What would Activision’s Donkey Kong have looked like? (Universal Pictures/Illumination/Nintendo)
The makers of Skylanders were once working on a new 3D Donkey Kong game for the Nintendo Switch but it never came to be.
There have been many rumours about Nintendo’s next console recently but they’ve all been rather dry technical details, such as support for 240fps and VRR, with next to nothing about what games could be appearing on the new system.
One of the few exceptions has been vague talk about a new 3D Donkey Kong, but that’s complicated by the fact that whispers of a new game have been around since the pandemic, when the game was presumably intended for the current Switch and the 40th anniversary of the character (and Mario) in 2021.
In the end, Nintendo didn’t even mention the 40th, which is very odd considering what a fuss they’ve made about other far less notable anniversaries, and while it’s been assumed that’s because the game got repurposed as a Switch 2 launch title, it seems things are even more complicated than that and that the original developer was… Activision?
According to two separate fan sources, Activision studio Vicarious Visions was working on a new Donkey Kong game codenamed Freedom, which would have featured an open world environment and, as a result of the studio’s experience with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise, would have DK roaming around on banana roller-skates.
This is not quite as strange as it seems, as Vicarious Visions worked on several entries in the Skylanders series in the early 2010s – which for a short while were even more profitable than Call Of Duty.
That didn’t last though and Vicarious Visions was recently renamed to Blizzard Albany, and reduced to doing support work for Call Of Duty and Diablo, but at the time this was supposed to be happening, in around 2016, they did have more experience with 3D platformers than almost any other Western developer.
Nintendo and Activision were surprisingly close friends in 2015 (Nintendo)
During the same period, Activision was collaborating with Nintendo for the Wii U versions of Skylanders, to the point where Nintendo even created special Skylanders versions of their characters to turn into amiibo… including Donkey Kong.
Western developers Rare and Retro Studios were responsible for both the original and modern entries in the Donkey Kong Country series, so it’s not hard to imagine that Nintendo might’ve been looking for other Western developers to work on the franchise.
According to both DK Vine and YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming, development lasted only around six months before being cancelled, although it’s not clear whether Activision or Nintendo lost interest first.
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What’s also unclear is whether the cancelled project has anything to do with the game that is believed to be currently underway at Nintendo EPD – the company’s top development studio, responsible for the likes of Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom.
Given the time frame involved it’s perhaps most likely that once the Activision game was cancelled Nintendo then started an entirely new game, made by EPD and intended for the 40th anniversary. When that got delayed by the pandemic it seems fair to imagine that it then became a Switch 2 title.
That’s mostly just speculation but the fact that Activision was working on a Donkey Kong game, if only for a brief period, does seem to be true. Knowing Nintendo, it’s probably also true that we’ll never get to see what it would’ve looked like.
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