What If Donkey Kong Country Used DK's Old Design?

Spacepig22
Spacepig22
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Published 2018-01-15
In the 90's Rareware was given the opportunity to redesign one of Nintendo's biggest mascots, Donkey Kong, and rendered him using state-of-the-art, prerendered, CG graphics. After seeing concept art though I got around to thinking, "What if Nintendo had been more strict with its IP, and told Rareware to stick with Miyamoto's old design for DK and DKJr?"

This is not a hack. I took footage of Donkey Kong Country, edited DK out with After Effects, and edited in the sprites I made in Maya.

Edit: Since people have been asking, here's how I made the sprites:

-First I researched DK's old design from arcade cabinets and the gameboy game.

-Using that design, I created a 3D model using Maya. I tried to make the models as 90's as possible, so the arms are two separate objects that overlap at the elbow, and the fingers are separate from the hands, and the fur is a fractal texture (just like in the original DKC).

-Then I animated the models, and rendered sprites at a large size, because rendering it at a small size made it blurry.

-I took those renders into Photoshop, and shrank them down so the idle animations were around 40x40 pixels each (since that seemed to be the average size of both original idle animations). The blending mode was set to nearest neighbor to prevent it from getting blurry.

-Photoshop has this neat feature under Images, Mode, Indexed Color, where you can limit any image to a certain amount of colors. So I took the renders and I limited them to only use the 16 colors (15 colors, 1 invisible) from Donkey Kong's color palette in the game.

-Then I just had to put them into After Effects and edit them into the video. Also, if you do this for yourself, I learned that After Effects doesn't like indexed colors, so after you index the colors, set the file back to RBG, and everything will work perfectly.

Also, I unfortunately don't know how to create ROM hacks.
All Comments (21)
  • @ReallyRASYT
    You coulda passed this off as a leak for the DKC prototype
  • @ProtoMario
    Cranky is still alive... You created a time paradox!
  • @DoodleThis
    There’s something very charming about the designs in that style, I can’t quite describe it
  • @jdazurek3579
    Makes dk model. Makes entire mountain old Dk's face. Forgets balloon lives. no hate intended, this is amazing.
  • @pavement3931
    disregarding the insane amount of effort put into this, can we talk about the detailed process that he gave? mad respect for letting others know how it was done
  • @DaniTheBeautyGeek
    Since he said he doesn’t know how to make hacks, someone should ask this man for all the modified sprites and then make this a real hack
  • @darthkahn45
    God i'd give anything for a romhack of this, it's so beautiful.
  • @nimaginendogames2293
    One of the best animations I've ever seen. Create a 3D sprites in the style of Donkey Kong Country are really very complicated to do. This technique that you found it's really better. That little detail of the sprite when it moves, is perfectly making the sprite more realistic. That is, more faithful to the original game.
  • @moonmedic2862
    The description says you made this but you obviously just traveled to an alternate timeline and got this. Because this actually looks like it could be legit.
  • @donpisotonasmr
    I love the fine details and references you put in this entire video. The barrel throwing animation, chest pound, and the ground stomp from DK, the death animations for both DK and Jr, hell, I didn't even notice you changed the whole island until a second viewing. This seems like some alternate reality we never were meant to see, but now I want to see a DK spin off like this where you play through an adventure as Cranky and DK in these forms and fight off a Prince K Rool, all told as a story to the other Kongs by modern Cranky. I'm never gonna get that, but I want to believe now, dammit.
  • @mrlongarms3998
    I came into this not expecting much, but these sprites are CLEAN. Well done.
  • @SirCaco
    I must admit that's insanely impressive. Granted I'm very glad they didn't stick with the old design, but be that as it may, this could easily pass as an official pre-release build. Bravo!
  • @rotcodfst
    The fact that you even changed DK Isle to match his old design is amazing attention to detail
  • @kirbyfrigginkirby5264
    Somebody needs to use the sprites made in this, and make a rom hack replacing the original sprites. I would pay good money to see that done.