Behind The Scenes of Diddy Kong Racing
GamesTM dishes out the good stuff
No matter which way you put it, Diddy Kong Racing was a significant title for both Rare and Nintendo. It not only reinvented the racing genre, but gave Diddy Kong himself his own title that didn’t have the words “Donkey Kong” in it. Plus it made both of the companies lots of cold, hard cash. Thanks to GamesTM, we now know a lot more about everyone’s favorite simian racing game. For the sake of simplicity, here are the interesting bits in the most predictable form I’m probably known here for:
- At its first stage, Diddy Kong Racing was a RTS game with a Caveman/time-travel theme worked on by a team of four (Chris Stamper, Lee Musgrave, Rob Harrison, and Lee Schuneman).
- The Adventure element of DKR was influenced by Disney World. At this point, DKR was known as Wild Cartoon Kingdom.
- Wild Cartoon Kingdom evolved into Adventure Racers.
- Nintendo had no involvement in DKR’s early stages, according to Schuneman.
- Schuneman reveals that he was the voice of the arse-slapping Bumper, while artist Dean Smith recorded the voice of our favorite anthropomorphic stopwatch.
- In June 1997, the game was known as Pro Am 64, a sequel to the RC-Pro AM titles on the NES. It was Miyamoto that offered Diddy Kong to the game.
- Pro Am 64 “didn’t even have cars, but instead had these three-wheeled trike things” that “didn’t last long,” said Schuneman.
- Much like the publicized fact of the Dinosaur Planet team’s unhappiness towards becoming StarFox Adventures, the Pro-Am 64 team wasn’t happy with having Diddy Kong in the game. Schuneman reflects, “I remember we were all initially against using Diddy Kong, but it’s a good job we listened in the end as being part of the Donkey Kong brand was a great plus.”
- Underneath that quote you can see the original design for the central hub of DKR. Notice how “Underwurlde” makes an appearance.
A rather deep look into one of Rare’s best selling titles, and a great one at that. You can see the scans by clicking in the thumbnails below. A special thanks goes out to Katzii_Yataki for sending the magazine my way.
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Somehow related news
- Diddy Kong Racing DS, still in the race ()
- Nintendo finally sets Diddy’s PAL releases ()
- Diddy Kong and friends hit the charts ()
- Diddy drives down to PAL territories ()
- Diddy faces PAL release controversy ()
5 Comments
An interesting read. That wooly mammoth on the last page is particularly neat.
Comment by Nick — 29.Mar.09 @ 9:24 pm
it’s cool i wanna see what rare is gonna announce
Comment by pattymcfatty — 29.Mar.09 @ 9:46 pm
Thanks for sharing! That’s a very interesting read.
Too bad that the the map of the WIP overworld is so small that we can’t read the text but Underwurlde sounds intriguing.
They should have used ONLY original characters, nothing Nintendo/Donkey Kong Related, so we could have DKR on XBLA (though we still could, without Diddy and Krunch).
Comment by Walecs — 11.Sep.11 @ 11:35 pm
meh
Comment by billy — 29.Mar.09 @ 7:52 pm