According to character designer Gregg Mayles on Twitter, after the announcement that King K. Rool would be in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a character that Gregg had named and designed the actions of, he revealed that the character was original called "KOMMANDER K. ROOL" and that Donkey Kong Country was originally to be called MONKEY MAYHEM. He also mentioned that the "K." in K. Rool does not actually stand for anything and the name itself is only intended to be a play on the word "cruel", though he joked that the initial could stand for something mundane and off-character, such as "Keith".

In addition, Gregg's brother Steve, who designed the look and visual design for the character, also revealed that the programmers thought King K. Rool was "too big" and too taxing on the game's memory, and thus several frames of the character's animation had to be dropped as a result.

According to Donkey Kong Country director Gregg Mayles in a discussion with Jirard Khalil (a.k.a. The Completionist), Cranky's infamous line "I did this using one life! And I took less than an hour!" during the credits was the last remnant of a scrapped mode where the player would be able to play as Cranky Kong, who would be much slower and in general perform poorly in comparison to Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong.

It was rumored that Shigeru Miyamoto disliked Donkey Kong Country. The rumor stated that Miyamoto said "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre game play as long as the art is good."

Later in an interview with IGN, Miyamoto clarified that he did in fact like Donkey Kong Country, and that he worked very closely with Rare on the game.

In an interview, Steve Mayles recalled that during the development of Donkey Kong Country, "Rareware had the most Silicon Graphics machines in the world next to Boeing" with Kev Bayliss adding "I seem to remember we actually received a phone call from the Ministry of Defence asking why we'd got all of this powerful hardware and what were we actually doing with it".