Donkey Kong 64 asks one question before anything else: how much game can you fit on a Nintendo 64 cartridge? Rare’s answer, delivered in November 1999, is a lot. The first Donkey Kong game to go 3D hands you an island, five playable Kongs, eight themed worlds and 200 golden banana objectives, then dares you to walk away.
K. Rool Invades DK Isle
The setup is a traditional one for the series. King K. Rool and his reptilian Kremlings invade the idyllic DK Isle, kidnap Donkey Kong’s friends, and plan to power up their Blast-O-Matic weapon and destroy the island. After a tutorial, the player sets out as Donkey Kong to rescue the others and stop K. Rool.
Rare had spent three years building this. Work began in 1997, after Donkey Kong Country 3, and a 16-member team — many of them pulled from the Banjo-Kazooie staff — saw it through. The project started as a 2.5D platformer in the Country mold before being reworked into something more open-ended on the Banjo engine.
Five Kongs, One Island
The character roster is the game’s real engine. Donkey Kong is the entry point, but the island opens up through four more Kongs, each with their own special abilities. Chunky carries a Pineapple Launcher. Lanky plays a Trombone. Tiny floats on a Ponytail Twirl. Diddy rockets skyward on a Jetbarrel.
That spread of abilities is not decoration. It is the lock on the door. Objectives are gated behind specific characters, so progress means swapping between them at designated tag barrels scattered through each level.
Bananas, Coins and Blueprints
Two currencies drive everything. Colored bananas are color-coded to each Kong and award banana medals, which can be traded for access to a world’s boss fight. Golden bananas are the hard gate — a certain number are required to unlock each new world.
Alongside those sit banana coins, spent to unlock new weapons and abilities, plus ammunition and blueprint puzzle pieces. The puzzles are mostly simple: rearranging items, manipulating switches and tiles, or matching items in the manner of Concentration. Minigames cover races, minecart rides, and barrels that fire characters as projectiles.
Eight Worlds, Any Order
Rare built eight themed worlds — underwater, forest, jungle, industrial among them — plus a connecting overworld. Each world holds five golden-banana objectives for each of the five Kongs. That is 200 goals in total.
The structural break from earlier Donkey Kong games is that objectives can be completed in any order. Fast travel comes through designated warp pads, and character swaps happen at tag barrels. It is a looser, more forgiving shape than the Country line ever offered.
The DK Rap and the Expansion Pak
Donkey Kong 64 was the first of two games to require the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak, the accessory that added memory resources. That requirement was not optional and it was not cheap for players who had not already bought one.
Grant Kirkhope composed the soundtrack, which includes a comedy hip-hop song, the “DK Rap,” that plays in the introduction. Nintendo backed the release with a US$22 million marketing campaign spanning advertisements, sweepstakes and a national tour.
Release Schedule
| Date | Region | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| November 1999 | North America | Nintendo 64 |
| December 1999 | Worldwide | Nintendo 64 |
| Later release | — | Wii U |
The game was developed by Rare and published by Nintendo, with Gradiente also credited as a publisher. It supports single player, multiplayer and split-screen modes, with up to four players competing in deathmatch and last man standing games.
Where the Weight Actually Sits
Here is the thing worth arguing about. Donkey Kong 64 earns its 9.0 on the strength of what Rare chose to overbuild, not what it chose to refine. The five-Kong structure is the whole game and the whole problem. Every level is designed to be walked five times by five different characters with five different movesets, and that repetition is deliberate — it is the content.
Whether that reads as generosity or padding depends entirely on appetite. What is not in doubt is the ambition behind it. Rare took the Banjo engine and deliberately differentiated the result with more collectibles, more playable characters, cinematic sequences and bombastic bosses. The 16-member team spent three years making sure the game could not be mistaken for Banjo-Kazooie with a gorilla dropped in.
The Expansion Pak requirement is the part that has aged worst. It was the first of two games to demand the accessory, which means a chunk of the audience paid extra before seeing a single frame. That is a real cost, and it sits outside the game itself.
The DK Rap is the part that has aged best, and not for the reasons Rare intended. It plays in the introduction and it has outlived nearly everything else about the release.
Where this paper lands: Donkey Kong 64 is a maximalist platformer that mistakes volume for depth in places, and gets away with it because the volume is genuinely well made. The 200 objectives are not all worth doing. Enough of them are.
The multiplayer deserves more credit than it usually gets. Deathmatch and last man standing for up to four players, split screen, on a console whose contemporaries rarely bothered — that is real value stacked on top of an already enormous single-player campaign.
The camera and the character-swapping both ask for patience. Neither is a dealbreaker. Neither is elegant.
What matters most is that Donkey Kong 64 understood something the later collect-a-thon imitators did not: a big world is only worth exploring if the things you find in it change how you move. Chunky’s Pineapple Launcher, Lanky’s Trombone, Tiny’s Ponytail Twirl, Diddy’s Jetbarrel — each one rewrites a level you thought you already knew. That is the trick, and Rare pulled it off five times over.
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