Summary
Back in May, DidYouKnowGaming’s Liam Robertson published a report claiming thatCrash Bandicoot N. Sanedeveloper Vicarious Visions pitcheda 3D Donkey Kong gamein 2015 to Nintendo. Activision allegedly pulled the plug on the idea, despite a positive reaction from Nintendo, so that it could keep the team working as a support studio forCall of Duty.
This pitch supposedly included concept art and even a prototype demo running on the Nintendo Switch, and five months later, that same concept art has allegedly been found.
The game would have allegedly taken place on an open-world island whichDonkey Kongcould grind across by placing bananas on his feet.
Onthe Gaming Leaks and Rumours subreddit, poster ‘BirdonWheels’ claims to have found a harddrive with the artwork on board. They won’t divulge where they got the harddrive, but they allege that they were told to wipe it. Instead, they plugged it in, opened it up, and found what they claim to be Donkey Kong Freedom concept art.
I’m using a lot of speculative language here because there are two major factors to consider — all of this could be an elaborative fake by the poster themselves, or the artwork they found on the HDD might have been faked by whoever gave them the harddrive. Suffice to say, it’s worth taking this story with a grain of salt.
Donkey Kong Freedom Concept Art
The problem with claims like this in the modern day is determining whether the artwork was even drawn by a person. Giventhe growing prevelance of generative AI tools, it would be all too easy for someone to type in a prompt like ‘Donkey Kong standing in front of a temple with floating bananas’ and then try to pass it off as lost media.
Luckily, the telltale signs of AI art are absent here. There are no weird distortions or warped textures, everything is proportionate, each banana is identical, and there are no repeating patterns. It looks to have at least been drawn by a person (although, AI is always improving, making it much harder to say for certain), but that doesn’t necessarily make it legitimate. It could still be a fake, just a more time-consuming fake than what we’re used to these days.
BirdonWheels even addressed these concerns, arguing that because it’s “true wide-screen” and “high resolution”, it can’t be AI.
It certainly feels like a natural continuation of the style we saw in Vicarious' Crash Bandicoot remake, and the hovering banana collectibles match the old school 3D platformer vibes perfectly. But until it’s verified or corroborated by a trusted source, we just can’t say for certain. Nonetheless, if this is real, it’s an interesting insight into what could have been had Vicarious not been sucked back into the Call of Duty vacuum.
