Ten years after the last opus, Donkey Kong fans are impatiently awaiting a new one. Rumors around an original project for the license have been circulating for several years, what is the situation today?
Nintendo is full of mascots whose games have been played for decades. Each player generally has their little favorite, impatiently waiting for a new game featuring their favorite hero. But today, it's bad news that will overwhelm fans of one of the Big N's most iconic mascots: Donkey Kong.
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Even before Mario, there was Donkey Kong. An emblematic Nintendo character, he experienced a prosperous period between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. Since then, the pace has slowed down considerably and the agile hero tends more to make up the numbers among his Nintendo comrades. So, each new game is highly anticipated by fans… but everything doesn't always go as planned.
A Donkey Kong project that will never see the light of day
For several years now, the fansite DK Vine covers the news around the Donkey Kong license. The team had probably heard of a sequel project to Tropical Freezethe latest opus released in… 2014, on Wii U, before its port to Nintendo Switch in 2018.
The sequel would have been entrusted to the studio Blizzard Albany (formerly Vicarious Vision), a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. Rumors reported that it was, apparently, a 3D open-world planned for the Nintendo Switch. The game would have relied on the gameplay of previous Donkey Kong Country.
But, according to anonymous sources within the studio, the project is no longer relevant… And has been for a while. In fact, the cancellation of Donkey Kong Freedom, from its code name, dates back to 2016. Even more, the project was ultimately only on track for 6 months before being aborted. We remember that at the same period, Activision decided to focus more on the Call of Duty license.
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Would this decision have contributed to the departure of Guha and Karthik Bala, the brothers who founded Vicarious? The two men actually left the studio at the same time to join Velan Studios, who owes Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. It therefore seems that we will still have to wait a while to see the return of Kong in a real game in his name. Waiting for.