Donkey Kong Bananza began development on the original Nintendo Switch before moving to Switch 2

Donkey Kong Bananza was originally in development for the Nintendo Switch before development of the project was moved to the Nintendo Switch 2.

The game, which is released later this month, began life on Nintendo‘s previous console, but as the game’s producer and director have now explained, technical limitations imposed by the first system made the transition to Nintendo’s newest console a natural one.

“So this game originally began its development cycle on Nintendo Switch 1 and at the time, we were still using voxel technology and thinking of lots of different ideas for applications,” producer Kenta Motokura told IGN.

“But when we learned about the Switch 2 development, we realized that the best implementation of these ideas and technology would be on Nintendo Switch 2.”

The game’s director, Kazuya Takahashi, also weighed in on the platform.

“I was previously talking about the importance of the continuity of destruction, which was something that we could expand on and have a longer continuous play experience with that kind of concept on Nintendo Switch 2. So this allowed us to engage in creating really extremely rich variety of materials and very large scale changes in the environment on that new hardware.

“And when destruction is your core gameplay, one really important moment that we wanted to preserve was when a player looks at a part of the terrain and thinks, can I break this? Because that creates a very important surprise that has a lot of impact for them, and that was something that was best done on Switch 2.”

Takahashi also said that it wasn’t just the power of the new console that attracted the team, but also some of the console’s new features, such as mouse controls, that inspired the platform change.

“But it’s not really even just the processing power of the Switch 2 that I think attracted us and gave us some interesting possibilities. There was also the device itself that offered things like mouse control, which you can use in co-op play for a second player to control Pauline’s vocal blasts or DK Artist, a mode where you can sculpt a large set of voxels.”

Donkey Kong Bananza will be released on Nintendo Switch 2 on July 17, VGC published a hands-on preview with Donkey Kong Bananza last week.

We wrote: “Like Mario’s recent 3D outings, Donkey Kong Bananza will likely be greater than the sum of its parts – a cavalcade of ideas and mechanics that might not seem like much on their own, but together form a consistently entertaining adventure.”