The Cancelled 'Donkey Kong' Reboot? - Return of Donkey Kong 

There was another Donkey Kong game released a few months prior to Donkey Kong Country, and that was Donkey Kong 94 on the Game Boy.

I always wanted this game to be something like DK 94 but for NES. I love that game and I love the DK series so that’s my dream. Your idea that Return of DK became DK Classics is a huuuuuuuuuge stretch

I always had a feeling "Return of Donkey Kong" was a concept that was leaked to Nintendo's official publications before it even got to the drawing board, and the game just never made it past the idea stage. As in someone in a board meeting said "Hey. Let's make a new Donkey Kong Game," someone thought it was going to happen and spread the word of a "Return of Donkey Kong" game concept, like it was going to go anywhere beyond that. No concept of what the game could be, no idea of what the end result was, and the idea of a new DK game was just a "let's put a pin in it" that never got revisited again.

I think, rather than a reboot, this would've been Donkey Kong 4 effectively.

I found you on twitter, and I wanted to recomend a video idea: Game development for the NES vs the PS4 ( there might be more documentation for it then the xbox or pc) Like how they changed coding languages and largerstudios, and the development of tools.

I think they re-worked this into Donkey Kong for the Game Boy

From the sound of it my theory is that Nintendo was planning a reboot of Donkey Kong similar to DKC but thanks to the SNES they shelved it until Rare got into the picture a couple years later. This advertising blurb is merely a remnant of this original Donkey Kong reboot idea that would go on to become DKC.

what i think that return of donkey would look like is where mario need to get up to donkey Kong like the original game but unlike the original the game is going to have a sidescrolling platform like kid Icarus style in worlds 1 and 3 i also imagine that would be alot more enemies like enemies from the game mario bros and probably other mario is probably going to have more efficient power ups and probably the plot of the game is that donkey Kong wants to get a revenge on mario

That game was a rumor. A whisper of a rumor. I remember hearing about it back in 88. It wasn't DK Classics. It was the original concept for Donkey Kong Country before the SNES came out.

I think this is kind of a stretch tbh, not impossible but I don't think it's what happened - mostly because of what Donkey Kong Classics is. Both of the ports on Donkey Kong Classics came out in 1983 and are simply repackaged together on Classics with no changes, and I don't think that would've involved over a year of development time, or have changed so radically in development that the magazine mentions had to be so vague. I definitely think that Return of Donkey Kong was intended to be an original game, since we know from the Nintendo Gigaleak that Nintendo did try to reboot the DK series before Rareware created Donkey Kong Country (we have two prototypes of a SNES game called "Super Donkey" that has a Yoshi's Island-meets-Rayman art style). However, with how vague the magazines are, and how we've never seen any prototypes leak, I don't think Return got very far into development before being cancelled. 1987 and especially 1988 were busy years for Nintendo EAD (amongst other projects, this was when Doki Doki Panic was retooled into Mario 2 USA, as well as when Mario 3 was being finished), I wonder if the problem was that the team was too busy with other projects to complete another original NES game on top of everything else. Then by 1989, it was obvious the NES was on the way out and the Super Nintendo was in early pre-production, so they decided to hold off until its release in 1990, with Super Donkey having been worked on in 91 and 92 according to file metadata in the leaks.

This video is great

There was an arcade called donkey Kong returns which is part two to the original game n more levels now it could be a lost game that’s a rom hack or a made up rom hack but I’ve played it it’s just as fun

What is the music at 4:50? I know I've heard it many times but can't put my finger on it. Is it from the wii?

AI is taking over

Actually I think the return of dk was a beta for donkey Kong country