Some “rough scribbles” from the old days in Rare
Aside from my normal rotation of YouTube subs adjacent to games, which I do a few times a week, lately, my feed has been full of everything but modern video games: hardware modifications, console restores, info little known about my favorite series, crazy lists and everything in between.
It’s totally branded that I would come across a video of the weird ex-artist Kev Bayliss which covers its original Donkey Kong Country sketches (including the iconic Animal Buddies) from 1993.
These are some of the “original scribbles” that were used as a basis for modeling our 3D graphics Donkey Kong Country“, He said.” There’s not much here, really, it’s just a lot of scribbles and, as I say, they’re very cruel, but it was all we needed the day before we started modeling our characters. “
“We just needed a couple of sketches to be able to refer to them and say‘ Yes, we want a frog ’and we would probably have consulted our natural history books or anything we had on the table before the internet, and we would see all the finer details. “
“If you presented this as conceptual art today, people would just laugh at you,” Bayliss added.
I especially love the unused scratched names (Rambi the rhino is presented here as “Rhidocerus”) and the “worst”, more Battletoads-sca variations that were considered. He also showed an enemy snake “Slippas” that could stun the Kongs and an early look at the Kremlings.
As for the DK itself, Bayliss said the character’s proportions were meant to “work better as platforms rather than being a bad one at the top of the screen,” thus redesigning it more “drawer” and “compact.” “.
It’s fascinating to see the original fax that “came from Nintendo” compared to Bayliss’s sketches.
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