Former RARE devs discuss Donkey Kong Country's long dev times, pressure from Nintendo and Miyamoto
Coming from a Nintendo Life interview with David Wise and Brendan Gunn...
"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." - Wise
"We had this massive air conditioning unit just to cool these SGI machines. 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." - Gunn
Gunn also talked about how Nintendo had little interference during the creation of Donkey Kong Country.
"The team was largely sheltered from outside pressures by the Stampers. We were aware that early on there was some wrangling over the look of Donkey Kong; we wanted to modernise the look and give him a different personality. Shigeru Miyamoto had some very strong ideas on what he should look like. Tim and Chris were very good at leaving us to it for long periods of time, and then they'd come back and there would be a flurry of feedback, but you never really knew if it was their ideas, or how much was coming from Nintendo."
Full interview here
"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." - Wise
"We had this massive air conditioning unit just to cool these SGI machines. 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." - Gunn
Gunn also talked about how Nintendo had little interference during the creation of Donkey Kong Country.
"The team was largely sheltered from outside pressures by the Stampers. We were aware that early on there was some wrangling over the look of Donkey Kong; we wanted to modernise the look and give him a different personality. Shigeru Miyamoto had some very strong ideas on what he should look like. Tim and Chris were very good at leaving us to it for long periods of time, and then they'd come back and there would be a flurry of feedback, but you never really knew if it was their ideas, or how much was coming from Nintendo."
Full interview here
