CD-i Donkey Kong title

(Don't mind me - I'm a crop from a magazine ad announcing the CD-i Nintendo games)

Welcome to the micropage for the Donkey Kong CD-i game! This should be your one-stop shop for info relating to this lost Nintendo CD-i title!

Info Table

The information on this page has been sourced from the Mario Wiki section about this game.

Development

Information about the Donkey Kong game for the CD-i is very scarce, and it actually used to be worse until some recent discoveries came to light. We don't even know what its title was.

For many years, the only indication that this game even existed was a magazine ad announcing the arrival of Nintendo's properties on the Philips CD-i. It featured four characters in both the description and its artwork - Mario, Link, Zelda, and Donkey Kong. This was the only official confirmation of the Donkey Kong CD-i game for many years, although there were (ultimately disproved) rumors of the game's progress in a couple of EGM issues.

Eventually, a reference to the Donkey Kong CD-i game was found on the LinkedIn page of former RSP programmer Adrian Jackson-Jones, who designed and implemented the game's engine. He was at the company from 1992 to 1993, giving a good estimate on when the game was in development. Jackson-Jones was interviewed by Time Extension about his involvement in the game, noting that he was able to circumvent the CD-i's memory limitations by using the player's moment to load in what'd be visible on-screen. However, due to a memory disorder, he was unable to recall other aspects of the game's production.

Later on, DidYouKnowGaming managed to interview an anonymous RSP employee who worked on the game as an artist. In the interview, the employee confirmed that the Donkey Kong game was meant to be a side-scroller, much like Animation Magic's Zelda titles and the future Donkey Kong Country series. It was also mentioned that the game never made it past storyboarding (and some engine development) due to the CD-i's limitations and Philips' lack of game development experience.

As for the recovery of any of its assets, it's unlikely. The founder of RSP, Michael J. Riedel, noted in an interview that the company would throw out assets relating to cancelled games. As a result of this practice, interviews are all we have regarding the existence of RSP's Donkey Kong game for the CD-i.

Apart from one thing.

A Lost Press Release Packet

There was a blog called Interactive Dreams which housed a bunch of CD-i-related blog posts, a multitude of which were exclusives to the site. There was a link to an archived post earlier in this page! One day during COVID, the blog posted images of a press release packet for RSP's Donkey Kong game. It essentially lined out what the game was going to be, going into gameplay and engine specs among other things. Unfortunately, there were no screenshots of the game in action.

The blog closed down around March 2022 and, unfortunately, I didn't save the press release images. Worse, the Internet Archive doesn't have the post archived, and its archival of full Blogspot posts is already not very good. I tried to look for them on CD-i Facebook groups (I think it was initially posted there?), but to no avail.

If anyone has images of this press release packet, let me know!! I'm still kicking myself for not archiving it.