Donkey Kong Bananza

GDC 2026 Tech Session

At the Game Developers Conference 2026 in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Nintendo producer Kenta Motokura and lead engineer Tatsuya Kurihara delivered one of the conference's most technically detailed sessions: a deep dive into the voxel destruction engine powering Donkey Kong Bananza on Nintendo Switch 2.

The session, titled "Building a Destructible World: The Voxel Engine of Donkey Kong Bananza," drew a packed audience of engineers and designers. Motokura opened by acknowledging that the technology had its roots in a prototype built for Super Mario Odyssey — specifically the game's snow-deformation system — and had been quietly evolving at Nintendo EPD for nearly a decade before Bananza gave it a full showcase.

The 347,070,464 Voxel System

The headline number from the session: each level in Donkey Kong Bananza contains exactly 347,070,464 individually destructible voxels. Every one of these can be broken, displaced, or removed through DK's punching and digging mechanics. The result is that the entire terrain of each level is a fully destructible three-dimensional volume, not a surface mesh with destructible props layered on top.

Kurihara explained the voxel grid is organized in a layered canyon structure, with each level containing multiple horizontal strata — visually distinct rock, earth, and mineral layers — each contributing to the 347M total. Players can dig vertically through all layers, revealing different biomes and secrets as they go deeper, or punch horizontally through walls to create new passages.

The system tracks destroyed voxels in compressed bitfield maps per chunk, allowing the engine to efficiently stream only the chunks near the player while keeping memory usage manageable on Switch 2's hardware.

Origins in Super Mario Odyssey Snow

Motokura revealed that the voxel technology traces its lineage directly to Super Mario Odyssey's Snow Kingdom. That 2017 game featured deformable snow — Mario's footsteps left indentations, objects could be thrown into snowbanks and leave impact craters. The underlying technique was a simplified voxel grid applied to the snow surface layer.

After Odyssey shipped, a small team at Nintendo EPD continued iterating on the voxel approach as an internal technology experiment. The question they were asking: what if the deformable surface wasn't just snow on top of the world, but the entire world? Could the same technique scale to a full 3D terrain volume at interactive frame rates?

Several years of prototyping followed, initially targeted at Switch 1 hardware. The prototype worked, but at significant compromises to level size, voxel resolution, and performance.

Why It Moved to Switch 2

Kurihara was candid about why Donkey Kong Bananza became a Switch 2 exclusive rather than shipping on the original Switch: "The original Switch simply could not handle the scale we wanted. We had a working prototype, but the level sizes were too small and the resolution was too coarse. It felt like a tech demo, not a game."

Switch 2's significantly upgraded CPU, GPU, and memory bandwidth — Nintendo has not officially disclosed Switch 2 hardware specs in full, but developer documentation indicates roughly 4–5x the GPU performance of Switch 1 — gave the team the headroom to scale the voxel grid to the 347M-per-level target while maintaining 60fps with dynamic resolution management.

The decision to move the project to Switch 2 was made in 2022 during Nintendo's internal hardware planning cycle. Bananza became one of the platform's first-party anchors alongside Mario Kart World.

The Restore Mechanic

One of the most unusual design decisions in Bananza is the Restore mechanic: a player ability that rebuilds destroyed voxels in a target area back to their original configuration. Motokura described this as both a gameplay tool (certain puzzles require rebuilding terrain to progress) and a solution to a design problem: in a fully destructible world, players could accidentally destroy the geometry they needed to complete a level.

The Restore ability is tied to a limited resource that recharges over time, ensuring players must think about both destruction and reconstruction. Kurihara noted that storing the "original state" for restoration required a separate compressed snapshot of each level's initial voxel configuration — essentially doubling the per-level voxel data stored in memory — but that Switch 2's RAM capacity made this tractable.

Dynamic Resolution & Performance

Bananza targets 60 frames per second across all play modes on Switch 2, including handheld. The engine achieves this through an aggressive dynamic resolution system that scales render resolution per frame based on GPU load — dropping from a native 1080p (docked) or 720p (handheld) target down to as low as 720p / 480p in the most destruction-heavy moments.

Temporal upscaling (Nintendo's proprietary solution, not DLSS or FSR) reconstructs the final frame to the display's native resolution. Kurihara said that in playtests, players rarely noticed the resolution changes during chaotic destruction sequences because the visual noise of flying debris and particle effects masked the scaling artifacts.

CPU workload from voxel physics — calculating which broken chunks fall, collide, and settle — was identified as the most challenging bottleneck. The team developed a priority system that runs full physics only on voxel chunks within a certain radius of the player, with simplified approximations for distant chunks.

Reception

Donkey Kong Bananza launched July 17, 2025, and was received as a critical success and one of the strongest Nintendo Switch 2 launch-window titles. The game earned an 89 on Metacritic, with critics praising the voxel destruction system as genuinely novel and the level design as the best in the Donkey Kong franchise since Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.

The GDC 2026 session — delivered eight months after launch — was unusual in that it revealed the full technical depth of a shipped title rather than a game in development. Industry observers noted this as a sign of Nintendo's confidence in the technology and an indication that the voxel engine will likely appear in future Nintendo titles.