A few “harsh scribbles” from the old days at Rare
Aside from my normal rotation of YouTube subs adjacent to the games I watch a few times a week lately, my feed has been full of anything but modern video games – hardware modes, console restores, little-known information about my favorite series, weird lists and everything in between.
It is entirely on-brand that I would come across a video from the former rare artist Kev Bayliss covering his original Donkey Kong Country sketches – including the symbolic 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 aren’t many here, really – it’s just a lot of scribbles – and, as I say, they’re very rude, but that was all we needed the day before when we started shaping our characters. “
“We only needed a few sketches so we could refer to them and say, ‘Yes, we want a frog,’ and then we’d probably look at our natural history books or whatever we had on our desk before the internet and we -I’ll look at all the finer details. “
“If you were to present this as a conceptual art nowadays, people would laugh at you,” Bayliss added.
I especially like the names of unused scratches (Rambi the Rhino is shown here as “Rhidocerus”) and “meaner”, more Battletoads-esque variations that have been considered. He also pointed to a snake enemy “Slippas” that could amaze 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, rather than as a bastard at the top of the screen,” hence the more “boxy” redesign, and “Compact”.
It’s fascinating to see the original fax that “came from Nintendo” compared to Bayliss’s sketches.
Filed under …