Donkey Kong Country GBC Nintendo Retrospective

It’s A Jungle In There!

When Rare created Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo in 1994, its beautifully rendered graphics and massive worlds instantly redefined what it meant to experience a great game. Gamers were amazed at the sheer size of Donkey Kong’s new adventure, and they were introduced for the very first time to a brand new character by the name of Diddy Kong.

Now, thanks to the power of Game Boy Color and Rare’s expertise, the original creators of Donkey Kong Country have crammed the entire Super NES version into a Game Boy cartridge without scaling down any of the classic levels or changing the gameplay. Every enemy, every friend, and every secret from the original game is back — and you’ll even find a Lost Level and extra bonuses created exclusively for the Game Boy Color version.

In case you weren’t lucky enough to experience the fun of Donkey Kong Country the first time around, here’s the full simian scoop to bring you up to speed. After a long career of kidnapping princesses and thoughtlessly throwing barrels, Donkey Kong finally decided that it was time to settle down in Donkey Kong Country and survive off of the massive banana hoard he had collected over the years.

His retirement began peacefully enough. His days were spent palling around with Diddy Kong and his nights were filled with romantic strolls through Barrel Cannon Canyon with his beautiful girlfriend Candy Kong. DK and Diddy made a lot of unusual friends on the island, including an ostrich named Expresso and a rhino named Rambi. The pair even found time to visit old Cranky Kong, an elderly video game star whose glory days were long gone …

Donkey Kong’s early retirement was cut short when he came home to his treehouse one day and found that his entire banana hoard had been stolen! The culprit was an evil villain named K. Rool, who led a powerful Kremling army made up of the most vile inhabitants of DK Isle.

At that moment, Donkey Kong knew that his days of relaxation were over. With Diddy’s help, DK struck out to scour the six worlds of DK Isle, each of which was filled with five dangerous sub-levels and ultimately guarded by a horrendous boss.

Donkey Kong’s feud with K. Rool eventually spread over two more Super Nintendo games, three Game Boy games and even a Nintendo 64 adventure. Now you can relive DK and Diddy’s original Super Nintendo adventure on Game Boy Color, almost exactly as it first appeared in 1994.

It was an amazing accomplishment for Rare to fit the entire Donkey Kong Country game into a tiny Game Boy Color cartridge, but believe or not they even managed to squeeze in some extra bonuses that weren’t in the original version. These bonus features make use of the unique capabilities of the Game Boy Color hardware and add a whole new level of fun to Donkey Kong Country.