Hold on to your banana.
Written on March 13th, 2026 by Tech Ads
‘Hold on to your banana.’
Released in 1994, Donkey Kong Country was a side scrolling platform game developed by RARE for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Limited by the then mid-life hardware of the SNES and it’s inability to display massed 3D content, RARE aimed to differentiate Donkey Kong Country from other platformers of the period by pre-rendering 3D images, capturing the required positions, and then compressing and storing them as classic 2D dimensional sprites. Base 3D images were created on a number of SGI Challenge workstations. Like all SNES cartridges, the Donkey Kong Country development team had the option of including non-standard hardware and, in this case, the team chose to use a then-large 32 Mbit cartridge to store the large number of pre-rendered images.
Donkey Kong Country was well received by both critics and players and spawned two further sequels on the SNES.
A copy of Rare’s 1998 Donkey Kong Country website can be found at the Internet Archive.