Donkey Kong Bananza is hardly the only game that allows you to destroy the levels you play in – after all, Minecraft and its many imitators all let you tear their worlds apart and rebuild them piece by piece. But merely destroying blocks wasn't quite fun enough, as the devs at Nintendo found when they first started prototyping Donkey Kong's latest adventure. No, for it to be fun, you really need to be destroying something pretty.
In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, attended by GamesRadar+, programmer Tatsuya Kurihara explains that, even when the team built the ability for you to destroy levels, "the satisfaction of destroying them was still lacking." The devs soon realized that "it's more fun to destroy something that doesn't look like it can be destroyed. It is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful. With this in mind, the development team set out to pursue destruction."
