Donkey Kong Country came with a risky investment for Rare
Donkey Kong Country became well-known for its pre-rendered 3D visuals. However, pursuing such a style came with a heavy financial burden for Rare. For the machines the team was using, each costed about £80,000.
Former Rare staffers Brendan Gunn and David Wise opened up to
Wise: I think the machines were around £80,000 each. Incredibly expensive even then, so they really did go out on a limb to buy two of these machines. Senior staff from Nintendo were visiting at the time that the boxing game was being worked on, and seeing that sealed the deal. Rare showed them this working demo with rendered graphics which nowadays probably wouldn’t look like much, but at the time it was like chalk and cheese when compared to other games.
The rendering of each 3D model would take ages. We’d work till 11PM at night, go home and in the morning the image might have finished rendering — it took that long for these huge machines to do it.
Gunn: We had this massive air conditioning unit just to cool these SGI machines (laughs). We could all be suffering in the summer but as long as computer didn’t overheat, it didn’t matter.
I remember the first time I saw the rendered Donkey Kong model on-screen and it looked like a real, solid thing. In the old days, stuff used to be hand-drawn on tracing paper and then someone would have to draw a grid over it and decode it by hand, so rendering it saved a bit of effort in that respect.
