Although Donkey Kong has been prominently featured in a number of recent Super Mario projects, it has been 10 years since his last brand new solo outing Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze.

According to an article by DK Vine and followed up by a video from DidYouKnowGaming, Vicarious Visions (now known as Blizzard Albany) was actually working on a Donkey Kong game codenamed “Freedom”. Sources claimed that the game was a 3D open-world experience, which featured a mechanic where Donkey Kong would grind on vines to traverse the world, drawing upon the studio’s experience developing Tony Hawk games. One interesting anecdote claims that Shigeru Miyamoto was concerned about “rope burns” on Donkey Kong’s feet, with the devs eventually having the character use banana peels while grinding to alleviate this issue.

Vicarious Visions allegedly received Switch dev kits and carved out a walled section of their offices to work on the game, but it was ultimately cancelled by the studio’s owner Activision six months in. Reportedly, this was due to the poor performance of the Skylanders series, and the publisher decided to shift focus away from single-player games.

You can check out the full video from DidYouKnowGaming below, or read the DK Vine’s article here.

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