Donkey Kong Bananza lets you destroy almost everything in its levels. The Switch 2 exclusive even has a special menu option to restore a level to its default configuration in case you go too wild breaking stuff. The developers at Nintendo knew they wanted destruction to be at the heart of the 3D action platformer’s design, but destruction alone wouldn’t be enough. They needed the world that players were breaking to look beautiful, too.
Every child knows the irresistible desire to knock over a perfectly placed tower of blocks or stomp through a carefully crafted sandcastle on the beach. To make Donkey Kong Bananza‘s destruction really sing, it needed to look like something worth smashing. “It’s more fun to destroy something that doesn’t look like it can be destroyed,” the game’s software engineer, Tatsuya Kurihara, said during a presentation at GDC 2026 this week while speaking through a translator. “It is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful.”
Levels needed lots of additional visual flourishes, ranging from patches of flowers and fauna to ornate rock formations and snaking, overgrown trees to make the destruction feel like the showstopper it was meant to be. He revealed that the average level in the game has 347,070,464 individually destructible voxels to help create the effect. It’s an impressive result made possible by Nintendo’s unique house style when it comes to creative experimentation and collaboration.
These remarks were delivered on March 11 to a packed hall in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It was the only talk Nintendo gave at the show and the most packed by far, with dual lines snaking around the third floor as young game developers and established veterans alike raced to catch a glimpse of the talent behind Nintendo’s games and hear insights into what makes them such consistently crowd-pleasing hits.
It was a lively but streamlined presentation. There were moments when it had more of the energy of a Nintendo Direct than a deep dive into the technical craft of game making. It was as much a peek behind the curtain at how the company approaches game development in general as a breakdown of how the Switch 2’s first sprawling adventure game was made.
Like most Nintendo games, Donkey Kong Bananza grew out of small ideas that the team had explored in earlier projects. In this case, one of the main building blocks was voxel technology used in Super Mario Odyssey for snow drifts, cheese blocks, and other destructible objects scattered across some of its worlds. Kurihara was responsible for those gameplay mechanics and decided to see if he could prototype them into something that could sustain an entire game.
The early result, as shared during the presentation, included a Goomba with two giant fists bashing through Super Mario Odyssey‘s Wooded Kingdom. The primitive test proved fruitful. “After making a box or prototype, I felt the ability to destroy any part of the terrain was a satisfying new interaction,” Kurihara said. “I especially liked the idea of being able to rip off chunks of the terrain and throw it to destroy things or make it stick. It was exciting. I felt we could create a game around the core idea.”
It was producer Kenta Motokura who wanted to use these mechanics as the basis for new Donkey Kong game. A more than 25-year veteran of the company, Motokura started his time at Nintendo as a character artist on games like Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Now in the driver’s seat and having recently directed Super Mario Odyssey, Motokura wanted to bring Donkey Kong back to the 3D action platformer genre. The voxel tech proved the perfect match for the character’s established penchant for throwing and smashing.
None of this is all that surprising. In fact, it almost feels obvious. But part of Nintendo’s gift as a game company has remained its ability to combine simple, iterative ideas into games that still end up feeling exceptional and surprising. It’s that marriage of the technical and the creative that can make brand new ideas feel inevitable in hindsight.
The talk by Motokura and Kurihara highlighted two of the ingredients to this magic formula. The first is a penchant for looking back at the past and reimagining it. Donkey Kong Bananza might seem like it has nothing in common with the original Super Mario Bros. but as Motokura pointed out, part of the inspiration for making nearly everything in the game destructible came from that NES game’s second level, where Mario is underground surrounded by blocks that can be broken to create unique paths, including one that leads to a secret warp pipe.
“I’ve loved this scene since I was a kid,” he said. “You can interact with almost everything on the screen, and depending on how you go about that, there are multiple ways to proceed.” Donkey Kong Bananza also revolves around power-ups for DK which change how he can interact with the world and destroy it. It’s the modern-day analogue to Mario getting a fire flower in SMB1.
While the GDC talk focused on how the tech was put together to power the Switch 2’s first major single-player hit, it was just as much about Nintendo’s broader philosophy around game development. Motokura and Kurihara kept returning to the theme of “fusing” together their ideas in a way that was complimentary.
They also reiterated multiple times that Donkey Kong Bananza was a joint effort only made possible by a large team where everyone’s input and feedback, regardless of discipline, is incorporated into the project. The talk ended with a picture of the “Banana Bunch,” a rare look at the core development team behind the 2025 hit at a time when Nintendo is more secretive than ever about who worked on what.
The company’s creative processes have never felt more guarded, but also never more relevant to an industry that’s struggled amid chasing market trends, boom-and-bust production cycles, and a winnowing down of stable, long-term game development companies to call home.
“This game was achieved by giving each person’s ideas and skills a thumbs up and fusing them together,” Motokura said. “And it doesn’t end there. I hope to continue the fusing process with all the game developers who are here today. Let’s create fun games and drive excitement. Finally, I want to give a thumbs-up to everyone here.”
