Remember Donkey Kong 64 in which Donkey had the Coconut Gun, an iconic weapon in it’s own right.
But in early builds of the game, this weapon was originally a realistic shotgun that fired proper bullets instead of coconuts.
Footage of the build with the shotgun can be seen in some early promos of Donkey Kong 64:
In an interview with Gamesradar, Donkey Kong 64‘s creative director George Andreas recounted the story about how the Coconut Gun came to be. And you might be amazed …
It came as a result of the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto’s horrified reaction to seeing Donkey Kong blasting enemies apart with a realistic shotgun.
Donkey Kong 64 – Killer game
Miyamoto-san, Iwata-san, and Howard Lincoln – chairman of Nintendo America at the time – came to our new studio. We switched on the game, they saw the rap, and then I started running around as DK. I swung on some vines, collected bananas, and they were beginning to really smile.
And then I pressed the button to pull out the gun. It wasn’t a textured gun that you might expect but a realistic shotgun with bullets flying out and with horrifying sound effects. You get so used to things being in development, even if it is a placeholder, and I completely forgot that it was in there. I’m shooting beavers, turned to my side, and see this look of horror on Miyamoto’s face!
Then he smiled and, taking some paper and a pencil, drew a coconut gun in front of us. It had leaves on it and he handed it to me. I looked at it and said ‘Oh yeah, that’s cool, we’ll put that in’ and the coconut gun was put in after that.
Well we made an impression of DK64 with a realistic shotgun above in our featured image … well we are glad they went with the Coconut gun here for sure!
