DF Retro: Donkey Kong Country + Killer Instinct - A 16-Bit CG Revolution!

[Music] the Nintendo wanted a new special looking game and the main aim was to make something that was look look special because there was this big game coming out from Sega Disney's Aladdin even today Donkey Kong Country remains one of the most influential games of all time was its unique approach to visual design and pivotal reimagining of a classic Nintendo character it's no surprise that dkc stands as the third best-selling Super NES game of all time but these days with advances in graphics technology it's easy to dismiss its pre-rendered graphics and simple gameplay as nothing more than a quaint artifact from another time but if you dig deeper there's much more to this game than you might first believe on this episode of DF retro then were diving back into the world of rares circa 1994 for a look at this platforming classic and this time we're talking directly with some of the people that helped make it possible what was it like working on the cutting edge game from the early 90s I think the greatest challenge on dock young country was actually is initially believing that we could actually get it to work that's not all though we're also looking at its stablemate killer instinct this arcade fighter pushes the techniques featured in Donkey Kong Country to the next level and remains an important piece of rare history all that and more is coming up on this special episode of DF retro let's get started [Applause] [Music] [Music] to understand how Donkey Kong Country came to be we need to first look back at rare itself founded in 1982 by Chris and Tim Stamper under the name ultimate play the game the company made itself known on the ZX spectrum with games such as jetpack and saber war does that expect him was a popular machine in the UK and one beloved by many still today but it was never much of a success outside of the UK ultimate needed to look elsewhere if it was going to grow its business and that growth would come from Nintendo's Famicom said to be unbreakable at the time the company got its hands on a Japanese Famicom system reverse engineered it and presented demos to Nintendo itself impressed with the results Nintendo granted the company which would now be named rare Ltd the license to produce games for its platform over the next eight years or so rare would develop more than 60 games for Nintendo's machines with various publishers handling the business side of things business progressed well for rare but a couple of years into the life of the Super NES one very special computer would change everything at some point sim bought some magazines and some brochures and with details on this this new technique of producing graphics it was pretty much like a C ad design package and after looking at was some of the movies at the the cinema at the time I think there was films like the abyss and I think terminated to it just come out we were looking at and trying to get these kind of effects into our games in the testbed for this new technology was none other than Battletoads the arcade game and there was a spaceship that was moving along and I modeled a very simple sort of spaceship in the shape of a toad that the three characters that were 2d sprites were sitting in and I just got it to sort of rock like this and I translated it from a lot of colors into very few colors just by using a few filters with the software that we'd gotten because it was moving it actually did its appear to look 3d so I think I tried something else then it was some huge steel balls like cannonballs roll toward you at the end of the level and I rendered those up in the same way because they were monochrome you only needed sort of shades of grey to show that it was moving and coming towards you surrounded those networks okay in the end the arcade version of battletoads turned out great with huge sprites smooth animation and solid brawler mechanics and there's initial experiments and SGI rendered visuals worked well but this was just the beginning we started looking at modeling sprites for I think it was a fighting game that I was trying to work on at the time and we knew that we could do it with 16 colors so we thought maybe if we get 64 colors or a larger color palette that they come out a little bit clearer but then after working on it for a little while Tim was doing some mock-up backgrounds for this this fighting idea and I did a couple of characters which were basically robots with a human head because I thought they would be easy because they're translating a few of colors and then came and said that Nintendo wanted a new special looking game the the main aim was to make something that was look special because there was this big game coming out from Sega that was Disney's Aladdin and it was featuring professional Disney animation and certainly it looked amazing and they wanted something that looked different to that thing just coincidentally we were working on this new technology Sega and virgin games were not shy with its promotion of its 16-bit take on Aladdin commercials were regularly aired showcasing its beautifully animated visuals and it would go on to become one of the best-selling Sega Genesis games of all time the development team at virgin pioneered a process known as Digicel which compresses source artwork into a format that was usable by a 16-bit console the development team led by Dave Perry would then go on to form shiny entertainment which would release the equally impressive earthworm Jim the following year it just so happens that rare was making progress on its own tests using SGI workstations and the impressive results pushed Nintendo to invest in rare the closer relationship ultimately gave the Stanford brothers an opportunity to work with one of Nintendo's iconic characters of their choice Tim gave me a sheet which had a picture of the old Donkey Kong character designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and he said that we were going to be doing something with this character but we needed to turn it into a a new style of the same character but sort of updated I did a few concept pictures along with a couple of other guys and Tim chose the one I did a little really sort of compact character because it was supposed to be for a platformer game and I was again thinking of how well he's gonna translate it into 3d so I'll try to keep it as simple as I could and I can basically a battletoads head with a coconut on top of it because he's got the same ice on DK the rendering being conducted on the silicon graphic stations was clearly very impressive but also not something the Super NES would be able to render in real time the question was how do you translate these detailed models into something workable in a Super NES game it may seem trivial now but at the time there were strict memory and color palette limitations in place which made this far more challenging than you might think when we did the initial experiments they looked interesting but the limitation still even with this Ness was it had only 16 colors that you could use on any sprite so we were having to condense something which had 16 million colors which was pre-rendered on the second graphics machines down to 16 colors and quite a few people believed including me said at times advice can be done sand possible and just is like I mean it we're never going to do it it's just not feasible but in the end it works because if you get down to those and recovery the brain fills in the rest and it decides that these things on screen and fact that you've got multiple frames of movement it kind of all adds to the realism and actually made it being way beyond what we could possibly have dreamed it would have been initially it wasn't long after this that Donkey Kong Country went into full development of course it's one thing to create a few renders for demonstration purposes but it's quite another to build all the necessary models and implement them Donkey Kong Country includes a wide variety of stages and enemies aside from DK and Diddy you have a large cast of enemies smaller items like barrels and bananas as well as the stages themselves so what did it take to bring an object or character from the artists imagination into the game itself yeah so the way it worked was he'd build like your character the package that I think was called piranha my arrow it's like the forerunner to Maya and we would build everything was done in NURBS not polygons it was incredibly slow and time-consuming and you know when when you you could kind of build a character out and texture it use a lot of procedural textures which is something that's still used a lot today but unlike the latest kind of texturing packages and then you'd collect create animations and then he'd just basically render them out a frame at a time one of the big problems was that these frames just took ages to render out because this was back in the 90s you know he wanted to render something today it's easily just click a button and it's it's there but you know rendering back then was just taking a long time and we we had powerful machines and a desktop but they weren't powerful enough if you wanted to render a hundred frames an animation act and so people would have to queue these up on different machines and then wait overnight that still wasn't long enough so we saw that certain graphics had the solution which was a giant machine it was like twice as wide as I am and way taller than I am and this machine would just it just took out massive amount of space and made a lot of noise and generated a lot of heat and it would just run constantly and people be throwing things out time but even that would still take overnight and people would often do things like you'd have artists who would be desperate to get their animation done for the next day so they see that somebody else's animation was running or not I believe there's stories around where they could kill the process of something else if they felt that their their work was more important than somebody else creating and rendering the artwork was step one but once this was completed there was the matter of converting these renders into chunks which could be used within the game itself to support this task a special machine was created by one of the in-house tech guys with a special editor similar to deluxe paint where the art would be manipulated to fit within the required constraints so what would happen is you get a you'd rather up a image which would be like 24-bit millions of colors and you didn't put this on to the hardware and you pick out 16 colors it would and then you'd like kind of run the conversion on it and see what it thought I didn't like you'd go back and change your palette up a little bit and so you'll end up with a palette of 16 colors usually for a character we'd have so many palettes reserved for background so many palettes reserved for characters so obviously that would limit the amount of characters on screen you're also limited by the sprites the amount of sprites you have on a horizontal line so we used to have to go through with all these frames and put boxes on to like put them into sprites and you know you have to be careful for the overlap and stuff and you have to try and get it out as few spikes as possible but keep the overlap down and then you'd have you'd also have a pipe reserved for more common stuff so things like the barrels the bananas stuff that could come on at any time they had to share a pallet of like 16 colors so that was you know that was one of the things I did you try to get all these common objects to fit in thing like this tiny little 16 color palette well folks like Mark were working on objects others such as steve hurst whose first project was actually Donkey Kong Country 2 it should be noted spent their time creating the building blocks used to build the stages so yeah my job and tell what what I would do I'd get him a piece of artwork that had been done by the background artist basically a 3d render of say a platform and it was then my job to take that image chopped it down reduced all the colors and create a tileable element that could be used in the game so it was very very difficult because I mean the snares had limited palettes and we were getting images back there were millions and millions of colors so it's quite difficult once all this artwork was converted into the appropriate formats and prepped for use in the game it would then need to be implemented by one of the programmers so getting news files so what would happen all these files be rendered so one of the artists say for example Steve would render all these images and then eat and going back previously when we were doing hand drawn images the limitation was simply the artists time so the artist would draw a few images and you put them in you go I need another image here I need an in-between between this one not only because it doesn't quite look right and but I'm so the limitation was sheer artist time it was kind of flipped the other way around this time because was pre-rendered images they can create as many frames of sequence as they want once they created the animation so Steve can generate hundreds of frames of a good jump sequence and I get this thing and I go I can't put this in because it's got like he would just you would take ten seconds to do this jump because he'll be going through there really smoothly and so what we do is we we decide to chop out some of the the frames and onto get that right but we also just chop night because we had so many frames we would just have too much memory to even fit the characters I mean the cartridge for DKC was large by its large of its times anyway but we would have way more than we needed frames so we had to cut them down so it was a it was a weird to go from the point where you never had enough frames and you almost felt you got to make do with the frames because the development time but now you had too many and you were kind of you were just going out on need these just throw them out [Music] [Applause] this is the end result each part of this process was slow and at the time there wasn't really any sort of reference to work from everything created in Donkey Kong Country had to be made from scratch without freely available reference material we didn't have the internet to research these things nowadays you go how do you do this and it tells you back then we just start well how we're gonna do it I know well I'll just start coding here you start writing stuff over there and when you've done bringing a floppy disk put it in and then I'll paste that code into my file and then we'll just keep doing that every few days and that that was the way the game was developed it was just a case of somebody would I would have the main body of the code and then somebody else would work on the visual effects or some other feature and then they'd bring those things in so there was several of us working on the game but that was the first time we've been that rare at this point with the game well underway rare shifted into high gear to prepare for its first showing and then we sort of spent I don't know a good month or so so all hands on deck just building all of these characters and it's a background to put together for the demo which I think it was the CES show I didn't go to the CES but there was a small group of people at Wentz and when I came back this and it just blew everybody away so the response should come as no surprise then after all rare was known for pushing the envelope well before Donkey Kong Country in games like Battletoads and the NES the programmers managed to implement things like parallax scrolling while many of its other NES games presented visuals that were atypical for the machine when talking about Donkey Kong Country though the first thing that comes to mind for most people are as pre-rendered sprites and as we've learned thus far getting these to work in the first place was a huge technical hurdle but there's a lot more to DKC than its SGI rendered characters it's a game that uses the Super NES hardware in very smart ways enabling cool effects that were not common on the platform first there's the parallax scrolling the Super NES features multiple Hardware scrolling layers which can be manipulated by the designer to create depth this is very common on the system but what is less common however is line scrolling look at the background here and you can see rows of trees scrolling independently of one another but it's ultimately just using one hardware background layer this is likely done using HD ma to modify graphics settings on a per scanline basis it was a case of Tim Stamper working with Brendan Harris T the visual effects guru put all these things together and they were constantly challenging each other over what they could do and how they could you know could they're pushing each other to see what they could do next so it was a case of oh can we get another layer of parallax and some of them were just the the different layers that these nests allows you to add in but there's different images in different layers and then you can move them at different rates and other things you can do by because you've got a character map screen you can do things where you can update certain other character maps and then give the illusion that there's another layer going on there so you can have say snow or something that's actually individually changing some of the different characters and updating those every frame and then it gives the illusion that we've got even more layers of parallax so there was a piece of adding those on top of the layers that we really had to get really vivid and strong depth well not necessarily uncommon on the Super NES the implementation here is a step beyond most other games for the system giving the impression of more richly detailed backgrounds this extends to the color gradients as well which are used to create more dramatic sunsets across the game it can even shift its palette to create the illusion of a day to night cycle of course rare would go on to further enhance and refine its work in the sequels the line trick used to give the impression of real depth scene in Donkey Kong Country 2 is perhaps one of the best examples of this it still looks great today beyond that dkc makes full use of the system's color palette and transparency features from the subtle swinging lights in the mine Stage two this flashlight holding bird which features a transparent code that can briefly flash the screen to simulate shining in the players eyes it all looks very impressive taken together it's fair to say that Donkey Kong Country simply makes great use of all the available hardware features and it did it without the aid of any additional chips like the super FX or even one of the DSPs even without the SGI rendered sprites DKC would still stand as an impressive Super NES game then there's the audio the music and sound programming are of exceptionally high quality the soundtrack was composed primarily by David wise and made tremendous use of the sample-based Super NES hardware rather than focusing on high-speed high-energy tunes wise instead opted to focus on building atmospheric tracks like this it's the kind of sound quality that simply wasn't possible in the competition at least without a cd-rom add-on Donkey Kong Country features a fresh Bank of sounds crafted specifically for the game and it shows over time the soundtrack has become extremely popular but during development it wasn't even certain that wise who was still freelance at this point would be working on the game he assumed that Nintendo of Japan would compose for it since it was so important to them yet his demo tracks were so good that he was offered a full-time position with rare ultimately over the course of 18 months all this hard work would coalesce into a remarkably impressive whole Nintendo had their special looking game and it released at just the perfect time the nintendo ultra 64 was still a year or two out and the Super NES was starting to look dated in comparison to the numerous next generation machines arriving DKC though completely redefined what people expected from the hardware an intended market et is not afraid to lean into it yes this was the play it loud error for Nintendo and dkc was one of its most important games there's no doubt about it Donkey Kong Country was a phenomenon a game which would help define the Super NES in its later years for those of us that experience the game near launch the impact is difficult to understate and to help illustrate the impact of the game had at the time I want to welcome my friend mark from my life in gaming to talk about the game I'll never forget how in the fall of 1994 my neighbor from across the street opened a catalog and said have you heard of this Donkey Kong Country game it has so many graphics my first thought was I'm pretty sure graphics aren't quantified that way and my second was 8 bits just aren't enough for me anymore since I only had an NES and Game Boy at the time my DKC experience may have been a bit different from those who'd been two 16-bit trenches for the past 3 to 5 years but on Christmas day I suddenly found myself with a new console and a range of titles highlighting the super Nintendos technical evolution including its latest and most groundbreaking showcase it seems to be that there's a common sentiment that oh the Donkey Kong Country games were just about the graphics and sure I was blown away by the jungle sunsets Endor inspired treetops and raging snowstorms and I still AM you cannot convince me that this piranha fish looks any less real today than it did back then it's amazing to consider how well the character animation has held up when the technique was so experimental and the cartridge size is so limiting but even still my intense love for the Super Nintendo Donkey Kong Country trilogy has always been rooted in the gameplay while dkc was sold as a technically advanced game it really goes back to the platform of basics most of the complexity that the genre had built up over the years was thrown out and the core mechanics were pared down to pretty much just running jumping and rolling this is platforming in its purest form perhaps even more so than Mario or Sonic but rare refined those basics into something that just feels so right great play control as we called it back then sometimes there are criticisms that Donkey Kong Country especially the second and third games relies too much on level gimmicks but I love how these varied concepts work seamlessly with the series established base mechanics and few 90s platformers can claim that every level is quite so distinct with its own concepts and themes the original dkc was the first game that made me think critically about what is good level design there's a beautiful almost mathematical flow to every level if you encounter one B then later you'll probably have to dodge two and then three if you're feeling confident and keep holding right is you make a big roll or jump chances are you'll land right where you can Bop a whole string of enemies once you get a handle on levels flow it's almost zen-like this feeling that you can sense what is ahead and when you nail the right moves before you even see it coming it's the most incredible feeling I mean sure it's often just rows of bananas and other design tricks meant to nudge you toward finding a secret or pulling off a cool move but regardless it's like platforming that makes you feel like you have the force now that's good level design I'm sure that's the way that a lot of people might feel about Sonic but for me it's Donkey Kong Country [Music] with a smash hit on its hands rare wasted no time and building on its momentum two sequels would be developed for the Super NES each offering a unique take on the formula the second game boasts improved visuals more complex level design and one of the best soundtracks to grace the system [Music] most of the original development team would then move on to other projects including project dreamed but some would stay behind to work on a third game all told these three games would go on to sell millions of units and remain some of the most beloved on the system but there was a lot more to Donkey Kong Country than just the Super NES seemingly against all odds teams within rare work to bring the series to Nintendo's portable systems the first is Donkey Kong land for the original black-and-white Gameboy which was an original game inspired by Donkey Kong Country what's impressive about this release is just how much of the original vision is still present in this 8-bit handheld iteration it really pushes the Game Boy in ways that many other titles in the system did not if you go back to Nintendo's own efforts like the original Wario Land levels were built entirely from square tiles with 90-degree angles which limited the complexity of the stages things like coins were entirely static as well just floating in the air rather than spinning as they did in the console games Donkey Kong land however pushes beyond this offering stages full of slopes along with spinning banana sprites this of course requires more storage space in the cartridge and more efficient use of said space while the game is well made the art style doesn't really work that well with the limited palette of the Game Boy and it's more difficult to visually read what's happening compared to many other titles in the system it also uses rather large sprites which reduces the size of the play field making the platforming more challenging since you can't always see what's coming up still it's a neat little game and would receive multiple black-and-white sequels over the years but what's interesting about these games is how they were developed completely separate teams were formed and they used some rather unexpected tools to make the game we've completely started from scratch it was a different team I actually worked on the last black and white game so but so I did all the level design on that we were using a silicon graphics machine to further the level editor as a mental but yeah it was a spare one it's all we're doing on that as I someone wrote a level editor for it and we were using to correct the levels of that it's also worth mentioning that Japan received an exclusive version of Donkey Kong Land 3 known as Donkey Kong GBA dinky khan and dixie kong the japanese version is actually a gameboy color game rather than a black-and-white Gameboy game this release then would be the final Donkey Kong LAN game released around the same time though another very small team within rare started experimenting on another piece of a Nintendo hardware I was kind of drafted on to help programa just look at see what was possible on the Virtual Boy so I know taken some of the sprites that had been done for the gameboy version and putting them into the Virtual Boy if you couldn't guess this was a very early project that never really made much progress thus there's not really any official media available for it it would have taken a lot of work to get the game running and also because the Virtual Boy was proven not to be the success that and tender maybe it helped yeah it was an interesting project but I don't think it ever really got off the ground beyond a few scrolling screens of graphics it was essentially a 3d black-and-white while red and black version of dkc yeah I supposedly I suppose you could compare it to the gameboy version it would be similar to the Gameboy but with full 3d and now it did the effect that we had was very very good we managed to get a very solid looking game but the the techniques that we needed to to do it were very laborious because you normally when you do a an image or a sprites you just do it from from Tom as we would have to render out two different things from either side to get the 3d effect so it was it was quote so instead of just rendering at one image it ended out at render it to from different eyes if you like with the Virtual Boy off the table the rest of rare including the dkc3 team moved on to other projects centered primarily around in tenders next generation Nintendo 64 unfortunately things didn't quite go as planned yeah I mean as soon as we finished dkc3 we started on the was to become dumpling 64 I mean that was kind of three years from start to finish but it had a bit of a reboot about halfway through originally it was kind of trying to stay more faithful to the format of the country games you know kind of A to B levels you know and obviously we were new to 3d and stuff at the time and it just started to become apparent how you know you know you spend weeks and weeks built in a level and people who play it in like a few minutes and and that would be it'd be darling you know you start to realize I guess a lot of games went the way of mario 64 you know where you have more of a sandbox thing and you have a bunch of big levels and a ton of different things you do in there so that was kind of what happens to donkey kong as well and this is indeed the case the final release of Donkey Kong 64 is a sprawling game focused on exploring huge open environments while completing various tasks along the way the original concepts in comparison however seem to share more with the likes of Crash Bandicoot or klonoa yeah it was kind of two and a half day I think it was somebody so it kind of went in the screen somewhere this kind of cold sideways kind of more of a fixed camera with no control over and yeah I guess that's the best way to describe it now you might be wondering just how long was this version of Donkey Kong 64 in development I mean I think that was going for about 18 months but you have to bear in mind that that was kind of started on the n64 which was new to the team you know back then we had no kind of common game engine everybody kind of did their own thing so you know a lot of that early work would have literally just been getting stuff up and running anyway from the kind of technical point of view the move from pre-rendered SGI sprites to real-time 3d was certainly profound at this point 3d graphics were still relatively new and the team had a lot to learn in building this new game it's like a double-edged sword really because like visually you can't get anywhere near the fidelity that you came from like pre-rendered graphics and stuff but then the flip side of that is there's other advantages to being in 3d so you know in 2d you you have like it's kind of like classic cel-shaded so you have a frame and a bunch of frames to do like a cycle of an animation and you'll find that you run out of memory pretty quick and the programmers end up taking out all your lovely frames so the character is just going to but in 3d it's like the opposite you can do so much more with animation because it's look like it's all driven from like a joint system and the animations can kind of bind into each other and and the it's less data heavy than like the visual kind of side of animation so the flip side was although we couldn't get the visual fidelity and the visuals of the characters we could be so much more expressive and do so much more with the animation side of it in the end dk64 released a mostly positive reviews but it wasn't perhaps everything fans had hoped for the levels are massive and beautifully made for the system but the game itself has bogged down by a focus and collectables if the original country games were stripped down to focus on precision platforming dk64 went in the exact opposite direction overall then it's an interesting but flawed experiment that's still worth checking out today if you're interested in the history of Kong not long after this however rare returned to the country series itself with the release of Donkey Kong Country for the Game Boy Color this 8-bit machine was more capable than the original black and white system and a rare took full advantage of its features producing a surprisingly playable an attractive version of the game now clearly you aren't going to get a one-to-one port of dkc on the gameboy color but the team did a respectable job of translating the experience of the Super NES game to a much less powerful handheld system when you compare the two side-by-side it's obvious where the cuts were made but still it's recognizably DKC and it plays better than the previous black-and-white games keep in mind that the Game Boy Color supports just three colors plus alpha for sprites which is a huge step down from the Super NES thus assets needed to be recolored to fit within the constraints of the system music was also recreated for the Gameboy sound ship and the results are surprisingly great [Music] all told dkc on gameboy color is a solid platformer for the system that manages to convey the feeling of the original game on a more limited piece of hardware the following year however Nintendo would unleash its next generation portable system the Game Boy Advance it wasn't long before rare started working on bringing its Kong classics to the new machine starting with the original Donkey Kong Country the end result is an interesting port but despite Hardware much stronger than the Game Boy Color it's immediately clear that it doesn't quite look like the original game the snazz was technically a better machine than the Game Boy Advance so and obviously we wanted to get the closest kind of variant of the game that we could at the time and so we had all the original artwork obviously her and so basically we went for the processor trying to match the graphics on the Game Boy Advance that the snares had and the biggest issues we had were the screen was kind of backlit on the advanced so it made a lot of the graphics that really kind of washed out and different from the original snows and get a version so I think I was probably looking back at the reviews that they start people would kind of say no it doesn't look the same as the snow so even though the you know the kind of the resolution was slightly less as well but they were the actual snows graphics on the Game Boy Advance clearly the Game Boy Advance screen itself was a huge issue in developing the game the original models featured a non lit screen which required developers to tailor artwork and the brightness of the game around this limitation a couple of years later however Nintendo released a side lit version of the GBA known as the Gameboy Advance SP which raises the question with two very different models available why not offer to display modes which take these systems into account I'm looking back at this I think is one of these things I intend owes that kind of it's the same machine basically if I from the users point of view it is and starting to put options in like that it kind of it's not good for the user experience I think when stacked up against the Super NES the differences are even more profound the marry background layer and the sprites are certainly derived from the Super NES as Gary noted but there are other changes of foot the distant background layers for instance have been changed the smooth gradients and line scrolling featured on Super NES are replaced with simplified layers instead the second stage said at night during a storm sees even more dramatic changes with most of those effects removed entirely the cool palette shifting seen in many levels in Super NES has also been eliminated on the GBA and when you land in the darker stages it just winds up looking like this on top of that the resolution of the GBA screen is lower than the Super NES with GBA featuring just 192 pixels of vertical screen real estate while the Super NES DS is 224 this results in a slightly cropped gameplay image clearly most of this is the result of tailoring the artwork to function on a non backlit screen a dark and stormy level on a stock GBA would be nearly impossible to see with that in mind then the results here really aren't half-bad there are other unique changes as well the game now begins with a full introduction sequence which was missing from the original while boss fights include post-victory exchanges with cranky kong himself the world map is also redesigned for the GBA with actual scrolling and animation implemented this time and on top of that the music sounds surprisingly good it's no secret that the GBA lacks dedicated sound hardware but the team was able to craft something that sounds different yet familiar ultimately dkc for the Gameboy Advance is an interesting iteration of the classic game and the number of changes implemented here make it worth checking out on its own and with Game Boy Advance out of the way [Music] yes it's time to jump back to 1994 prior to the release of Donkey Kong Country itself and look at Killer Instinct this is an important and interesting game for its day as it showcases the full potential of the pre-rendered SGI work rare was doing at the time without the constraints of the Super NES hardware when designing an arcade game after all the sky's the limit and thus the team was unshackled to push new boundaries powered by a bespoke arcade board using a mips R 4600 cpu killer instinct is one of if not the first arcade game to make use of a hard disk drive and the reason for it why the backgrounds of course the visual element which separates ki from any other game at the time P point the camera on a traditional game when you'd look at the a 2d plane on from the screen where you're playing everything else it would traditionally move behind and it would move in a 2d fashion but a different speed to give the impression of depth and so we don't call that parallax scrolling and so the further things were away from the camera the slower they moved and so they gave the impression of it was far away but if we wanted to get this perspective you'd have had to almost do it on every scanline to allow everything to sort of move in perspective as the camera move but as soon as we started rendering the backgrounds in maya and we totally had a 3d environment because the camera was picking up with the depth of field and all the perspective and so every time the camera moved we noticed everything moved and we could see behind this object and in front of this object whereas what we were used to seeing for so many years was just something moving along like this on the same plane and so when we first saw it and we rendered the camera it was a bit of a mistake because we didn't really expect to see quite so much perspective and when we moved it and we had a character on the the foreground and this sort of animation sequence of a camera panning from left to right as a character it was it was really apparent the depth that was there and it was just I think that's what took it to another level there was there was no static billboard backgrounds moving like this everything was sort of moving as it would do in the real world and the question is once you have all these 3d models how do you display it within the game itself while keeping the frame rate at a smooth 60 frames per second necessary for a fighting game every frame was I think it was a sort of three screens long so I was 320 why 640 resolution 320 by 240 resolution so you'd have three screens wide maybe two screens wide and the camera would start in the middle and then we rendered every every single frame and I don't know whether it was like 50 60 frames or something like that all stored and compressed and I think that was one of the stumbling points was getting a good enough compression routine sorted to get everything onto the onto the hardware I think one of the guys spent a good couple of months trying to work out the the best compression for that so but yeah that was we couldn't not do that after we saw it we were thinking maybe we would just make the camera move just a little bit or maybe we'll split it up and have layers but as soon as we saw the effect I think also we are on the arcade hardware we did also have an arena level where you could be on the top of a roof and so that was a very simple arena with clouds in the backgrounds I didn't think that was going to work because the characters were actually just 2d sprites but the camera rotated all around the level when it came in and when you not sky off the roof it but it all held up because it was just as if the characters were always facing the camera but because they've got so much solid rendering class to them and they they looked like they weren't paper made and then two got a shadow and so they all look pretty good and it kept together killer instinct was a huge success in the arcade but it's unique visual style made for a challenging console conversion kay I would be released on multiple Nintendo consoles with version differing significantly from the arcade original the Super NES port is a valiant effort then applying techniques learned while making DKC backgrounds are reduced to flat two-dimensional images while character sprites are drastically reduced in size with fewer animation frames it looks pretty good for the Super NES and it's about what you'd expect given the massive golf and hardware capabilities what's impressive here though is how well it stacks up in terms of actual gameplay it still plays very much like killer instinct and in that sense it's a very impressive port and the next port is equally impressive killer instinct for the Game Boy to fully appreciate it though we need to first look at other fighting games in the Game Boy at the time take Mortal Kombat 2 the sprites are large for Game Boy but the framerate is obscenely low the backgrounds simplified in the animation rather poor it really doesn't look or play much like actual Mortal Kombat does it Killer Instinct though not only does it run at full 60 frames per second with more frames of character animation rare also implemented parallax scrolling across most of its backgrounds the Game Boy doesn't natively support independently scrolling background layers of course instead the programmer simply modifies background scrolling on a per scanline basis of course all the other Gameboy limitations apply as well including the highly limited color palette but still the end results look pretty good and then we come to the Nintendo 64 version was its cartridge spaced format the pre-rendered backgrounds were off the table but at least the hardware is much more powerful when we put the n64 version together we knew that that was going to work and I think by taking some of the elements of the arcade hardware and applying the textures to that arena we were confident it was still going to look ok not exactly the same but still had plenty of depth as Kevin suggests the n64 version moves to fully 3d backgrounds across all its stages with some base textures applied across the polygons based on the arcade version the effect works well enough but when compared to that arcade original it's obviously nowhere near as detailed it's not just the backgrounds either the character sprites themselves also took a hit the thing is when killer instinct was first marketed in arcades it along with cruisin USA boasted the ultra 64 logo suggesting that these arcade games were built using Nintendo's next-generation console but really the hardware was rather different now the n64 does share a similar CPU but the rest of the machine differs significantly still given the constraints here rare did a good job bringing ki to the n64 and it plays pretty well following this however the series would remain dormant for years before eventually returning in 2013 on Xbox one created by a completely different studio through this new release killer instinct lives on today [Music] and with that we've come to the end of another DF retro I hope you enjoyed this look back at one of rares most famous games and can appreciate Donkey Kong Country for what it is even today we're not done though during the interview sessions I also had the opportunity to discuss games beyond the Super NES era which means next year will be another episode covering rares later works but we went down the route calling the game dinosaur planet and I started building lots of different dinosaurs but we moved on to banjo kazooie why sure we moved on to project dream and then it became time to kazoo that's all for me though if you enjoyed this episode be sure to let us know in the comments subscribe to the channel and follow me over on Twitter thanks for your patience and until next time stay retro [Music]

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 371,104

Keywords: DF Retro, Digital Foundry Retro, Rare, Rareware, Playtonic, Digital Foundry, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, making of, making of Donkey Kong Country, making of Killer Instinct, donkey, kong, retro, nintendo, snes, super, graphics comparison, frame rate, performance, fps, visual comparison, framerate, head to head, frame-rate, head to head comparison

Id: GQ7qtqqgTlo

Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SubatomicSeahorse]

highly recommend watching this, love hearing about the ways older games were made.

crazy how much has changed in 20 years

[u/Darkvoidx]

It's absolutely amazing to me how good Donkey Kong Country manages to look even all these years after release, especially the environments and backgrounds. All these leaps and bounds in technology and DKC is STILL putting other 2d platformers to shame in the environment department.

[u/lp_phnx327]

Graphics aside, Rare's music composers were a treasure. Hats off to David Wise and Robin Beanland. I wish I still had my copy of Killer Cuts from the SNES/KI bundle.

[u/SimonCallahan]

I remember when Donkey Kong Country came out, it was such a huge deal. Getting that VHS tape from Nintendo Power in the mail, I must have watched it a billion times. I didn't actually have an SNES at the time, but my friend did so that's how I got to play.

Killer Instinct wasn't as big of a deal. Sure, it got a VHS tape like DKC, there was a comic in Nintendo Power, and media outlets (Nintendo Power, EGM and Game Pro) made a huge deal over how the SNES version was basically just a downgraded version of a game that ran on arcade hardware (arcade hardware that later became the N64), but I never got to play it as a kid. The only one of my friends who was actually interested in the game was one of those self-proclaimed "cool kids" with the spiked up hair and an unhealthy obsession with Neil Peart.

[u/WhipSlagCheek]

I like the part were they talk about the how dk64 was originally going to be more faithful to the other dkc games but the levels wound up being too short (because they were 3d levels) so they scraped that and went with the Mario 64 collect-a-thon style design. Which they said people also didn't like because it was the opposite of the precision platformer design fans wanted.

Years later and people wonder why 3d platformers are dead.

[u/poplin]

wish they'd compared KI Gold to KI2 arcade. Not sure why they compared it to KI arcade. Otherwise really good video