Diddy Kong Racing Wad Wii
Nayme Cutforth
As part of our end-of-year celebrations, we're digging into the archives to pick out some of the best Time Extension content from the past year. You can check out our other republished content here. Enjoy!
Kev Bayliss is famous for working on Rare titles like Battletoads and Killer Instinct and is currently working at Playtonic Games, home of Yooka-Laylee and friends. Today marks the 25th birthday of Diddy Kong Racing, another of Bayliss' titles, so now is the perfect time for him to recount the development of the N64 classic that gave Mario Kart a run for its money.
It might surprise you to learn that I hold such affection for Diddy Kong Racing, given that I'm the person who designed the Battletoads and Fulgore from Killer Instinct! But it's true, and it all started a little something like this. Shortly after completing work on Killer Instinct II, I started creating a character for a platform game on the N64 with Chris Tilston, the lead designer for the Killer Instinct series.
I was appointed as the new character developer, and there were the two 'Lees' - Lee Schuneman on design and artist Lee Musgrave, who had previously been working on character designs. Soon, Richard Gale, Rob Harrison, Martin Penny, John Pegg, Paul Mountain, David Wise, Keith Rabette, Dean Smith, Johnni Christensen and more amazing devs joined what was originally a team of two or three people to form a great family who all had a similar interest in racing games. We all got on extremely well, and it was a fun place to be.
Rob Harrison had the fantastic idea of using sprites to reduce the need for a large number of polygons to create wheels for the car and came up with some code to reuse the animated sprites on each vehicle. This mixing of 2D sprites and 3D polygons was something we knew would work because we had previously mixed them together in Killer Instinct, and when we tried it in Diddy Kong Racing, the results were amazing.
Nintendo asked us to try using Diddy Kong but not Donkey Kong, because he already appeared in Mario Kart, and this would have been confusing to have him appear in what could be seen as a competing racing game. They told us if we just call it 'Diddy Kong Racing' and placed him in as the main character, people would know what it was!
Kev is a Character Designer & Artist at Playtonic Games. He was previously Graphics Director at Rare Ltd and has worked on games such as Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing, Battletoads, Killer Instinct, Star Fox Adventures and many, many more.
This game deserves the "Nitro Fueled" treatment. The N64 version is too brutally punishing and drops cool stuff for the sake of framerate in multiplayer. The DS version is Too brutally easy, and sanitized the original visually (you never see diddys face when he goes around corners, it's like that Elijah wood scene in Eternal Sunshine). The track designs could use a bit of fleshing out, the game broke ground so understandably could be modified a bit for improvement. More characters and karts, another couple grand prixs, a bigger island with an even more open world feel in single player. And (most importantly) the ability to race multiplayer without single player progression. But the core is just so solid, I think it would easily sell ten to fifteen million copies if done as well as CTR (but with faster loading times).
Diddy Kong Racing is definitely something to be proud of. The controls hold up so much better than Mario Kart 64. It also had such variety of play with the different vehicles and adventure. I would love to see a successor in the form of Yooka-Laylee or anything else.
Best article on the site by far. It is always an absolute pleasure to read your insights into this game Kev! It makes perfect sense this jewel of a game was a joy to work on. That "wonderful" development period really shows in the final product.
First thing I remember about playing Diddy Kong Racing was realizing how much better it looked compared to Mario Kart 64, with 3D characters and all. The airplane was my very nice to ride, I spent ountless hours just flying around the main area, relaxing. It worked for me just like the Dolphin Park in Wave Race 64.
And I still consider DKR to be one of the best kart racers ever made. Though while it remains fun even on an old N64, a couple of Gameshark codes to get 60fps + widescreen + music in multiplayer can really make it shine today!
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