Nintendo Addresses Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Credits Controversy

Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country Returns HD earlier this week, with fans noticing that the original team members at Retro are not individually credited in the updated version. "Instead, the credits state that it was 'based on the work' of Retro Studios, while the team at Forever Entertainment gets its credits for working on the remaster," reports GameSpot. In a statement issued to Eurogamer, a Nintendo spokesperson said: "We believe in giving proper credit for anyone involved in making or contributing to a game's creation, and value the contributions that all staff make during the development process." From the report: That statement doesn't really address why the original team's names were excluded from the credits, and this has happened before. In 2023, the Retro Studios developers behind Metroid Prime were left out of the credits for Metroid Prime Remastered. Similarly, external translators voiced their frustrations last year because Nintendo didn't credit them for their work either.

This story has been largely overshadowed by the reveal of Switch 2 earlier this week. It seems likely that the Donkey Kong Country franchise will be revisited on that system as well. However, it's not among the games rumored for Switch 2. In the meantime, the bizarre Donkey Kong Country animated TV series is still available to watch on Prime Video.

One of the really impressive things

[rsilvergun]

Companies pulled off was getting us to associate video games not with the people who actually make them or even the studio but with the publisher who puts up the money. Fun fact Nintendo didn't make the original donkey Kong game. If you ever wonder why you never see the arcade version on any official stores it's because they had a little fight with the company that really made it and they don't own the code. So they always put up the famicom version

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Is the SuperFX chip that hard to emulate?

I've never had a problem running a SNES game in an emulator, so I'm gonna say no. At least, it's possible to do well and people have done it in FOSS.

Re:

[ac22]

Fun fact Nintendo didn't make the original donkey Kong game

Has Shigeru Miyamoto been deceiving us all this time?

Nintendo of America was founded in 1980 with minor success at importing its parent's arcade cabinets from Japan. In early 1981, its president Minoru Arakawa bet the small startup company on a major order of 3,000 Radar Scope. Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president (and his father-in-law) Hiroshi Yamauchi send a conversion kit of new game software. Yamauchi polled the company's entire talent pool for fresh game design concepts to save the distressed startup. This yielded Shigeru Miyamoto's debut as lead game designer of his Donkey Kong concept, and Yamauchi appointed head engineer Gunpei Yokoi as project supervisor with a budget of $267,000 (equivalent to $895,000 in 2023) according to Miyamoto.

Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for some of the development, with no role in the game's creation or concept, but to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo". Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards (PC boards). This later led to mutual lawsuits in 1983, as Ikegami asserted ownership over Donkey Kong which Nintendo denied as Ikegami was a subcontractor who had already been paid. Game Machine called it "simply a nuisance tactic" on the part of Ikegami.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Do they reuse code?

[reanjr]

Does the remaster reuse code or assets from the original? Or does it reimplements everything like one might when writing a clone? Cause if it's the former, they deserve credit, but if it's the latter, they don't.

Re:

[dmomo]

But even if its the latter they do, at least if the game is a faithful recreation. Games are not 100% spec'd out before the coding begins. There are iterative processes where developers implement parts of the game, and go back to the drawing board to rework the code and data (assets, levels, configurations, etc) based on testing. The game is a result of all of this trial and error.

Even if a game were rebuilt from scratch, the people who contributed to the original development effort share in the end product

You want to hear this

[Plugh]

OCRemix DK Country [youtube.com]