Donkey Kong Country 1–3

When Rare showed Nintendo the first footage of Donkey Kong Country in 1994, the story goes that at first nobody believed such graphics were actually running on the SNES. And no wonder. The British studio reached for the then-astronomically expensive Silicon Graphics workstations and modeled its characters and environments in 3D, which it then pre-rendered into 2D sprites. The result was a look nobody expected on a 16-bit console — sculpted, glossy, almost tangible. For the aging SNES it was a weapon that helped it keep pace with the emerging 32-bit competition.

But Donkey Kong Country was never just a technical exercise. Beneath the flashy surface lay a first-rate platformer. You play as Donkey and the nimble Diddy Kong, switching between them on the fly, riding mine carts, blasting out of barrels, swimming through underwater caves and relying on animal buddies like Rambi the rhino or Expresso the ostrich. The second and third installments refined the formula further — the pirate-themed second game with the duo of Diddy and Dixie is, for many players, the absolute peak of the whole trilogy.

The first game alone sold over nine million copies, making it one of the most successful titles of the entire SNES era. The series helped cement Rare as one of the finest studios of the 1990s and gave the ape hero a pop-culture life of his own, well outside Mario's herd.

An inseparable part of the magic is David Wise's music. His atmospheric compositions — hypnotic underwater themes or melancholic snow passages like the legendary „Stickerbush Symphony“ from the second game — rank among the most acclaimed soundtracks of the 16-bit era and still appear on lists of the best video game music of all time.

The trilogy gradually saw ports to the Game Boy Advance and re-releases via virtual storefronts, and its legacy was later carried forward by Retro Studios in the Donkey Kong Country Returns series. Yet the 1990s originals remain the benchmark for just how great a classic platformer can look and play.

Why play it: For visuals that stunned the entire world in 1994, and for three beautifully tuned platformers with one of the finest game soundtracks ever made.