Some ‘rough scribbles’ of old at Rare
Aside from my normal rotation of upcoming YouTube topics I’ve been watching a few times a week lately, my feed was full of everything but modern video games – hardware modes, console fixes, little known stuff about my favorite series, crazy lists, and everything in between.
It’s completely on the brand that I would come across a video of the former rare artist Kev Bayliss covering its original Donkey Kong Country sketches – including the iconic Animal Buddies – from 1993.
These are some of the “original scribbles we used as a basis to model our 3D graphics” Donkey Kong Country, “he said.” There really is not much here – it’s just a lot of scribbles – and as I say, it’s very crude, but that was all we needed the day before we started modeling our characters. ‘
“We just needed a few sketches to refer to them and say ‘Yes, we want a frog’, and then we would probably have our natural history books or whatever we had on our desks in front of the internet have, consult, and we will look into all the finer details. ‘
“If you were to present it as concept art these days, people would just laugh at you,” Bayliss added.
I especially like the scratched out names that have not been used (Rambi the Rhino is suggested here as “Rhidocerus”) and the “meaner”, more Roadblocksesque variations considered He also showed a snake enemy of the Slippas who could stun the Kongs and an early look at the Kremlin.
As for DK itself, Bayliss said the character’s relationships are meant to ‘work better as a platform rather than a villain at the top of the screen’, thus redesigning the more ‘boxy’ and ‘compact’.
It’s fascinating to see the original fax that “came over from Nintendo” compared to Bayliss’ sketches.
Filed under …