Donkey Kong Bananza was originally a Nintendo Switch 1 game

Donkey Kong Bananza is continuing the trend we’ve been seeing as of late, which is that while it’s coming to Nintendo Switch 2, it was originally planned for Switch 1.

That news comes from Kenta Motokura, the game’s producer. He said that it was always the plan to use voxel tech and consider “lots of different ideas for applications.” However, when Nintendo Switch 2 started to become a reality, the team “realized that the best implementation of these ideas and technology would be on Nintendo Switch 2.”

Director Kazuya Takahashi chimed in on this as well, telling IGN:

“And when I was previously talking about the importance of the continuity of destruction, that was something that we could expand on and have a longer continuous play experience with that kind of concept on Nintendo Switch 2. So this allowed us to engage in creating really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware. And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this? Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them and that was something that was best done on Switch 2. But it’s not really even just the processing power of the Switch 2 that I think attracted us and gave us some interesting possibilities. There was also the device itself that offered things like mouse control, which you can use in co-op play for a second player to control Pauline’s vocal blasts or DK Artist, a mode where you can sculpt a large set of voxels.”

This is the third time we’re hearing about a Nintendo-published Switch 2 game that was originally slated for the original Switch. Mario Kart World and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment were the other two projects. You can read more about that here and here.