How Nintendo Built Donkey Kong Bananza's Satisfying Destruction

Donkey Kong Bananza on Switch 2 lets players destroy almost everything in its levels, and includes a menu option to restore a level if you go too far. The team put destruction at the heart of the design but also made sure the world looked worth smashing; "It's more fun to destroy something that doesn't look like it can be destroyed," said software engineer Tatsuya Kurihara.

The average level uses 347,070,464 individually destructible voxels to create that effect. The feature grew from voxel work Kurihara did in Super Mario Odyssey for snow drifts and destructible objects, which he prototyped into a bigger idea — an early test showed a Goomba with two giant fists bashing through the Wooded Kingdom.

"After making a box or prototype, I felt the ability to destroy any part of the terrain was a satisfying new interaction," he said, and producer Kenta Motokura pushed to use those mechanics for a new Donkey Kong game.

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