Prolific Nintendo YouTuber and commentator, Nintendo Prime, recently relayed a lot of new information about a supposed 3D Donkey Kong game that made the rounds a couple of years ago, as it's been rumored to be in development for a while.

In episode 12 of his podcast's second season, Prime claimed to have seen footage of an old build of this game and stated that it's "absolutely still a thing that's coming," as it's currently in development at Nintendo. However, take this information with a grain of salt, as it hasn't been confirmed by any official sources, nor has it been corroborated by another journalist.

Matching the prior rumors, Prime stated that this project was originally in development at Activision-owned studio Vicarious Visions, which was most recently known for its Crash Bandicoot reboot and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2. The project was allegedly called Donkey Kong Freedom, an open-world game that featured Donkey Kong using banana peels on his feet to grind across vines.



Miyamoto was allegedly deeply involved in the project, assisting in its design, and he apparently "loved everything happening with it." At some point around 2017, Vicarious Visions shifted its focus onto other projects and parted ways with Nintendo, the exact reasons unknown.

As Prime explained it, it's seemingly unclear if the game's concept is still exactly the same, as all available information came from the Vicarious Visions project, but Prime did state that "it has not been canned. This is absolutely still a thing that's coming." He claims that the project is now being developed internally at Nintendo and it has been since 2017, so it will likely be very large-scale.

Prime states it's being made by a subset of developers who worked on Super Mario Odyssey. Though, as he described it, it's not the mainline team of veterans, but a younger team that assisted with Odyssey and then spun off to begin working on this project by themselves. Finally, Prime speculated that the 3D Donkey Kong game is likely meant to drop with the next Nintendo console, which has also had its fair share of recent rumors.

Posted: Mar 24, 2023 12:18 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/3d-donkey-kong-in-development-nintendo/