Early in development, Cranky had a much nicer personality compared to his mean spirited one he has in game.

The Kremlings in Donkey Kong Country were originally created for another game in development at the time, an unannounced cancelled point-and-click adventure game titled "Jonny Blastoff and the Kremling Armada", but Rare repurposed them for DKC and they seemed to fit perfectly.

In an earlier version of Donkey Kong Country, Jungle Hijinxs was known as "Jungle Japes". The title Jungle Japes was reused as the first level of Donkey Kong 64.

This game was Donkey Kong's only playable appearance in a main-series Donkey Kong game until Donkey Kong 64, despite the game's sequel and triquel games bearing the Donkey Kong Country name.

Cranky Kong is the antagonist in the original Donkey Kong arcade and NES game. The Donkey Kong that you play as is the grandson of Cranky Kong.

Diddy Kong was originally going to be Donkey Kong Junior. According to character designer Kevin Bayliss, Donkey Kong Jr. was given a significant redesign inspired by Coco the Monkey, a mascot used for the Kellogg's breakfast cereal Cocoa Krispies/Coco Pops. Nintendo felt that Rare's redesign was too different from the original appearance of Donkey Kong Jr. and mandated that Rare either use Donkey Kong Jr.'s original look, or change the character's name. Rare decided the second option would be best. The potential names were Diet DK, DK Lite, Titchy Kong and Dinky Kong. Dinky Kong was almost the final name, but was dropped due to legal considerations.

In May 1995, an interview with series creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Rare co-founder Tim Stamper about the development of Donkey Kong Country (DKC) was published in the magazine Electronic Games, conducted by game journalist Steven L. Kent. Kent later claimed on an episode of G4's docuseries "Icons" that Miyamoto was angry during this interview, channelling it into bitter criticisms of DKC's gameplay and the Western market's praise of its pre-rendered graphics, and that Stamper "sat there and took it, even though really the anger wasn't meant to be at Stamper". Miyamoto clarified in a 2010 interview with IGN that he did like the game despite these rumored criticisms, and that he worked closely with Rare and Stamper during development.

Years after the interview's publication, Kent would print an alleged portion of a later interview with Miyamoto in his 2001 book "The Ultimate History of Video Games", claiming that the anger had stemmed from "touchy" internal discussions regarding Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The hand-drawn crayon art style of that game was said to be a result of the alleged anger over DKC's graphics causing him to rebel against Nintendo's internal evaluation committee, who wanted Yoshi's Island to use pre-rendered graphics. Part of the Miyamoto quote reads:


Developers on Yoshi's Island have given less angered statements regarding the choice in art style over the years. Yoshi's creator Shigefumi Hino and game director Takashi Tezuka each claimed that it was done for sentimental reasons, as the development team believed that all video games from that point on would likely utilize 3D graphics. They decided to "fight back" in Hino's words by scanning in hand-drawn illustrations and manually editing them to be readable sprites, creating a unique art style intended as a bow-out for 2D graphics:


Since then, every game in the Yoshi series has taken on a deliberately different visual style, including hand-crafted assets and real-world materials, to set itself apart from the Mario series.