It turns out this Rare platformer is hiding some dark secrets.
ROM corruption is one of the more interesting ways players mess with games after release. At its most basic level, ROM corruption involves messing with game data using various tools. It can be useful to uncover how games work, and also result in games breaking in amazing ways.
Look what happens to Super Mario Bros., for example:
When YouTuber mystman12 decided to start corrupting Donkey Kong Country, he expected weirdness. You never know what you’re going to get when the game’s not functioning normally.
What he didn’t expect, however, was the Rare platform to turn into a horror game, as the game’s lovely soundtrack was bent, twisted, and warped into something out of a John Carpenter film.
It wasn’t just that, though. Creepy music only scratched the surface. Something much darker was lurking in this world, he just didn’t know it yet.
We have, of course, the glitchy visuals that one comes to expect from a ROM corruption.
While goofing around, mystman12 ends up dying, but when he starts the same level over again, he’s somewhere else, another stage in Donkey Kong Country.
Weird, sure, but not that weird. While progressing through the stage, he enters a room full of bananas. If you’ve played Donkey Kong Country, you know spots like this are incredibly common. He begins collecting the bananas, despite how distracting the game is looking now.
What’s waiting for him at the end, though, is...well, unexpected.
If you’re wondering if that’s the corpse of Diddy Kong, you’re right. For whatever reason, the game has decided to pull a single, unsettling frame from Diddy Kong’s death animation and placed it at the end of this other unnerving sequence in which Donkey Kong is disembodied.
Diddy Kong doesn’t move. Whatever he saw before he passed, it left him in a state of shock.
When you die as Diddy Kong in Donkey Kong Country, here’s the animation it pulls:
Did you catch it?
Yep, that’s a dead Diddy Kong. Who knew Rare’s platformer was hiding such dark secrets?
When mystman12 realized what was happening, there was only one option: embrace fate.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.