. Nintendo decided not to do that, whether or not it was because it had a recent sort of reboot in Super Mario Kart, so it would be a risk to also redesign him. So I created Diddy, and they both went in the game, and then the next thing you know, it was at the CES show, and people were wondering what console it was actually on because it didn’t look anything like a Super Nintendo game. That’s all thanks to the SGI machine, not my talent. I could have put a cube there running around and people would have still gone wow, look at that, but it’s amazing to see that the character is still pretty much as it was back then 30 years ago.

David: Also because it was so different and so inspiring, like, the visuals obviously inspired the gameplay, it inspired the music, it inspired everything; we were just all kind of in the zone about creating something very special. 

Kevin: Well, I think for Dave, this was his first chance to see the game. We’d always use the special effects to create rain or snow and stuff like that, but it never looked as it did when we did it in SGI machines, and obviously for you (David), that must have been a lot easier to sell the emotion of the levels with the music.

David: Absolutely!

With Kevin mentioning the music of Donkey Kong Country, my attention turned to David, and I wanted to know what his process was when creating the music for the game.

David: Well, I was still coding it, typing it in hex and subroutines, which meant I had to protect the flexibility, so I wasn’t using the Nintendo tools, which took up half the memory, so if I was still coding it, I could use the whole memory, but it was still restrictive. So what I decided to do was to reverse engineer a core wave station that used tiny little samples, sometimes single cycles, which is almost no memory, and they just sequenced the waves together or cross-weighted them, so I was able to do that on Super Nintendo, and that just gave me a whole new palette to work with that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So for me, that was the best way of matching up my music to the amazing visuals that I had to work with. 

With David working on various Nintendo Entertainment System games before Donkey Kong Country, I was intrigued by how he found the transition to the Super Nintendo.

David: It meant you could write music that you actually enjoyed listening to, so I don’t mean to downplay the NES; it was great for me to work on, but suddenly you’ve got real-sounding instruments, and that’s a big difference from just waveform instruments, but then to have that crossweight, that fusion between synthetic and real, and really mix it up, that was really interesting, as in really enjoyable. 

Thinking back to Donkey Kong Country, I was curious if David had struggled to create music for a particular level and, if so, which one. 

David: No, not really. Right from before I started writing a note, I knew what I was going to do on each and every level. I just struggled with the technology sometimes because you have to keep focus, so you were typing with all the right channels, and if anything went out of sync, it went to a complete mess, so it was really just the technical side of keeping the mess out and being in sync. 

Turning my attention back to Kevin, I wanted to revisit an earlier comment he made about Diddy Kong, which had sparked my fascination to find out more on his creation and how it made Kevin feel to see Diddy being embraced so warmly by the fan base. 

Kevin: I’d kind of forgotten all about Diddy for a while. Once we began working on what became Diddy Kong Racing, the protagonist was originally going to be Timber. It wasn’t until we got towards the end of the development that Nintendo had actually taken another visit to the offices, and they saw that Banjo-Kazooie wasn’t ready for completion, but Diddy Kong Racing actually was quite close. Despite Mario Kart not being that far behind, they saw that Diddy Kong Racing had a kind of a different vibe to it with the adventure element, but they were concerned about the main IP, that nobody would know who he was, and they wanted a game for Christmas, so they said if you can use Diddy Kong, which again I was a little bit annoyed about because I really wanted this tiger character as the star, then we’ll push the game and we’ll make sure it’s released this year. So I spent some time making a different logo, which was easy enough. Once they’d said they were going to call it Diddy Kong Racing, I put a Diddy Kong 3D model together really quickly based on the NERVS model that I’d built, and it just worked. It really did work. The colour palette, everything about it—it didn’t really fit in with Wizpig and the new universe 100%, but we worked a solution to that into the story, and the whole thing just worked. 

We just had a little chat earlier, and I said it was the most pleasant experience at Rare. It wasn’t a lengthy process either, making the game. I think we all knew 100% what we wanted it to be and what we wanted it to do. Once we’d reached a certain stage, it was plain sailing, and adding the extra vehicles just added so many more dynamic gameplay elements to it, and it just gave the game an extra boost. I think that also boosted Diddy because you recognised that game and you recognised Diddy Kong for being part of that. I’m hoping that we can see it again at some point. I know he’s in Mario Kart, but to see another Diddy Kong Racing would be fantastic; I’d love to work on that. 

I couldn’t resist bringing up our friend, Cliff Foster from N64Life, who is always calling for justice for Timber and has been hoping for a new game with Timber as the lead character. I asked if this may ever be a possibility. 

Kevin: When we finished the game, we started working on what was Dinosaur Planet, which became Star Fox Adventures, and the same thing happened again, more or less, because Timber got replaced by Sabre, who got replaced by Fox McCloud. I think if we hadn’t changed Timber for Sabre, Nintendo wouldn’t have looked at it and said, This is very similar to our Star Fox franchise; why don’t we marry the two universes together. I think Timber could have his own game, but it wasn’t to be, but maybe one day.

Moving back across to David, I had a question from Matt (one of our game writers). Matt had heard that a lot of video game music composers of the 8 and 16-bit era didn’t realise the impact they were having on their audience until years and years later. Matt wanted to find out David’s thoughts on discovering a website like ocremix.org and realising just how big of an impact he’s had on an entire generation of people. 

David: Yeah, I mean, that’s quite overwhelming at the time. It took a few weeks to kind of realise, because it was about five or six years after we did it, and I can remember I’d been invited to an orchestral concert just after we’d finished Donkey Kong, but somebody played it down and said it wasn’t going to be very big anyway. I think it was at the International Forum, and I’d been invited to a big orchestra playing some of the themes from Donkey Kong, but I didn’t realise for around six years, so when I did, it was, oh, wow, that’s cool. 

Matt had one last question, which related to Gimmick 2, a game that was released only this year, and Matt was curious on how David got involved with the project. 

David: So, Nick at Bitwave got in touch with me, as he was a fan of my music, and he was a big fan of Gimmick, and he had the opportunity with Embracer to bring back the series and do something different with it, and he wanted me to compose the music for it, which was really exciting for me. I can remember just before I started working on the Donkey Kong series, Chris Stamper had been playing me the soundtrack to the original Gimmick, and seeing all the extra waveforms made me really jealous, because obviously he could do so much more as a composer than I could. Then Chris said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, we’re going on to the Super Nintendo,” so it was almost full circle back for me to be on Gimmick 2 and being able to do something myself with the franchise, so it was really cool.

I would like to thank David and Kevin for their generosity, not only with their time but also for being so warm, open, and friendly. We did start running short on time, which in some ways was a good thing, as this interview would probably have run into multiple parts otherwise. I still have so many questions for both of them, not only for Donkey Kong Country but for many of the other games they helped create in their careers, and hopefully, one day, they may appear on the podcast to answer them. 

If one thing that has come out of my interactions with the developers and the fans of Donkey Kong Country is that there is still a lot of love for not only this game but for its sequels too. The mark they have left on the gaming world is still felt today, and the whole team should feel very proud for creating such a remarkable game that will live on for many years to come.