Donkey Kong 64 is at last coming to Nintendo Switch Online, a grueling four-and-a-half years after Nintendo first put N64 games on the service, and a whole year after Nintendo seemingly inadvertently teased it. This has been met with plenty of eyerolling and monkey jokes from the populace because, as we all know, Donkey Kong 64 isn’t a very good game and is tedious to play in 2026, and no one in their right mind would pick it up on NSO, right?
No!
No, I’m not doing this anymore! Every time I bring up Donkey Kong 64, everyone rushes in to tell me what a terrible game it is, and how I should not, under any circumstances, replay it! I’m tired of stiffly nodding along and saying, “Yes, it’s bad, but I have some nostalgia for it,” until we change the subject! Donkey Kong 64 is good and I am not afraid to say it.
First off, this weird DK64 hatred hasn’t always existed. It received mostly excellent reviews when it launched and was the best-selling game of 1999, beating even Pokémon Red/Blue, according to Circana director Mat Piscatella. It was praised (rightfully!) at the time for its ambition; though it borrowed a lot from games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, it did so on a scale we hadn’t seen before with the massive-at-the-time DK Isles and all the secrets they hid. People loved its cleverness, too, in both boss battles and puzzles, and its cast of characters was funny and quite memorable.
Donkey Kong 64 is a bit of a white whale for me. I never owned an N64 growing up, but my neighbor did, and we spent countless weekends passing the controller back and forth trying to finish it. I was the older of the two of us and had access to a printer, so eventually I started printing off pages of GameFAQs guides to help us when we got stuck. We finally made it to the final fight against King K. Rool, but my neighbor sadly moved away before we could land the final blow, so I never finished the game. I’ve replayed parts of it a few times over the years, stopping neither out of boredom nor misery, but always because some new game came out that I had to play for work. Most recently, I’ve been mucking around with DK64randomizer.com, having used it to make a totally randomized yet guaranteed-completable version of Donkey Kong 64 that I’ve dumped several happy hours into already.
For these reasons I feel confident in saying that a lot of Donkey Kong 64 holds up better than anyone gives it credit for. Its world still manages to feel big even by today’s standards, in part because it’s so stuffed with puzzles and buttons and switches and bits that I constantly feel there’s something I haven’t explored yet. Its characters are delightful, dripping with personality in their dialogue and animations, and I think it’s a crime that Lanky, Tiny, and Chunky haven’t appeared in more things. The level designs are so cool: I love the mushroom forest that changes depending on whether it’s day or night, and Creepy Castle’s circular structure and loads of hidden rooms, and the interconnectedness of everything in Frantic Factory. The little sounds everything makes are great. I love running around and scooping up all the collectibles. And, sure, I’ll say something really controversial: I think it’s fine to have different stuff for each Kong to pick up. It gets a little annoying if you’re trying to 100-percent the game, but I have a lot of fun taking Kongs back to previously visited levels and seeing what new secrets I can open up and how many more bananas I can gather. At the same time, you don’t actually need to do that much backtracking just to finish the game, and anyone claiming you do clearly hasn’t played it in years. And hey, the DK Rap is a classic, but the actual main game theme is no slouch either.
I’ll grant you: there are warts. Its jetpack and swimming controls are a disaster, but I feel confident in saying that basically no game had good swimming controls in that era, and a lot of games today still haven’t figured it out yet, and as for the jetpack, that’s basically just swimming through the air anyway. I also think forcing players to endure the original Donkey Kong and Jetpac in order to beat the game is extremely rude and should not have been done. I will also allow that some of the barrel games are…frustrating. For instance, that beetle you have to race multiple times? It’s on sight.
It’s fine to dislike Donkey Kong 64, and I’ll even concede it’s not some sort of all-time great nor even among the best Donkey Kong games (shoutout to Tropical Freeze), but it’s not the glaring scar on the face of the Donkey Kong franchise everyone pretends it is. It was cool during its time, and is still pretty fun now when you’re not underwater or 100 feet in the air shooting peanut pop guns. As such, once I finish the other games I’m in the middle of right now, I will be fulfilling the public oath I have taken to finally beat Donkey Kong 64 now that it’s out on NSO. You will see me back here in a few months and you bet your bananas, I will not regret anything I have written here.
