Here’s What Donkey Kong Bananza Looked Like On Switch 1

In a recent interview, developers Kenta Motokura and director Kazuya Takahashi from Nintendo confirmed that Donkey Kong Bananza was originally intended for the Switch 1.

In a new Ask the Developer feature, fresh screenshots have been shared that shows the visual difference between Switch 1 and Switch 2 for Bananza, with Kenta Motokura, Wataru Tanaka, and Daisuke Watanabe all providing more context as to why development was shifted over to Nintendo’s new console.

In a nutshell, it’s confirmed that the development team started to think about moving the game over to the Switch 2 in 2021. The general idea was that if the new hardware could handle more objects in the environment, then the very nature of destruction would become significantly more enjoyable.

Here’s what was said:

Motokura: We originally began developing Donkey Kong Bananza on Nintendo Switch, but we ran into some challenges. I think it was around 2021 when we started to think about moving development to Switch 2.

Watanabe: We first looked into how we could upgrade what we’d originally built for Switch to take advantage of Switch 2. One of the most obvious improvements was that we could place far more objects in the environment than before. Being able to place more objects in the terrain didn’t just enhance the game’s visual richness. More importantly, it increased the amount of things players could destroy, which amplified the exhilaration of being able to demolish anything and everything. That went hand in hand with the game’s core concept of destruction. It convinced us that this game would be even more fun if we developed it for Switch 2.

Tanaka: From a programmer’s perspective, voxel technology is well-suited for creating gameplay centered around destruction. However, it also uses a lot of system memory, and we faced the challenge of Switch not having enough to support everything we wanted to do.

I’ll explain with some simple arithmetic. If you’re asked to double the size of a 1 × 1 pixel image in both width and height, you end up with a 2 × 2 image, which means four times as many pixels. But when you do the same with voxels, you’ve got width and height, but also depth to contend with. So, doubling all three dimensions gives you 2 × 2 × 2, or eight times the data. It may sound simple to just “double something,” but the reality is that memory usage, voxel density, and all kinds of processes end up gobbling up eight times the resources. It was clear that the memory available on Switch would struggle to handle that load, and we felt that manifesting the huge volume of terrain that we did in this game might have been unachievable on that platform.

With the move to Switch 2, we gained not only more memory but also greater processing capacity. That gave us the freedom to incorporate gameplay ideas we’d previously abandoned because they were too demanding. When we got down to trying it, we discovered that not only could it handle the heavy processing requirements, but it also ran at 60 fps. Things we’d given up on, like explosions flinging large objects or causing them to collapse, were now possible. Designers could also place as many objects as they wanted. There were so many moments when we thought to ourselves, “Now we can really do this.”

So, with that context in place, let’s take a look at how the game differs between the two consoles:

It doesn’t look bad, right? But it’s clear just how much Nintendo was able to implement into the game world with the Switch 2, in addition to some fancy crepuscular rays shining down from above.

Donkey Kong Bananza is launching this week on 17th July 2025. It was recently reported that physical copies of the game have managed to sneak out into the wild, so be wary of what you’re looking at online if you don’t want to be spoiled.

What do you make of the comparison here between Switch 1 and Switch 2 for DK Bananza? Share your thoughts with a comment down below.