The team behind Donkey Kong Bananza has revealed that series co-creator Shigeru Miyamoto got to playtest the game, and what he got up to is seemingly quite on brand for the industry icon.
Donkey Kong's latest game is all about breaking stuff. Bananza started as a Switch 1 game, but when the developers realized the console couldn't handle the full scale of this destruction, it was moved to Switch 2 in 2021. Thanks to the game's in-depth voxel tech (which a developer says "must have been an absolute nightmare for the programmers"), everything in the environment is destructible, which fits perfectly with a giant gorilla.
One person who was clearly a fan of the destruction found in Bananza is Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto. In an interview with The Guardian, Super Mario Odyssey director-turned-Bananza producer Kenta Motokura recalled presenting the game to Miyamoto. "Instead of progressing through the game, he just stuck to one point, smashing and digging around a lot. It was a good thing to see him playing that way … it proved that there are a lot of things that players could potentially be curious about in the game."
Granted, this isn't the first story about Miyamoto playtesting a game in an unconventional way. Back in 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi revealed Miyamoto spent his first time with the game climbing trees for an hour (via Nintendo Life). "When we first presented this to Mr. Miyamoto, he spent about an hour just climbing trees. We left little treats like rupees on the trees, but we also left other things in other places we thought he might go. But he just kept climbing trees."
At the very least, the developers of Bananza had a better reaction to Miyamoto's methods than he did for his own son playing Super Mario 64 – "Geez, does this kid have any brains?"
