Donkey Kong Bananza’s Destruction Idea Came From A Goomba With Hands

A new Ask the Developer interview all about Donkey Kong Bananza is now available for your perusal, and it’s packed with anecdotes and info about the upcoming 3D platformer.

One particularly interesting nugget was that the concept of destruction was actually being worked on before development on Bananza officially began. In fact, one concept video shows that the team experimented by sticking hands onto a Goomba – more specifically, Knucklotec hands from Super Mario Odyssey.

Here’s what the team said:

So it wasn’t that the concept of destruction came first, and then you built a mechanic around it?

Wataru Tanaka: No. Shortly after Super Mario Odyssey was released, we started running technical experiments with the idea of, “What kind of game do you get if everything in the environment is destructible?”

Kenta Motokura: We even tried sticking arms on a Goomba.

Tanaka: That’s right, we did. (Laughs) In Super Mario Odyssey, there’s a boss called Knucklotec who attacks Mario with giant hands. The programmer who created him tried attaching those arms to a Goomba as an experiment. The Goomba could smash terrain, tear off pieces to use as weapons, and throw them. Those actions felt surprisingly satisfying, and we got a sense that this destruction-based gameplay could be a compelling core mechanic.

Motokura: The results of our tests showed that destruction-based gameplay could work, and it was a good match for Donkey Kong’s enormous strength. We felt that the concept and the core gameplay had clicked into place.

And here’s a look at the concept video itself (courtesy of Stealth40K on BlueSky):

It’s a very barebones video, but you can certainly see how it would go on to inform the gameplay seen in Donkey Kong Bananza. It makes us wonder what other kind of concepts Nintendo has managed to stockpile in recent years, too. Just imagine the possibilities!

The same interview also revealed what Bananza had looked like when it was in development for the Switch 1. The team stated that they had begun to think about moving the game to Switch 2 in 2021 after it became apparent that the improved specs would lead to more satisfying destruction.