According to Donkey Kong Country director Gregg Mayles in a discussion with YouTuber Jirard Khalil "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. There is however an unused walking animation for Cranky left in the files of the SNES version of the game that would later be used in the GBA version after the player defeats a boss.

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.

In 2019, Shesez, known for his YouTube series "Boundary Break", interviewed Kevin Bayliss, who was previously one of the animators and character designers for Donkey Kong Country. Bayliss mentioned during the interview that when Rare co-founder Tim Stamper and Nintendo tasked him to redesign Donkey Kong and "bring it up to date", Bayliss originally wanted DK's design to be "compact" similar to how NES characters were previously designed, and wanted the character to show up "nice and clearly." Bayliss later revealed that when designing Donkey Kong's new facial features, he used the same design as the Battletoads' eyes, believing that gorillas "look like they got this big brow". In a 2025 tweet, he expressed frustration that this design choice always made him look "annoyed". This response was made in support of a new, contentious redesign of Donkey Kong first introduced in the 2023 film The Super Mario Bros. Movie and later incorporated into Nintendo's games starting with Mario Kart World. Donkey Kong's creator Shigeru Miyamoto later stated in a 2025 IGN interview that the redesign was intended to make Donkey Kong more expressive, citing Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat as the starting point to the new direction they took his design.

The opening of the Gangplank Galleon theme in Donkey Kong Country was based on the title and menu theme to Rare's NES version of Sid Meier's Pirates!, which was also composed by David Wise.

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 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 Kevin 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".