This month we played all three Donkey Kong Country games, developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom in 1994, 1995, and 1996.

We talk about the difficulty patches, Rare’s way of teaching the player mechanics, boss fights and general evolution of the key pieces across the series, as well as the experimentation of the third game in relation to the rest.

These games are classics of the platforming genre, with the extra pizazz of computer-generated graphics as input for sprite animation and to create level backgrounds; behind the scenes Nintendo was already trying to develop a Nintendo 64 so that it could be released in Summer of 1996 (in Japan), but DKC 1 was a technical — computer-generated — showcase in the meantime. Whereas by 1996, in November for DKC 3, the N64 had already launched.

Maybe that explains why DKC 3 is the weird one.

Check out the liner notes for this episode for a look at speed running and the history of development/tech behind the DKC series on SNES.

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