Donkey Kong Bananza — GDC 2026 Tech Reveal

At a standing-room-only session during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2026 on March 11, 2026, Nintendo pulled back the curtain on the technical architecture of Donkey Kong Bananza — the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive developed by Nintendo EPD.

Producer Kenta Motokura (previously director of Super Mario Odyssey) and Software Engineer Tatsuya Kurihara presented the session titled "Satisfying Destruction" to a packed Moscone Center audience in San Francisco. The talk detailed how Nintendo engineered a world that is simultaneously high-fidelity and almost entirely breakable — and why the original Switch couldn't handle it.

The headline figure: a single level in Bananza contains an average of 347,070,464 individually destructible voxels — each carrying its own physics properties of density, wetness, and destructibility. The number went immediately viral following the session.

The core design thesis of Donkey Kong Bananza — articulated by Motokura at the session — is that destruction only feels meaningful when the thing being destroyed has value. The team spent significant development time on making the initial state of each environment visually compelling, specifically so that the act of smashing through it carries weight.

“

It is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful. If the environment looks cheap, the destruction feels cheap. We had to make players feel something before Donkey Kong's fist ever touches the ground.

This philosophy manifests in the game's 17 "nearly destructible" levels — a term Motokura used deliberately to acknowledge that not every surface in the game can be broken, but that the proportion of breakable vs. unbreakable geometry was engineered to feel "limitless" from the player's perspective.

A voxel (volumetric pixel) is the 3D equivalent of a 2D pixel — a discrete unit of space that can carry its own data. In most games, geometry is built from polygons; Donkey Kong Bananza uses voxels for its destructible terrain layer, giving each unit independent physical properties.

Kurihara explained that the voxel grid is layered beneath the game's high-resolution surface geometry. Visually, the world looks like a traditional polygon-based game; the voxel destruction system activates underneath whenever Donkey Kong interacts with terrain — punching, stomping, grabbing, or throwing a section of the environment.

Maintaining a stable 60 frames per second with 347 million active voxels was described by Kurihara as the team's primary engineering challenge. The solution is a dynamic resolution system specifically designed for voxels:

• Voxels close to the player and in motion are rendered at full resolution with complete physics simulation
• Voxels at mid-range distance are downscaled with simplified physics
• Voxels far from the player or in static, undisturbed areas are held at minimal resolution with no active simulation
• When a distant voxel zone is disturbed — by a thrown boulder, for example — the engine dynamically upgrades its resolution in real time

One of the more quietly clever systems Nintendo revealed is the Restore Function. Because players can theoretically destroy their way into a corner — collapsing terrain needed to progress — the team built a seamless environment reset system:

• Chunks of destroyed terrain can be restored without a level reload
• The restore is applied at the voxel layer, seamlessly regenerating geometry in place
• The system triggers without breaking gameplay flow or interrupting music and enemy AI

Motokura described the restore mechanic as "invisible design" — a failsafe that most players will never notice unless they specifically attempt to softlock themselves. The goal is to keep destruction feeling "consequence-free" for casual play while still allowing experienced players to dramatically reshape the level.

The voxel system did not emerge fully-formed for Bananza — it traces directly back to experiments Kurihara conducted during the development of Super Mario Odyssey (2017), where voxel tech was first used at Nintendo in limited, cosmetic roles.

“

I remember looking at Donkey Kong's arm reach and thinking — this is exactly the character who should be ripping terrain off and throwing it. The prototype almost designed itself once we had him in the scene.

Donkey Kong Bananza was originally in development for the Nintendo Switch (2017). The decision to move it to the Switch 2 was not a business decision driven by launch lineup needs — it was, according to Kurihara, a technical necessity.

The original Switch's custom NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor and its memory architecture introduced hard ceilings on the number of voxels that could be simulated concurrently. Early internal builds on the original hardware ran at framerates that were, per Kurihara, "not compatible with a fun experience." The Switch 2's upgraded processor, increased RAM, and improved memory bandwidth resolved the constraint.

A technical detail that drew particular attention from developers in the audience was the Canyon Layer — Nintendo's internal term for the subsurface voxel geometry that sits beneath the game's visible surface terrain.

When Donkey Kong breaks through a floor or wall, he is not simply revealing a flat void — the Canyon Layer generates a visually consistent interior, complete with its own voxel density properties, rock strata, and material variation. The effect is that even deeply excavated areas feel like they were "always there," rather than procedurally generated in response to destruction.

Kurihara described the Canyon Layer as one of the most memory-intensive features of the engine — maintaining a fully-formed underground world in memory at all times — but said the team considered it non-negotiable for the game's sense of physical reality.