Every great game design starts somewhere. Often that somewhere is messy, experimental, and involves a lot of failure. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Nintendo gave a rare public window into how Donkey Kong Bananza, the Switch 2's acclaimed destruction platformer, grew from a single programmer's lunch break idea into one of the year's most celebrated releases.
The origin story is charmingly humble. Voxel technology had been used in Super Mario Odyssey for snow drifts and cheese blocks; programmer Tatsuya Kurihara decided to see if he could prototype those mechanics into something that could sustain an entire game. The result was not particularly dignified: a Goomba with two giant fists bashing through terrain.
This absurd little test proved unexpectedly potent. Kurihara found that the ability to destroy any part of terrain was satisfying, and he especially liked the idea of being able to rip off chunks and throw them. The team recognised they had stumbled onto something worth building around.
What made this spark ignite into something larger was the recognition that Donkey Kong himself was the perfect character to carry the concept. Kurihara noted that to make destruction satisfying, environments needed visual flourishes like patches of flowers, rock formations, and overgrown trees. In other words: it's more fun to smash something beautiful than something basic.
The creative lineage runs deeper than one prototype. Producer Kenta Motokura cited the influence of Super Mario Bros. World 1-2, the original game's first underground level, which offered multiple ways to proceed by smashing blocks to create paths; this inspired Bananza's destructive approach. Nintendo, it seems, has been thinking about interactive destruction for forty years.
The Technology Behind the Chaos
Voxels are simply 3D versions of pixels. Each voxel in Bananza contains information such as density, material properties, damage, wetness, and more. The numbers are staggering. The average level has around 347 million individually destructible voxels.
Creating those levels was simultaneously convenient and nightmarish. Building levels from voxels proved more convenient than traditional polygon modelling, allowing developers to quickly iterate by combining voxels and testing in-game. But hiding the voxels so players didn't notice the blocky underneath proved painstaking. Nintendo sought to ensure players wouldn't see the voxels themselves, limiting polygons to maintain smooth frame rates.
The original Nintendo Switch simply couldn't handle what the team envisioned. Development began on the original Switch but shifted to Switch 2 around 2021; the original system's limited memory struggled with the detailed environments. That hardware upgrade proved transformative. At 30 frames per second the destruction couldn't be fully captured; at 60 fps the team saw the sense of destruction come through much more clearly, with switch 2 unlocking the game's full potential.
The real question is whether all this technical wizardry actually matters to you, the player. It does, but only because it vanishes into the experience. Each level contains detailed visual elements including flowers, rock formations, and overgrown trees, designed so destruction feels meaningful; Kurihara explained that it's more fun to destroy something beautiful.
This is Nintendo's operating philosophy distilled: hide the complexity, surface the joy. A Goomba with fists turned into a gorilla with worlds to shatter. The technical scaffolding is elaborate, but the experience feels simple: punch, destroy, smile.