 Well, folks, I get to break up all this tears of the kingdom videos we've been making to tell you the truth as we know it today about 3D Donkey Kong. Man, I've been looking into this story for a couple of weeks. There have been people that have been digging into this for many, many years. But the reason I want to revisit this story is two-fold. One, I've gotten confirmation from somebody who is prominent in the journalism field after reaching out to several different journalists that this project was real. In addition, there was a brand new podcast episode dropped by DK Vine called the Kong Conversation. That's the name of their podcast. I subscribe to their Patreon so I can get early access to it. They will release publicly on Sunday and you can listen to their discussion around this where they dive into several sources they had that gave a bunch of information. Now, there's a lot of reasons we need to talk about this. We need to go over what I have talked about in the past, revisit some of that. And we also need to talk about the stuff from the Kong Conversation and reveal new details about this now cancelled 3D Donkey Kong game made by Vicarious Visions. Now, before we do that, we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers. Man, I can't believe I'm even saying that right now. If we get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out, we will give away 8 Tears of the Kingdom Collector's Edition. Heck, we'll probably throw in the pin from Pax. Maybe even more. Who knows at this point. Just know I appreciate every single one of you for watching my videos. Subscribing, liking, leaving those comments. Keeping the gaming conversations moving forward. Alright, so first let's talk about the stuff that we've... I've been on before. There's been some select people out there that have had some choice words about the things that I have said about Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong, our last podcast episode, at least at the time of recording this last week, is now our most viewed episode of Season 2 of the Nintendo Prime podcast, specifically because of the things I was talking about with Donkey Kong. Kind of interesting because I never expected my own podcast to get picked up by news outlets over Donkey Kong, but that's exactly what happened. And the interesting part about that is something I talked about in there. That I want to clarify. I mentioned in that conversation that I had seen 40 seconds of this supposed game. Now, I at this time am not 1,000% confident that I wasn't duped. A lot of the evidence provided to me that this was real was basically images of the vicarious vision's office. And the problem is, I have since discovered that some of these images have been circling in the behind-the-scenes territory among many fans for a while, meaning that someone could have got ahold of these, use those images to try to verify who they are, and then duped me with the footage. So I'm not 100% confident in that. But what I am confident in is that vicarious vision was indeed working on a 3D Donkey Kong game because I've had confirmation from somebody who I can't tell you who it is, other than they're a pretty big name journalist, and I've been talking to several of them to chase down this story. Now, this gets into the details we have today and the truth behind all of this. Because one thing we talked about on my podcast was that the game was called Donkey Kong Freedom. Well, we have some details on what that actually was. It turns out it was a code name, so it was what the game was called, but it was not going to be the final name. And people, some particular people, went ahead and typed in Donkey Kong Freedom on YouTube and found a YouTube channel that has a game on it called Donkey Kong Freedom. And what it actually is, is a fan-made game in PlayStation Dreams game because you can make your own games in there. And it was based on the rumors because these rumors have been around for a couple of years. And so this fan, this crazy fan who I've actually been talking to behind the scenes, made a bunch of stuff. But he even put out a YouTube short explaining that he just created a fan game based off the rumors and that's the story of that existence. But, you know, some people just kind of thought I was just making things up and what I really was talking about was some stupid fan game on YouTube. Now, we were talking about something that was tangible and real. Now, let's get into the conversation. It is arguably the world's number one Donkey Kong podcast. I'm not sure how many Donkey Kong podcasts exist because it's honestly never been a territory I've dived into. I listened to more general Nintendo, sometimes some Zelda podcast or Mario podcast. But I will say that this information seems to mostly check out with stuff I have already heard. So I think it's worth covering. And that's why I labeled this video The Truth behind 3D Donkey Kong because I know it to be real. This is without a doubt real to me. So here's the information drawn in that podcast and you can listen to their full 2 hour 40 minute plus discussion on it on Sunday when it goes live. I will link to where, a spot where they post the episodes publicly on Sunday. I'm not going to link to the private one because you need to be a member of their Patreon although I might link to their Patreon if you guys for some reason want to dive in and listen for yourself early. I think it's only fair if I'm making a video on their information but I also plug their Patreon. Alright, so Nintendo asked Vicarious Visions about making a Donkey Kong game after being impressed with how they handled Donkey Kong in Skylanders. Alright, the 3D platformer code name was Donkey Kong Freedom. Again, important to note that wasn't going to be the final name of the game. That was the internal code name. It's like NX, right? It eventually became the Nintendo Switch but it's code name was NX. They use code names of games when they don't have finalized names. Alright, they were trying to create a Donkey Kong Country game but in 3D. It would have kinetic gameplay involving moving around obstacles and vine swinging. Vine grinding was also a thing and you could slide down the vines originally on his feet, Donkey Kong could. But Miyamoto didn't really like that he could slide on his feet. He didn't really think that was practical so they ended up creating banana shoes and when they presented this to Miyamoto, he was really, really happy. He thought that was a brilliant way to implement vine grinding because he didn't really hate the idea. He'd hate the idea that he would be doing it barefoot so they came up with this concept and yeah, they ended up using that grinding I believe in a future game that they worked on. That means that's a different story. Let's focus here on Donkey Kong himself. Now, Miyamoto was actually heavily involved with this project. He was very hands on, he was very aware of everything happening. You guys think Mario and Zelda might be his baby but he really babies Donkey Kong apparently. It is his bread and butter, it is the start of his famous career and he wants to make sure Donkey Kong is done right in his mind. Now, this game was in development for one to two years and it was in development for Nintendo Switch. So that's what we know right now. Now, we have some plot details. Remember, this is a cancelled game by the way. See, none of this is spoilers because we're never getting this game but the plot was that a factory opened up in the Donkey Kong, Kongo, Jungle and owners of the factory dammed the river of the jungle drying up the Mandana trees causing a crisis. It never really got far enough into development to establish who the primary villains were or anything. However, they obviously discussed the Kremlins, no surprise. So Diddy Kong would have been in the game but he wouldn't have been playable individually. He would have been in some prior Donkey Kong games where he was on Donkey Kong's back. So while he's in the game and you could probably do some things with him he wasn't playable individually. Pauline, however, was a playable character but only playable in specific sections of the game. So not overall playable for the whole of the game. She was going to be completely redesigned from the design she had in 1994 and she would have been serving this role of a human coming to help protect the apes from the dangers coming in from the outside world. So the factory and all that, she was there to protect them. Ramby would be in the game as a rideable animal and that seems to be the only buddy character that existed at this time. The game was only in development for one to two years so it wasn't fully fleshed out the way that a complete project would be. Now, as for why this game got cancelled it seems to be a combo of two factors. One was that the Bauer brothers who founded Vicarious Visions while they were in high school left the company in April of 2016. Then, whoever the... What's not clear here is if it's the new leadership or if it was Activision themselves because Activision owns Vicarious Visions or at least did before they shut the studio down the interesting part here is whoever was in charge at the time whether it was Activision or New Leaders they assigned at the company basically said, you know what I think we need to stop working on Donkey Kong because we're not going to make as much money off this property. We think it's a better financial decision for us to move you guys to helping out on Destiny 2. They basically just said, look it's not that we hate what you're doing but we don't want to share money with Nintendo we think this is a better choice. So they went ahead and moved on to Destiny 2 and eventually on to other projects as well, Crash Insane Trilogy, etc. Now remember Crash because this is going to be important in a moment the trees and foliage in this game are actually the exact trees and foliage in the Crash Insane Trilogy. So if you go and play that game and you just start paying attention to the jungle areas with the trees and the foliage it was the exact same models they were using in Donkey Kong Freedom. Now it's not really sure if they existed in Donkey Kong Freedom first or if they were just some like a general asset they had created for games and they happened to use it in the Crash Insane Trilogy and also while they were working on this game but if you want an idea of some of the visual art style of this game that's where you can you can find some information. So in the end Nintendo was obviously disappointed at Activision's or the new leadership's decision but Miyamoto didn't want to just not make a Donkey Kong game. So he decided hey let's just do this ourselves. Now what does that mean? Do this ourselves? Are they making a 3D Donkey Kong? What the hell is Nintendo doing? Not necessarily. We don't know that it's going to be a 3D Donkey Kong we don't know what it's going to be because there's nothing about the Donkey Kong game made by Nintendo themselves and there hasn't really been information that's come out. So all of this is really just to tell you a story of a forgotten game that we will never get to see because it was never far enough along for us to see it. To give you an idea of how not far along it was there weren't any enemies in the game. They weren't even far enough into the game to put enemies. They were really focused on core mechanics and core gameplay elements and making sure it ran well. That's basically the premise I got from the conversation and it lines up with some stuff that I've heard as well. So all I can say on this is this seems to be the truth on this game as it stands today. I know there's many people out there that maybe want to call me out maybe want to expose me who I got the information from because duh, and no I'm not going to sit there and try to point you in a direction of who the conversation sources might be either. What I will say is you can hear it from them yourself by joining their Patreon or waiting until Sunday. Alright guys, you're amazing you're awesome, remember that and I'll catch you in the next video.