It turns out this Rare platformer is hiding some dark secrets. ROM corruption is one of the more interesting ways players mess with games after release. At its most basic level, ROM corruption involves messing with game data using various tools. It can be useful to uncover how games work, and also result in games breaking in amazing ways.
Look what happens to Super Mario Bros., for example:
When YouTuber mystman12 decided to start corrupting Donkey Kong Country, he expected weirdness. You never know what you’re going to get when the game’s not functioning normally.
What he didn’t expect, however, was the Rare platform to turn into a horror game, as the game’s lovely soundtrack was bent, twisted, and warped into something out of a John Carpenter film.
It wasn’t just that, though. Creepy music only scratched the surface. Something much darker was lurking in this world, he just didn’t know it yet.
We have, of course, the glitchy visuals that one comes to expect from a ROM corruption.
While goofing around, mystman12 ends up dying, but when he starts the same level over again, he’s somewhere else, another stage in Donkey Kong Country.
Weird, sure, but not that weird. While progressing through the stage, he enters a room full of bananas. If you’ve played Donkey Kong Country, you know spots like this are incredibly common. He begins collecting the bananas, despite how distracting the game is looking now.
What’s waiting for him at the end, though, is…well, unexpected.
If you’re wondering if that’s the corpse of Diddy Kong, you’re right. For whatever reason, the game has decided to pull a single, unsettling frame from Diddy Kong’s death animation and placed it at the end of this other unnerving sequence in which Donkey Kong is disembodied.
Diddy Kong doesn’t move. Whatever he saw before he passed, it left him in a state of shock.
When you die as Diddy Kong in Donkey Kong Country, here’s the animation it pulls:
Did you catch it?
Yep, that’s a dead Diddy Kong. Who knew Rare’s platformer was hiding such dark secrets?
When mystman12 realised what was happening, there was only one option: embrace fate.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Comments
8 responses to “Corrupted Donkey Kong Country Is Basically A Horror Game”
Ooh 10/10 glitch game.
Meanwhile….the hours (days, weeks, months maybe) that I clocked on this game. Was amazing. Speaking of amazing…..remember that aussie kids tv show A*Mazing….where there was a maze that the teams had to find stuff in and a giant keyboard to spell stuff out on and then the final challenger was a video game one and one season they did F1 racing lap time, another was fly swatting on mario paint and then another was bananas collected in DK. good times.
A*Mazing was the tits.
There was a campaign to bring it back a couple of years ago but I don’t think it got very far.
YouTube has a pretty decent collection of clips though. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=a%2Amazing
that was such an awesome show! i started at a new primary school in grade 5 and told everyone that i was on a*mazing at my old school. and that our team ended up getting to the final maze and we found all the keys and won the gameboy. years later i was telling some mates in highschool about it, forgetting that one of the guys in our group went to that primary school with me, and he said ‘but you were on a*mazing, weren’t you?’ i totally ruined the best thing that never happened to me.
I remember that. I can sum it up in four words.
“Look in the boot!” 😛
The idea of DKC on A*mazing was to get as many bananas as possible. I remember someone doing the banana cheat where you’d walk back into the house and come out to the bananas returning. After that they switched to gnat attack
Thought I was replying to an above comment but logging in changed it.
It’s incredible how good this game still looks almost 20 years later.