Behind the Bananza: How Nintendo Crafted Donkey Kong's Smash-Happy Adventure

Donkey Kong Bananza didn't become a smash hit by accident – it's the result of some bold ideas and years of creative development at Nintendo. In interviews leading up to the game's release, the developers shared fascinating insights into how Bananza's central mechanic (letting players destroy almost everything) came to be, and the technical hurdles they overcame to make it happen. Here's a look behind the scenes at the making of Donkey Kong's latest adventure, and how the team at Nintendo EPD turned a crazy idea into one of the most innovative platformers of the decade.

A "Smashing" Concept is Born

The seeds of Donkey Kong Bananza were planted shortly after the release of Super Mario Odyssey. Members of the Mario Odyssey development team wondered what kind of game they'd get if "everything in the environment is destructible." They began running experiments with that concept, even using Odyssey's engine and assets as a starting point.

In a now-famous anecdote, one programmer took the boss character Knucklotec's giant hands (from Mario Odyssey) and stuck them onto a Goomba, just to see what would happen. The result was hilarious and eye-opening: this beefed-up Goomba could smash terrain, tear off pieces of the world to use as weapons, and toss them around. To the team's surprise, those actions felt incredibly satisfying.

That little internal demo – a tiny Goomba with massive arms wreaking havoc – was the "Eureka!" moment. Destruction-based gameplay could be a compelling core mechanic. It was also immediately clear which Nintendo character would be perfect to build a whole game around that idea: Donkey Kong, the powerhouse primate himself, whose whole shtick is brute strength.

As lead designer Toshihiko Tanaka recalled, once they saw how fun smashing could be, "we felt that the concept and the core gameplay had clicked into place" with Donkey Kong as the star. In essence, they had answered the question: what if you gave DK an entire world he could tear apart?

Voxels: Building (and Destroying) a World Block by Block

Embracing a destruction-heavy concept brought along a major technical challenge. In most games, environments are static – you can't just punch a hole in any wall you please. The Bananza team realized that to make everything destructible, they would need to overhaul how levels were built. Their solution was to use voxels, which are like 3D pixels or tiny cubes that serve as the building blocks of the game's world.

Instead of traditional polygonal terrain, every piece of ground, every rock, and even the enemies in Bananza are composed of these countless small cubes. Voxels allowed the developers to assign properties to each little chunk (sand, soil, rock, etc.) and have them react individually to being hit. This meant when Donkey Kong punches the ground, the terrain can crack, crumble, and collapse in a dynamic, realistic way.

As Technical Director Ryohei Takahashi explained, "everything in this game is made out of voxels… enabling the core gameplay feature where you can destroy virtually everything in sight."

Technical Challenges and Solutions

Implementing voxel technology on the Switch 2 was no small feat. Early on, the team instinctively knew it would be difficult – standard game engines and tools aren't built for fully voxelized 3D worlds. They had to create custom development tools to generate and manipulate voxel-based terrain.

The effort paid off: with their new tools, designers could quickly build a level out of cubes, test how it feels to destroy, and iterate, which "let us quickly experiment and iterate when building Layers", says developer Risa Watanabe. Each "material" (like sand, red soil, gray rock) was given unique physical properties – sand is soft and will spill or stick to surfaces, whereas rock is hard and causes satisfying shatters.

Thanks to voxels, if you destroy the support of a structure in Bananza, whatever's above can collapse under its own weight – a level of environmental interaction that would be impossible with traditional level design. The team collectively referred to their approach as "chain of destruction" design, meaning one destructive act leads to another and so on, creating a chain reaction.

Designing Levels That Survive Destruction

With great destructive power comes great level design responsibility. One obvious question the developers faced: How do you design fun levels when the player can, in theory, break the level completely? Nintendo's answer was to rethink level design from the ground up (literally).

In most platformers, designers create a main path and try to prevent you from straying too far off of it. In Bananza, they did the opposite – they embraced the idea that you might dig tunnels off the intended path, bypass obstacles, or approach goals from unexpected angles.

Lead designer Yuki Takahashi explained that they made levels with a lot of "flexibility in mind," ensuring that even if a player comes at a challenge from the "wrong" direction, the game still rewards them for it. For example, one level might intend for you to use a Bananza Transformation to smash through a concrete wall to get a golden banana, but if a crafty player decides to tunnel around and grab it from behind, that's totally valid and anticipated.

This approach meant every layer (world) in the game was like a playground that could be tackled from multiple angles. The team had to place important items on indestructible surfaces or have failsafes (like indestructible "frame" structures) so that the world wouldn't break irreparably, but otherwise they gave players a ton of leeway.

Making Destruction Delightful

A game about constant destruction could easily become monotonous or overwhelming, so Nintendo put special effort into the sensory experience of smashing. The development team wanted every punch and crash to be satisfying and responsive, without being irritating over time.

Sound Director Naoto Kubo revealed that they went to great lengths with sound design. Rather than using one or two stock breaking sounds, they recorded many sounds by hand: breaking real rocks, smashing wood, crumbling sand, even squishing fruits, to get a variety of audio for different materials. They layered these sounds and added subtle randomization in the code, so that when you're, say, carving through a dirt wall, you'll hear a pleasing mix of crunches and thuds that rarely repeat exactly.

The goal was to have sounds that "are pleasant to the ears without being tiring or repetitive," since players would hear them thousands of times. Kubo even joked that they wanted a watermelon hit to "sound delicious" – indeed, there is a unique juicy splat sound if you smash a melon in-game.

This attention to detail paid off: players have commented that breaking stuff in Bananza "just feels good," in part because of how it sounds and looks. On the visual side, they implemented particle effects (flying debris, dust puffs) and subtle controller rumble to give each impact weight. The result is a kind of "intuitive, simple fun" – as Producer Koichi Hayashi put it, anyone can pick up the controller and immediately enjoy smashing things, even if they're not typically into action games.

From Concept to Classic

All these behind-the-scenes elements – a wild idea born from a Goomba experiment, voxel tech, clever level design, and immersive sound and visuals – came together to form Donkey Kong Bananza as we now know it. The developers admit it was a long journey; many on the team had never worked with voxels or this level of player freedom before.

There were likely moments in development where it seemed daunting to make a game where the player can "break" the rules so freely. But Nintendo's team persisted, testing and iterating until breaking things was balanced with progressing through a fun adventure. As a final touch, they layered in the Donkey Kong charm (Easter eggs, a lighthearted story, and nods to DK's history) to ensure the game wasn't just technically impressive, but also heartfelt and nostalgic where it counts.

Now, the payoff is evident: Bananza is being celebrated as one of Nintendo's most inventive titles in years, and it's largely because the developers dared to ask "what if?" and then answered it. "What if you could smash everything?" became "let's allow players to smash everything, and make it awesome."

The next time you're gleefully reducing a Bananza level to rubble, take a moment to appreciate the craft under the chaos – the game is a masterpiece of design meeting technology. As Donkey Kong pounds his way to the Planet Core, he's not just collecting bananas; he's showcasing Nintendo's ability to reinvent platforming by literally breaking the ground it stands on. And according to the creators, seeing players discover the fun of that freedom has been the ultimate reward.

Donkey Kong Bananza was built to be broken – in the best possible way – and that innovative spirit is likely why it's destined to be remembered as a groundbreaking (pun fully intended) entry in the DK series.