"Donkey Kong Country EXPOSED - The Making of Donkey Kong Country" (1994)

A fun VHS promotion showcasing the making and the upcoming release of "Donkey Kong" for the Nintendo 64.

Receiving promotional VHS tapes in the mail, like I did with the tape of Mervyn's California Grand Opening, this tape was video game based. As you can see from the pictures, I kept this tape closely within my video collection but have also never played it! For the sake of review, I finally did and here are the results:

THIS is what a promotional video outputted on VHS should look like! We get host Josh Wolf traveling to Nintendo of America, Inc. to interview some workers in the company developing a new game for the Super Nintendo. That game happens to be Donkey Kong Country.

Along with brief intros and a small tour of the offices at Nintendo of America, Inc., there are clips of the game interspersed throughout. Along the way, you learn where the idea of Donkey Kong came about—through a friend from a UK video game company called RARE>—and you even get video gaming tips from video game testers Henry and Isaac.

At the end of the video was quirky but a bit amusing. You see an "Easter egg" of the host barging into a room, only to get kicked out after seeing the employees play Killer Instinct. Yeah, that was it.

As always, these promotional tapes almost never get preserved nor do they pop up at online/auction websites. Out of our courtesy, here's the full video of this tape uploaded by third-party fans, who, too, have this VHS:

Video ends...with no credits whatsoever. It's a sad thing when this was very well done, and well edited.

I think the most fascinating thing about this was the fact that a lot of [retro] video gamers still own this tape making it worthwhile. Near the end of the video, you see the text "NOT ON SEGA." This was during the time the 16-bit wars were still in effect, until years later when Sony released a 32-bit console after failing to contractually agree collaborating with Nintendo. In case you haven't seen, there was a prototype called the Nintendo PlayStation which is so rare, you may have to sell both your house and your car, plus an arm and a leg for good measure. Still, both companies faltered and are still currently in heated competition. (In fact, Sega did the same with the Dreamcast but it didn't win over video gamers which is hard to believe. How can anyone not own a Dreamcast?)

Alright well, anyway, promotional video tapes aren't too much a benefactor as they are just low-cost commercials outputted to tape to tell people about an amazing venture into a new product/business that bound to brew in the future. Imagine how many tapes they'd have to get duplicated and produced to market this; That's quite a lot of tapes to mail out. Nevertheless, it was a neat ol' time.

This video tape briefly showed the efforts into making Donkey Kong Country but not completely, despite that this is a promo tape and not a documentary. I see this more of an overview, behind the scenes stuff into bringing Donkey Kong into life. Just thought I'd clarify to avoid confusion when interpreting the VHS title containing the words "making of."

If you manage to snag this tape from online shops, it may not be a huge collectible item but it's a blast from the past. Video gaming culture has changed drastically, along with the marketing methods companies integrated to keep in steady competition against the other video game producers. Looking back at videos like this, it's somewhat amusing to see what video gamers thought about those newly-released games when video game reviewers, like The Angry Video Game Nerd, has given old games a piece of his mind for being sources of "cash grabs"—video games made to snag money, not caring about bad reviews or proper enjoyment. However, Donkey Kong Country is a pure classic and is not a bad game anyway (review here on SHOWSOTROS coming in the future).

No doubt that this was a very well made promotional video. Yeah, it's a bit humorous seeing and hearing the reactions from the gentlemen in their reactions to the gameplay and the game itself. Things like that strike a cord in our hearts to remind ourselves how uncertain things were during that time, only to smirk it off now that we look back. That's what makes these VHS tapes valuable.

If you really want an official, physical copy of this video, I bid you the best of luck in your search or even talking on online video gaming communities trying to meet someone who may have one they love to get rid of or sell. This video tape defines the nineties.

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he started blogging in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, plus playing old video/MS-DOS games, digital video archiving, listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

• About me • Contact me