Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Bananza is about to land in stores but it took almost eight years of development to get here. When the concept was developed, it began on the Switch before making the jump to the Switch 2, the developers revealed in a three-part interview series.
Speaking about the upcoming game, producer Kenta Motokura revealed, when asked about Donkey Kong Bananza’s development, that the game initially began on the Switch but was later moved to the Switch 2 in 2021 due to the hardware challenges the team faced. Daisuke Watanabe mentioned during the interview that they wanted to see how the team could upgrade what they did for the Switch by taking advantage of the Switch 2.
“One of the most obvious improvements was that we could place far more objects in the environment than before. Being able to place more objects in the terrain didn’t just enhance the game’s visual richness. More importantly, it increased the amount of things players could destroy, which amplified the exhilaration of being able to demolish anything and everything. That went hand in hand with the game’s core concept of destruction. It convinced us that this game would be even more fun if we developed it for Switch 2,” reveals Watanabe.
The physical destruction DK delivered to the world and terrain became smoother with 60 FPS, but at 30 FPS, it wasn’t able to capture everything happening on screen. The boost in framerate makes it much more satisfying to cause destruction and chaos. Essentially, the jump to Switch 2 unlocked the game’s full potential.
Using voxels was something that was decided early on, reveals game director Wataru Tanaka. In the interview on Nintendo’s website, Tanaka states that the voxel technology used is a memory hog, consuming a significant portion of the internal memory. This was a challenge on the Switch as it didn’t have a lot of memory to offer.
“If you’re asked to double the size of a 1 × 1 pixel image in both width and height, you end up with a 2 × 2 image, which means four times as many pixels. But when you do the same with voxels, you’ve got width and height, but also depth to contend with. So, doubling all three dimensions gives you 2 × 2 × 2, or eight times the data,” says Tanaka. It isn’t as simple as doubling up, as the memory usage increases, you need to consider voxel density, and the processes taking up the space. The Switch could not handle this load, so the move to Switch 2 made sense due to more memory and greater processing power.
“Things we’d given up on, like explosions flinging large objects or causing them to collapse, were now possible. Designers could also place as many objects as they wanted. There were so many moments when we thought to ourselves, “Now we can really do this,” reveals Tanaka.
The Switch 2 has made an impressive debut since its launch on June 5, 2025, and has sold over 3.5 million units in the first four days.
Donkey Kong Bananza is set to launch on Thursday, July 17, 2025 for the Switch 2.
