Some ‘rough scratches’ from old times in Rare
In addition to my normal rotation of YouTube subscribers adjacent to games that I monitor a few times a week, lately, my feed has been full of anything except modern video games – hardware mods, console restores, little-known information about my favorite series , crazy lists and everything.
It’s entirely about the brand that I found a video from a former Rare artist Kev Bayliss covering your original Donkey Kong Country sketches – including the iconic Animal Buddies – from 1993.
These are some of the “original squiggles that were used as a basis for modeling our 3D graphics to Donkey Kong Country“, he said.” There’s not much here, actually – it’s just a bunch of scribbles – and like I said, they’re pretty rough, but it was all we needed the day before we started modeling our characters. “
“We just needed a few sketches so that we could refer to them and say ‘Yes, we want a frog’, and then we would probably consult our natural history books or whatever we had on our tables long before the Internet, and look at everyone the most subtle details. “
“If you were going to present this as conceptual art today, people would just laugh at you,” added Bayliss.
I particularly love the scratched names that were not used (Rambi, the Rhino is presented here as “Rhidocerus”) and the “bad guys”, more Battletoads– few variations that have been considered. He also displayed an enemy “Slippas” snake that could stun the Kongs and get a first look at the Kremlings.
As for DK himself, Bayliss said that the character’s proportions were made to “work better as a platform game than as a villain at the top of the screen”, hence the more “boxy” and “compact” redesign.
It is fascinating to see the original fax that “came from Nintendo” compared to Bayliss’ sketches.
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