Nintendo has confirmed fan suspicions that the upcoming Donkey Kong Bananza game for the Switch 2 console has been developed by the same team that worked on Super Mario Odyssey. A handful of previews for DK Bananza went live yesterday after some media were given the opportunity to play four hours of the game, and coming out of the event, Nintendo confirmed the development team.
If you don’t know, the team behind Super Mario Odyssey is also part of Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning and Development division. This group consists of over ten Nintendo first-party teams who work on various projects internally at the company. EPD Production Group No.8 was the team that created Super Mario Odyssey and Galaxy. However, back in the day, Nintendo didn’t refer to its development divisons as EPD, but rather, the EAD Tokyo.
EPD Production Group No.8 has been known for working on various 3D Mario games, including Super Mario 3D World. It gets even better: Nintendo EPD Group No.8 consists of director Kenta Motokura and producers Yoshiaki Koizumi and Koichi Hayashida. While they haven’t been credited on the game yet, they have likely been part of the development on Bananza. The team were also directors and producers on Super Mario Odyssey.
While this might not sound like a big deal, it really is. To compare this Nintendo news to other industry content would sort of be like saying that “Naughty Dog is working on Uncharted 5”. It essentially means that the best Mario 3D team, who have produced some of the award-winning games in the past, such as Super Mario Galaxy and 3D World, has cooked up Donkey Kong Bananza.
Nintendo might not have fancy studio names for its development team, but the confirmation is good news for fans. Donkey Kong Bananza is set to launch exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on 17 July. Catch up on the latest Nintendo Direct showcase here, where over 15 minutes of gameplay was revealed for the game.
