Donkey Kong country artist Kevin Bayliss pulled out old character sketches for a show and storytelling

Some old-fashioned “ rough scribbles ” at Rare

Aside from my normal rotation of YouTube subs adjacent to the game I watch several times a week, lately my feed has been full of everything except modern video games – hardware mods, console restores, little-known bits and pieces of my series. favorite, wacky lists and everything in between.

It was entirely on the brand that I came across a video of a rare former artist Kev Bayliss covering its original Donkey Kong Country sketches – including the iconic Animal Buddies – from 1993.

Here are some of the “original scribbles that we used as the basis for modeling our 3D graphics for Donkey Kong Country“He said.” There’s not a lot here, really – it’s just a lot of scribbles – and like I said they’re very rude, but that was all we needed at the time before we started to mold our characters.

“We just needed a few sketches so that we could refer to it and say ‘Yeah, we want a frog,’ and then we would probably go through our natural history books or whatever we had on our desks long before the internet, and we would look at all the finer details. “

“If you were to present that as concept art these days people would laugh at you,” Bayliss added.

I especially like the striped names that haven’t been used (Rambi the Rhino is introduced here as “Rhidocerus”) and the “meaner” plus Battletoads-the variants which have been considered. He also showed an enemy snake “Slippas” that could stun the Kongs and a first look at the Kremlings.

As for DK himself, Bayliss said the character’s proportions were supposed to “work better as a platformer rather than a villain at the top of the screen,” hence the more “square” and “compact” overhaul. “.

It’s fascinating to see the original fax that “came from Nintendo” in relation to the Bayliss sketches.