Some ‘rough scribbles’ from the past at Rare
Aside from my normal rotation of gaming-bordering YouTube subs that I monitor a few times a week, lately my feed has been full of everything but modern video games – hardware mods, console restorations, little-known tidbits about my favorite series , crazy lists and everything in between.
It is completely on-brand that I came across a video of a former rare artist Kev Bayliss about its original Donkey Kong Country sketches – including the iconic Animal Buddies – from 1993.
These are some of the “original scribbles that were used as the basis for us to pre-model our 3D images Donkey Kong Country‘, he said.’ There’s actually not much here – it’s just a lot of scribbles – and like I said, they’re really gross, but it was all we needed the day before we started modeling our characters. ‘
“We just needed a few sketches so we could refer to it and say ‘Yes, we want a frog’, and then we would probably consult our natural history books or whatever we already had on our desks way before the internet, and we would look at all the finer details. “
“If you presented this as concept art these days, people would just laugh at you,” Bayliss added.
I especially love the scratched-through names that weren’t used (Rambi the rhinoceros is presented here as ‘Rhidocerus’) and the ‘meaner’, more Battletoads-like variations that were considered. He also showed a “Slippas” snake foe who could stun the Kongs and an early look at the Kremlings.
As for DK himself, Bayliss said the character’s proportions were meant to “work better as a platformer than as a villain at the top of the screen,” hence the more “boxy” and “compact” redesign.
It’s fascinating to see the original fax that “came from Nintendo” compared to Bayliss’ sketches.
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