Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, March 14, 2025. Below, we take a look at how the unusual platformer had a spark unlike anything else in the series.
When fans think of the Donkey Kong series’ platforming games, it’s easy to consider the timeline as one that began with Rare and its groundbreaking CG graphics in the SNES era before the baton was eventually picked up by Retro Studios with Donkey Kong Country Returns. In Nintendo’s history of wacky and inventive ways to play games, there is perhaps nothing quite as bizarre as Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, released in North America in 2005 for GameCube, which gave the iconic ape a stopgap to remember in between the Rare and Retro eras.
The credit can’t all go to the Kyoto company though, quite literally so because this was in fact the debut of its newly established EAD (Entertainment, Analysis and Development) Tokyo studio designed to attract new talent from Japan’s capital. Even the technology that’s front-and-center in Donkey Kong Jungle Beat wasn’t created by Nintendo but rather Namco in its 2003 music spin-off Donkey Konga.
The DK Bongos felt like a natural extension of drumming in its popular Taiko no Tatsujin series. While a microphone also detects hand claps, it otherwise follows rhythm game conventions of tapping the drums of clapping in time to notes on screen.
Call it another example of lateral thinking, but the strange minds at EAD Tokyo, led by Super Mario Sunshine co-director Yoshiaki Koizumi, somehow came up with an unconventional way of using this controller, all while taking Donkey Kong back to his side-scrolling fundamentals.
Rather divisively, Jungle Beat eschews many of the staples from the Donkey Kong Country series–no rolling jumps, no collectible jigsaw pieces or KONG letters, not even Diddy Kong–in favor of a simple story where DK goes through different kingdoms battling evil kings from across the animal kingdom in a bid to come out as the top banana.
The stripped-back approach was in service of the simpler controls. Beating the left or right drum individually makes DK move in that corresponding direction–rapidly to make him move faster, while beating both together makes him jump. Meanwhile, clapping your hands sends out a shockwave that stuns enemies caught in the radius, collects nearby bananas, and interacts with objects like vines and catapults. Helpfully, this also mitigates the need for exact precision.
While the game garnered some criticism over being more simplistic and lacking in the secrets and challenge of the Country series, Jungle Beat is anything but easy. What makes it replayable is its score-attack system. Rather than just getting to the end of a level, it’s about earning as many bananas as possible, and the way to get more bananas is by earning more beats. For instance, you could just walk and jump to collect the bananas onscreen, but if you clap, the shockwave collects them all around you instantly, which in turn increases your beat score.
Defeating enemies and interacting with objects also gains beats, but the real trick is performing all these actions together while airborne, which builds up a combo. The higher the combo, the more beats and bananas you get–one way of gaining more beats is not from bananas but flowers. At the end of each kingdom, your banana total also determines your rank, where you’re awarded a crest for bronze, silver and gold, which is important as it’s also how you unlock more levels in the game.
Rather than a world map made of different levels that culminate in a boss fight, each kingdom is made up of two levels and a boss battle, which have to be completed before you’re scored. However, you can’t collect any more bananas during the boss battles, some which include rival Kongs that take the form of one-on-one brawls where you have to avoid a punch at the right time before bashing the drums for a counter.
It then ups the stakes, as you try to avoid getting hit, which causes you to lose bananas, which also counts as your health. Having hundreds means the game is incredibly generous when it comes to life, but there’s nothing worse than having racked up over 800 bananas (the number required for a gold crest in the first two stages) only to mess up against the boss and drop a rank.
While this simple control scheme still allows for some interesting maneuvers like backflips and wall jumps, the execution isn’t without its flaws. Even if the instruction manual warns that the bongos are highly sensitive, in the heat of playing Jungle Beat, it’s all too easy to beat the drums so hard (especially when it feels like a beat hasn’t been registered) that the microphone mistakes it for a clap instead, while even a brief session is likely to leave your palms sore from so much clapping. But even though you can technically play with a regular GameCube controller, and some would argue using the C-stick triggers shockwaves with more precision than hand claps, that would also largely rob the game of its unique charm.
Looking back, Jungle Beat might be more of a curio before Retro picked up the baton years later, while EAD Tokyo arguably went on to far greater feats, its next project being all-time classic Super Mario Galaxy. Yet with its design to make a more approachable game that could appeal to more players with a unique control scheme, you can see that kind of thinking as a precursor to the Wii’s philosophy. It did receive a Wii port sans bongos. And while it may not have resulted in a sequel, I can’t help but think that it was influential in its own way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the streamers who beat Dark Souls with a dance mat or a banana hadn’t come across Jungle Beat first.
With Retro focused on the upcoming Metroid Prime 4, there’s been speculation that Nintendo is once again internally developing a new Donkey Kong game, which would make sense following the opening of the Donkey Kong Country area in Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World. Whatever the future holds, I can only hope that it contains ideas even a fraction as bananas as Jungle Beat’s.
