Donkey Kong Bananza Was Originally Planned For Switch 1

It turns out Donkey Kong Bananza, which releases next week, was originally poised to release on the original Switch, but its mechanics were simply too much for the 2017 console to handle.

In an interview with IGN, Kenta Motokura confirmed the game was originally planned for the previous gen, but its voxel technology, which allows for the destruction of the environment, proved too much for the original Switch. Shifting to developing it for the Switch 2 led to the game’s reliance on the voxel technology to be not such a big problem.

“This allowed us to engage in creating a really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware. And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this? Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them and that was something that was best done on Switch 2.”

Oddly, Donkey Kong Bananza isn’t the only Switch 2 game was conceived for the OG Switch, with Mario Kart World also having its origins on the previous gen, only for its core mechanics to hold it back from releasing on the previous generation.

What do you think? Are you glad development shifted to the Switch 2? Let us know below!