Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
Conversely, the lead designer Gregg Mayles and his brother Steve recalled that it was Nintendo that requested a Donkey Kong game.
Donkey Kong creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, said that Rare approached Nintendo and offered to handle Donkey Kong since other developers were preoccupied with franchises such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda.
Miyamoto was still involved with the project and Rare said he provided crucial input.
It cost an estimated 1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years.
Gunn said they were under significant pressure from the Stampers and to finish in time for Thanksgiving due to Nintendo's competition with Sega.
Mayles recalled they were largely uncomplimentary, with one member, Gunpei Yokoi, saying it "looked too 3D".
Miyamoto said he felt "blessed" to have Rare developing Donkey Kong Country because they had their technology prepared in advance.
Adapting to the cutting-edge SGI workstations was difficult; Steve Mayles said they had a steep learning curve.
The ACM process pushed the SNES hardware to its limits; the programmer Mark Betteridge said Rare wanted to do everything they could with the hardware similar to what they had done with the NES game Battletoads (1991).
Mayles said: "We thought a second character could perform this function, look visually impressive, and give the player a feeling that they were not alone".
Donkey Kong Country did not have much cut content; Gunn said he only regretted that Donkey Kong walks across dotted lines instead of paths on the world map, which could not be implemented due to time constraints.
His colleague Grant Kirkhope said that Wise's familiarity with the SNES hardware meant he could "make it do things that people hadn't heard before".
The boss theme was inspired by the Nine Inch Nails song "March of the Pigs" (1994), and K.
Wise said his primary focus was to make the most of the SPC700, and he input the music by hand to save memory.
Beanland said Tim Stamper liked it, so Wise adopted it.
Gregg Mayles recalled the audience was stunned in silence before bursting into applause.
As one of the flagship games of Nintendo's Play It Loud! promotion, Donkey Kong Country was backed by an exceptionally large marketing campaign—"marketing blitzkrieg", as Hardcore Gaming 101 put it.
Exposed, hosted by the comedian Josh Wolf, provides a "behind-the-scenes" glimpse of the Treehouse, the Nintendo of America division where games are tested.
Nintendo World Report wrote that Exposed was "probably the first time most people outside of Nintendo learned about the [Treehouse]" and the promotion allowed players to see Donkey Kong Country for themselves at home, rather than having to learn about it secondhand from a magazine.
Nintendo anticipated that it would sell two million copies in a month, an expectation that Main acknowledged was unprecedented but was "based on the off-the-chart reactions we've received from game players and retailers".
Diehard GameFan and Total! said it changed expectations for 16-bit and platform games, and Entertainment Weekly wrote it "is to most 16-bit games what most 16-bit games are to their Atari forebears.
Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) called Donkey Kong Country "one of the few games that is actually as good as the hype", and Total! declared it the best game of 1994.
GameFan said that Donkey Kong Country set a new quality standard that many developers would attempt to imitate.
EGM said that the graphical quality prompted questions about the purpose of 32- and 64-bit hardware.
Total! said the character animations surpassed those of a Disney film and applauded the parallax scrolling.
Several critics said the graphics were the best on available hardware, with Entertainment Weekly writing that they were comparable to matte paintings.
Total! said the music built atmosphere, Top Secret wrote the "captivating" soundtrack asserted itself as a masterpiece in its own right, and EGM and Entertainment Weekly said the audio quality was unprecedented for the SNES and on par with a CD's.
EGM and GamePro found searching for bonus stages was challenging, though GamePro said it was easy to "breeze through the game" without them and criticised the boss fights as simplistic.
GameFan said it would be a worthy successor to Super Mario World even without the graphics and Total! wrote that it took Mario best elements, increased the speed, and presented them better.
Next Generation felt the gameplay, though good, did not meet the standards of previous SNES games such as the Mario and Legend of Zelda series and prevented it from being a "typical Nintendo blockbuster".
It said that experienced players may find the game, designed for the mass market, unoriginal.
IGN wrote that it "saved the SNES" and revitalised sales by bringing back lapsed fans.
Reviewing the Virtual Console rerelease, Nintendo Life felt the visuals were still among the SNES's best, and Jeuxvideo.com said they had provided unprecedented realism.
IGN and AllGame said the visuals remained impressive for the SNES (though IGN thought they were no longer as significant a draw), while GameSpot thought the graphics rivalled 32-bit consoles.
Conversely, USGamer said that, though technically impressive, they did not age well, with "cringe-inducing", "paper-thin backgrounds".
According to IGN, critics accused Donkey Kong Country of "sacrificing gameplay for the sake of a short-run attention grab and quick impulse sales", which USGamer attributed to the "flimflammery of its visuals and the relative mundanity of its actual game design".
Polygon said that although some aspects had not aged well, Donkey Kong Country remained among the best Donkey Kong games and deserved praise for resurrecting the franchise.
Hardcore Gaming 101 said it was the one element that had unquestionably aged well and contained some of the 16-bit era's most memorable music.
Miyamoto spoke highly of Donkey Kong Country in a 2000 interview; he said that Rare "breathed new life into" Donkey Kong, had demonstrated excellent research into what made a Nintendo game work, and proved they could be trusted with the Donkey Kong franchise.
Kent wrote that Miyamoto said "Donkey Kong Country proves gamers will put up with mediocre gameplay if the art is good" during a joint interview with Tim Stamper in Electronic Games in 1995.
Kent said that Nintendo's marketing department had rejected Yoshi's Island for lacking Donkey Kong Country pre-rendered graphics, and that this had possibly motivated Miyamoto's remark.
Miyamoto denied this in 2010, noting he "was very involved" in Donkey Kong Country and had corresponded with Stamper throughout development.
In 2014, USGamer described Kent's claims as "seemingly apocryphal", and in 2019, the video game historian Frank Cifaldi found that the Electronic Games interview did not contain the alleged quote from Miyamoto.
Donkey Kong Country exerted "revolutionary influence", according to GameSpot.
Kotaku said its unprecedented graphics represented the future of games and Nintendo World Report wrote that it set standards for how platform games could look and play.
(1996), exposed the "illusion upon which [Donkey Kong Country] was built".
Kotaku said Donkey Kong Country was an event that could not be replicated in modern times due to the game industry's growth.
IGN said Donkey Kong Country contributed to an increased appreciation for video game music as an art form, and The New York Times called it the video game equivalent to the Beatles' Revolver (1966).
"Aquatic Ambience" has been described as "the 'Eleanor Rigby' of video game music", praised by artists such as Trent Reznor and Donald Glover, and The A.V.
Glover sampled it in his 2012 song "Eat Your Vegetables", to which Wise expressed approval.
The SFC version earned a place in the Silver Hall of Fame in the "Cross Review" of the game magazine Famitsu, and its sales in Japan reached 3,000,000 copies, No. 4 of all time for a Super Famicom title, with 9,300,000 copies worldwide.
At a time when next-generation consoles such as the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation (PS) were coming to the fore, all 3 titles in the Donkey Kong Country series achieved million-seller status in Japan, cumulative sales for the series exceeded 10,000,000 copies worldwide, and it became a series representative of the late SFC period both in Japan and overseas.
In the "Cross Review" of the game magazine Famitsu it received 7, 8, 8 and 8, for a total of 31 out of 40, earning a place in the Silver Hall of Fame, and its rating in the "Game Report Card" reader poll run by Family Computer Magazine was 24.7 out of 30, as shown below.
In the "Cross Review" feature of the magazine Famitsu,the four reviewers gave 7, 6, 6, and 5, for a total of 24 out of 40. In the "Game Report Card" reader poll run by Family Computer Magazine,it scored 22.5 out of 30, as shown below.
Donkey Kong Country (Super Famicom, 1994-11-26) shipments of about 3,000,000 copies
Donkey Kong Land (Game Boy, 1995-7-27) - shipments of about 1,080,000 copies
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (Super Famicom, 1995-11-21) - shipments of about 2,210,000 copies
Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! (Super Famicom, 1996-11-23) - shipments of about 1,770,000 copies
Donkey Kong 64 (NINTENDO 64, 1999-12-10) shipments of about 1,100,000 copies
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii, 2010-12-9) - shipments of about 1,000,000 copies
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D (Nintendo 3DS, 2013-6-13) - shipments of about 370,000 copies
With 9.3 million copies sold worldwide, it is the third-bestselling SNES game and the bestselling Donkey Kong game.
It cost an estimated 1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Nintendo spent 16 million on marketing Donkey Kong Country in America alone; at the time, major games typically had an average marketing budget of 5 million.
Donkey Kong Country set the record for the fastest-selling video game at the time: it sold over 500,000 copies within a week, and sales reached one million copies in the US alone in two weeks.
In April 1995, following Donkey Kong Country success, Nintendo purchased a 25% minority stake in Rare, which increased to 49% over time.
It sold 2.19 million copies worldwide.
The GBA version sold 1.82 million copies, including 960,000 in the US by August 2006.
The console's top five is rounded out by Rare's Donkey Kong Country in third, with sales of 9.3million units, while its two follow-ups are also in the top ten, Super Mario Kart in fourth, selling over 8.7million units, and Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in fifth, with 6.3million units sold.
2001, the only Game Boy Color title in the series, is a port of the SFC version but basically also inherits the system of the GB version, and besides changes to stages and new stages, its music is based on that of the GB version.
Donkey Kong Country was the first Donkey Kong game that was neither directed nor produced by Miyamoto, who was working on Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (1995).
Donkey Kong Country was one of the first games for a mainstream home video game console to use pre-rendered 3D graphics, a technique used in the Amiga game Stardust (1993).
Rare briefly feared competition from DMA Design's Uniracers (1994), which also featured pre-rendered graphics; they were relieved to learn that the player character was Uniracer only pre-rendered element.
Donkey Kong Country did not have much cut content; Gunn said he only regretted that Donkey Kong walks across dotted lines instead of paths on the world map, which could not be implemented due to time constraints.
Nintendo World Report wrote that Exposed was "probably the first time most people outside of Nintendo learned about the [Treehouse]" and the promotion allowed players to see Donkey Kong Country for themselves at home, rather than having to learn about it secondhand from a magazine.
Donkey Kong Country sold six million copies worldwide in its first holiday season, grossing in worldwide sales revenue.
Donkey Kong Country was the only video game included in Time Best Products of 1994 list, coming in second behind the Chrysler Neon, and it became the first game to win the Favourite Video Game Kids' Choice Award at the 1995 Kids' Choice Awards.
Rare was the first non-Japanese studio to enter such a relationship with Nintendo, making them a second-party developer; Nintendo published Rare's subsequent games and allowed them to expand their staff from 84 to over 250 and move out of the farmhouse to an advanced development site elsewhere in Twycross.
Rare was one of the first developers to receive Nintendo 64 software development kits and decided to start spending more time developing fewer games.
Rare followed Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! with Donkey Kong 64 (1999), the first Donkey Kong game to feature 3D gameplay.
It was released in November 1994 to acclaim; critics hailed its visuals as groundbreaking and praised its gameplay and music.
Reviewers praised the gameplay for its variety and depth; Entertainment Weekly appreciated that it did not build upon the original arcade game's design.
Nintendo and Rare's partnership produced acclaimed Nintendo 64 games such as GoldenEye 007 (1997), Banjo-Kazooie (1998), Perfect Dark (2000), and Conker's Bad Fur Day (2001).
Critics praised the GBC version for attempting to preserve the visuals in spite of hardware limitations, but criticised the GBA version's downgrades, which IGN considered detrimental to the experience.
Though retrospective reviewers criticised the boss fights, they praised the rhythm, variety, and replay value.
Wise's soundtrack was influential and his work developed a cult following.
"Aquatic Ambience" has been described as "the 'Eleanor Rigby' of video game music", praised by artists such as Trent Reznor and Donald Glover, and The A.V.
Adapting to the cutting-edge SGI workstations was difficult; Steve Mayles said they had a steep learning curve.
Reviewing Donkey Kong Country for release, Nintendo directed Rare to reduce the difficulty to appeal to a broad audience, reasoning that the secrets would provide sufficient challenge for hardcore gamers.
USGamer noted that Nintendo, at the time of Donkey Kong Country release, faced difficulty to keep the SNES profitable.
The four reviewers in Famitsu complimented the gameplay, though one, Hirokazu Hamamura, found it too difficult.
Conversely, the lead designer Gregg Mayles and his brother Steve recalled that it was Nintendo that requested a Donkey Kong game.
Mayles recalled they were largely uncomplimentary, with one member, Gunpei Yokoi, saying it "looked too 3D".
Gregg Mayles recalled the audience was stunned in silence before bursting into applause.
Wise initially worked as a freelancer and assumed his music would be replaced by Koji Kondo because of the importance of Donkey Kong to Nintendo.
According to Beanland, the track was intended for a Killer Instinct progress video, before Nintendo decided to use it in a Donkey Kong Country promotional trailer.
The title of the version outside Japan is Donkey Kong Land, but in Japan the title Donkey Kong Land was used for the game that is the sequel to this one.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (Wii U, 2014-2-13; Nintendo Switch, 2018-5-3)
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