If you thought the Donkey Kong we all know and love has some junk in the trunk, wait until you see the character’s original design that the game’s artist, Kev Bayliss, has released. Baby’s got some serious back.
Bayliss, who is a former Rare artist, shared an inside glimpse on a Youtube video of his journey recreating the Donkey Kong character for the video game.
The video is a fascinating insight into how the design was originally created, as well as Bayliss’s thought process behind it.
“I was given the opportunity to recreate Shigeru Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong character for the game,” Bayliss says of the sketches. “I really didn’t think there was anything wrong with the Donkey Kong character in the first place, but when I got the chance to recreate him, I was really excited about it.”
You can see in the pictures that Bayliss’s sketch is very close to the actual character that emerged on the game – just chunkier!
Though it’s been 25 years since Bayliss’s original design, the Donkey Kong character has kept true to his look and has featured on many games such as Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party and Diddy Kong Racing, among many more.
It was announced recently that Nintendo “laughed their asses off” when Microsoft tried to buy them around 20 years ago.
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“They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went,” shared Kevin Bachus, an X-Box/Microsoft employee.
Microsoft’s plan was to team up with Nintendo, saying that they would sort out the hardware while the latter made the games.
“The pitch was their hardware stunk, and compared to Sony PlayStation, it did. So the idea was, ‘Listen, you’re much better at the game portions of it with Mario and all that stuff. Why don’t you let us take care of the hardware?’” Said Bob McBreen, former head of business development at Microsoft/Xbox.
Watch the video below of Bayliss explaining the process:
