Donkey Kong Bananza's earliest demo featured a Goomba as a playable character, but in a sick experiment, Nintendo gave it giant hands that could destroy the world.
The newest Donkey Kong game was designed with destruction in mind, to the extent that the developers moved it off of Nintendo Switch back in 2021 to transition it for a Switch 2 release. But the earliest experiments the team behind the game didn't feature Donkey Kong at all; in fact, it was actually built from some fun Super Mario Odyssey asset reuse. But in the process, the developers at Nintendo EPD 8 made a truly horrifying creation that ranks with the likes of Frankenstein's monster or Resident Evil's Nemesis… a Goomba that can throw hands.
In an edition of Nintendo's "Ask the Developer" interview series dedicated to Bananza, co-director Wataru Tanaka says, "Shortly after Super Mario Odyssey was released, we started running technical experiments with the idea of, 'What kind of game do you get if everything in the environment is destructible?'" And Odyssey director (and Bananza producer) Kenta Motokura recalled an experiment where "We even tried sticking arms on a Goomba."
The core gameplay mechanic of Donkey Kong Bananza came from a technical experiment of taking the arms from a Super Mario Odyssey Boss and putting them on a Goomba to smash the terrain! pic.twitter.com/3QNrbrWvDcJuly 15, 2025
Tanaka explains "In Super Mario Odyssey, there’s a boss called Knucklotec who attacks Mario with giant hands. The programmer who created him tried attaching those arms to a Goomba as an experiment." He added, "The Goomba could smash terrain, tear off pieces to use as weapons, and throw them. Those actions felt surprisingly satisfying," with Motokura chiming in, "The results of our tests showed that destruction-based gameplay could work, and it was a good match for Donkey Kong’s enormous strength. We felt that the concept and the core gameplay had clicked into place."
Now the developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should, giving a Goomba hands sets forth massive implications for the Mario universe, and if not contained, could be devastating. Even the footage shown of the experiment was enough to send chills down my spine, thank god Donkey Kong stepped in to take on the lead role, because the world isn't ready for big hands Goomba.
