Donkey Kong 64 is a 1999 platform game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. It is the first Donkey Kong game to feature 3D gameplay. As the gorilla Donkey Kong, the player explores themed levels to collect items and rescue his family members from the crocodile King K. Rool. The player completes minigames and puzzles as five playable Kong characters—each with their own special abilities—to receive bananas and other collectibles. In multiplayer modes, up to four players can compete in deathmatch and last man standing games.
Rare began working on Donkey Kong 64 in 1997, following the completion of Donkey Kong Country 3 (1996). A 16-member team, with many staff from Rare's Banjo-Kazooie (1998) team, developed it over three years. It was conceived as a 2.5D platformer similar to Country before it was reworked into a more open-ended game using the Banjo engine. Rare sought to differentiate Donkey Kong 64 from Banjo with more collectibles and player characters, cinematic sequences, and bombastic bosses. It was the first of two games to require the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak, an accessory that added memory resources. Grant Kirkhope composed the soundtrack, which includes a comedy hip-hop song, the "DK Rap", that plays in the introduction.
Donkey Kong 64 was released in North America in November 1999 and worldwide in December. Nintendo backed the release with a marketing campaign that included advertisements, sweepstakes, and a national tour. Donkey Kong 64 received acclaim and was Nintendo's bestseller during the 1999 holiday season, selling 5.27 million copies worldwide by 2021. It won the 1999 E3 Game Critics award for Best Platform Game and multiple awards and nominations from magazines. Reviewers praised its visuals, size, and length, but criticized its camera and emphasis on item collection and backtracking. Some cited its gameplay and visual similarities to Banjo-Kazooie as a detriment.
Donkey Kong 64 was Rare's final Donkey Kong game before its acquisition by Microsoft in 2002, the last major Donkey Kong game until Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (2004), and the franchise's only 3D platformer until Donkey Kong Bananza (2025). Nintendo rereleased it via the Wii U's Virtual Console in 2015 and the Nintendo Classics service in 2026. Retrospective reviews were mixed; critics considered it emblematic of the tedium in Rare's "collect-a-thon" adventure platformers for its excessive emphasis on collecting items and have blamed it for precipitating 3D platforming's decline in popularity. Video game journalists have called the "DK Rap" one of the worst songs in a video game, and it has garnered popularity as an internet meme.
Gameplay
Donkey Kong 64 is a 3D platformer in which the player, as Donkey Kong and his friends, explores an island and collects items to progress through minigames and puzzles. The game follows a traditional storyline for the series: King K. Rool and his reptilian Kremlings invade the idyllic DK Isle and kidnap Donkey Kong's friends, planning to power up their Blast-O-Matic weapon and destroy the island. After a tutorial, the player embarks as Donkey Kong to rescue the others from their kidnappers and stop K. Rool's plan. While exploring the in-game world and completing puzzle minigames, the player collects two types of bananas: colored bananas, which are color-coded differently for each Kong character, award the player with banana medals and can be traded for access to each world's boss fight; and golden bananas, a certain number of which are required to unlock each new in-game world.
Most of the puzzles are simple and involve rearranging items, manipulating switches and tiles, or matching items as in the game Concentration. Minigames include races, minecart rides, and barrels that shoot the characters as projectiles. There are five such golden banana-rewarding objectives for each of five playable characters across eight themed worlds200 goals in total, in addition to a connecting overworld. The worlds' themes include underwater, forest, jungle, and industrial. Unlike prior Donkey Kong games, the objectives can be completed in any order. The player can fast travel between sections of the level with designated warp pads and can swap between characters in designated tag barrels. The player collects banana coins, which can be spent to unlock new weapons and abilities, and other collectibles such as weapon ammunition and blueprint puzzle pieces. As in other Rare games, the player often encounters an impasse such as an indestructible object or out-of-reach area, and must acquire a new ability with which to eventually backtrack and resolve it.
Donkey Kong's kidnapped friends become playable characters after being rescued. Each of the five characters begin with basic abilities and can purchase additional, unique abilities from Cranky Kong as the game progresses, which are necessary to solve certain puzzles. For example, Donkey Kong can operate levers, Chunky Kong can lift rocks, Tiny Kong can shrink in size, Diddy Kong can fly with a jet pack, and Lanky Kong can float. Each character can also obtain a unique projectile weapon and musical instrument. For example, some doors can be opened only with Donkey Kong's coconut shooter and others can be opened only with Diddy Kong's guitar. There are more special abilities than face buttons on the controller, so button combinations are needed to trigger some abilities. Combinations also trigger special modes, including alternative camera angles, a sniper mode, and a snapshot mode which unlocks more in-game secrets. Playable versions of the original Donkey Kong (1981) and Jetpac (1983) are hidden within the game, and playing through them is required to finish the story. The player-character can also transform into animals, such as Rambi the Rhino and Enguarde the Swordfish, who recur from earlier series games. Optional hardware support includes a widescreen mode and Rumble Pak compatibility.
A separate multiplayer mode has six minigames for two to four players. Monkey Smash is an open arena, deathmatch-style minigame in which up to four players find ammo and use their respective projectile weapons from the single-player game to damage other players before losing all their own lives. Battle Arena is a king-of-the-hill minigame in which players use weapons and explosives to knock each other off the edge of a platform. Each mode has several sub-types in which players can compete based on time or score. By taking snapshots of Banana Fairies hidden in the game, players will gain access to bonus features, including cheats, bonus stages, the ability to replay bosses and cinematics, and Krusha as an additional character in the multiplayer mode.
Development Conception The British studio Rare, which created the successful Donkey Kong Country games for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid-1990s, developed Donkey Kong 64, with Gregg Mayles leading the effort. Development began in 1997, shortly after the completion of Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! (1996). It was originally reported as an intended release on the Nintendo 64's 64DD add-on, but transitioned to cartridge while the 64DD was delayed and eventually canceled. Rare artist Carl Tilley disputed the possibility of a 64DD release, recalling to Did You Know Gaming? that "Rare [management] wouldn't have wanted to release on the DD. Hardware sales dictated where best to sell the game." Time Extension argued that early reports of a 64DD release were "a mistake, a mistranslation, or simply talks between upper management." Grant Kirkhope stated that Project Dream was the 64DD title being developed by Rare at the time, not Donkey Kong 64. A team of 16 people worked on the game across three years, and an additional eight members assisted in its later stages. George Andreas served as the project's director.
Rare conceived Donkey Kong 64 as a linear, 2.5D platform game similar to the Donkey Kong Country games. The Nintendo 64 was still new, and at the time Rare did not have a common game engine. The linear version was developed for around 18 months before it was eliminated in favor of a more open-ended approach similar to Rare's 1998 game Banjo-Kazooie (1998). Many developers transitioned from the Banjo team, and the final version was built atop the Banjo game engine.
Design The character models were designed and animated from scratch. Rare was unable to reuse the models from the Donkey Kong Country series, where they had been pre-rendered and modeled with NURBs using PowerAnimator; Donkey Kong 64s real-time 3D graphics could only use polygons, so the team used a new tool, Gamegen. The pre-rendered models were used as reference for the polygon models and textures, such as for the interior of the Kongs' mouths. Though the real-time graphics prevented Rare from reproducing the level of detail seen in the Donkey Kong Country series, they allowed for more expressive characters. Rendering satisfactory models proved challenging; lead artist Mark Stevenson noted that "Being able to see this character from any angle, you'd make an animation, put it in the game, and you'd think it looked good side-on, but awful from every other angle!"
The strong emphasis on collectibles was a design choice made at the request of Rare co-founder Tim Stamper to distinguish Donkey Kong 64 from Banjo-Kazooie. According to director George Andreas, "I'd always go back to him and say 'Here's some' and he'd go 'No, more things. Retrospectively, Andreas commented that he should have reined himself in; particularly, he would have liked to unify the color-coded banana system. Rare attempted to differentiate Donkey Kong 64 from Banjo-Kazooie through its variety of playable characters, cinematic set-pieces, and bombastic boss battles. According to Andreas, Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto was appalled when he saw Donkey Kong shoot a realistic shotgun used as a placeholder during a pre-release demonstration, and quickly sketched the coconut gun used in the final game.
A removed feature, "Stop 'N' Swop", allowed data to be transferred from Banjo-Kazooie to Donkey Kong 64 to unlock in-game bonuses. During development, Rare discovered the Nintendo 64's memory retained data for several seconds after a cartridge's removal. They implemented a hot swapping feature whereby removing the Donkey Kong 64 cartridge and quickly inserting the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge, while the data of the former was still in memory, would unlock bonus content. Nintendo requested Stop 'N' Swop's removal when Rare submitted Donkey Kong 64 for approval. Nintendo was concerned the Nintendo 64 would not reliably retain the data for long enough for the feature to work and that it could potentially damage consoles. Specifically, Nintendo 64 models produced after Banjo-Kazooie release reduced the amount of time the console retained memory, making Stop 'N' Swop nearly impossible to activate as intended.