Donkey Kong Bananza Started Development As Soon As Mario Odyssey Launched

July 17, 2025

5

It’s no secret that Grand Theft Auto 6 has been in development for a while. The last game in the series launched in 2013 (12 years ago), and Rockstar’s most recent title, Red Dead Redemption 2, is a little under seven years old. Given the size and scope of the next GTA, a long development cycle is to be expected, and that was confirmed by Take-Two, which rebuffed rumors that development started in 2018 and instead confirmed it “began in earnest” in 2020.

“We prioritized fun and playability.”

Color me surprised, then, when Nintendo just confirmed that the upcoming Donkey Kong Bananza, a game about a little monkey, has been in development for significantly longer than Rockstar’s tentpole release.

Donkey Kong Bananza Has Been In Development For Almost Eight Years

donkey kong bananza swinging a punch in bananza with pauline on his back. — via Nintendo

I’m being reductive in the sentence above. Donkey Kong Bananza is going to be far more than a game about a little monkey. It’s coming from the incredibly talented team that created Super Mario Odyssey, after all, but like many games in this current age, it’s taken an awfully long time to develop.

In a new interview with La Vanguardia, Bananza producer Kenta Motokura and director Kazuya Takahashi shared the extent of just how long the creation of Donkey Kong’s next mainline adventure has taken.

“I can’t give you very precise details, I can tell you that we started developing it after finishing Super Mario Odyssey (2017),” said Motukura when questioned on when development started. That’s a total of almost eight years, three years longer than GTA 6 has supposedly been in the works, and roughly as long as Starfield took to create. It’s no surprise then, given how long the game has taken to create, to see it move from the original Nintendo Switch to the Switch 2.

I’m a huge Nintendo fan myself, but it’s hard to imagine that Bananza has the same scale and scope as either of those games above, and it serves to highlight just how wild game development has become.

I can tell you that we started developing it after finishing Super Mario Odyssey.

Motokura also shared the reason that it took Nintendo so long to release a brand-new Donkey Kong game, saying, “At Nintendo, we make many types of games, and we always think about what best fits the type of experience we want to create at any given time. We felt this was the right time to develop this game.”

Here’s hoping that Bananza has been in development alongside the next 3D Mario adventure, as I’m not sure I can wait another eight years for one of those.