Rare's Donkey Kong games are back to Nintendo?

[John Enigma]

Now? After all these years?

Literally, the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy, the original Donkey Kong Land trilogy, and now recently, Donkey Kong 64, all made from the original Rare people (before it was bought by Micro$oft), now fully belong to Nintendo (in their eShop's Virtual Console library, of course).

My question is still the same: why, after so many years?

Does anybody know any legit/reliable answers?

[Taylor]

Well, the DKC games came out on the Wii virtual store years ago. It's not like they've all suddenly come from nowhere, although I imagine Tropical Breeze etc. convinced Nintendo to push the DK franchise a bit more on the Wii U.

[John Enigma]

[Taylor]

I'm not sure. I never knew Nintendo removed DKC from the Wii, but I suspect they did in order to make the Wii U release a big deal and sell more copies. Wii U versions are more expensive than the Wii versions... It's probably all to do with marketing.

I have no idea why DK64 wasn't released on the Wii. They never released many N64 titles, so maybe it was just that they didn't feel it was worth it/iconic enough compared to games like Mario 64.

As I said, Donkey Kong has recently made a comeback with Tropical Freeze etc. so that explains Nintendo reintroducing the older games. Kids are familiar with Donkey Kong again, so it's the perfect time to sell the franchise.

[Scrubber]

There has never been a legal issue everything Donkey Kong belongs to Nintendo. The dkc series has been on Wii for YEARS. It was taken down to big up the WiiU release. The issue with DK64 will have been that one of RARES properties (Jetpac) was in the game. I'm guessing this has been removed from the WIIU version. I sure hope it has been removed I HATE it.

[John Enigma]

[Alph]

No one knows why the Donkey Kong Country games were removed from the Wii Virtual Console several years ago, but it's unlikely that it was marketing related. Nintendo never took down any of their other classic games in order to promote their release on the Wii U eshop, so why do that with DKC? Also, why wouldn't they have released them on the eshop LAST year so as to coincide with Tropical Freeze? Instead they waited until this year to release them seemingly at random, along with the Donkey Kong Land games (which had never been released before) and now Donkey Kong 64 (which also had never been released before).



It really does look like Nintendo managed to come to an amiable agreement with Microsoft in regards to Rare's DK games. Especially after Phil Spencer's recent tweet about having no issues working with Nintendo.

[John Enigma]