It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
Donkey Kong Country was one of the first games for a mainstream home video game console to use pre-rendered 3D graphics
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
Rare invested their NES profit in Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) Challenge workstations with Alias rendering software to render 3D models. It was a significant risk, as each workstation cost £80,000.
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)
It used isometric 3D since the SNES lacked any 3D capability.
It was made by the same people that did those isometric games on 8 bit computers, Ashby Computer Graphics, aka Ultimate, which changed their name to Rare.
It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)
Meanwhile, Nintendo positioned this method to compete with Aladdin, which simply hired Walt Disney animators to do the sprites.
It used isometric 3D since the SNES lacked any 3D capability.
It was made by the same people that did those isometric games on 8 bit computers, Ashby Computer Graphics, aka Ultimate, which changed their name to Rare.