Donkey Kong Bananza has seemingly been in development for longer than GTA 6, according to the Switch 2 game's producer.
If you ask anyone about GTA, they'll tell you Rockstar Games has taken forever to get GTA 6 out, which makes sense since GTA 5 is old enough to make a will in its home country of Scotland. While not quite Duke Nukem Forever levels, it feels like GTA 6 has been in development for so long that it's going to be almost impossible to live up to the hype. However, an ex-Rockstar dev claimed work on GTA 6 didn't actually kick off until 2018, after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, which feels like a far more realistic dev time for a game as big as GTA 6.
Speaking to Spanish outlet La Vanguardia (via TheGamer) Super Mario Odyssey director and Donkey Kong Bananza producer Kenta Motokura has confirmed that work on Bananza actually started all the way back in 2017, following Odyssey's release, meaning it's been in development for almost eight years. "I can't give you very precise details, I can tell you that we started developing it after finishing Super Mario Odyssey." We previously found out that Donkey Kong Bananza started as a Switch 1 game, so this timing would make sense.
Obviously, "development" in this sense could mean many things, considering the game's director, Kazuya Takahashi, joined Nintendo in 2020, it's likely the prior years were mostly pre-production, while the team at EPD Tokyo was also working on Bowser's Fury for the Super Mario 3D World re-release.
Although Take-Two said development on GTA 6 began "in earnest" in 2020, so even on that front, there's a chance Donkey Kong has it beat. Of course, being in development for longer doesn't instantly make something a better game, but I don't see a giant gorilla in GTA 6, so…
Donkey Kong Bananza's director replayed every game in the series when he was assigned to the Switch 2 game: "That motivated me to incorporate past memories along with new ideas."
