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Kev Bayliss: The Man who put the Kong in Donkey Kong

6/10/2024

Interview by: Gemma @ Juicy Game Reviews / TheGebs24

Kev Bayliss - The man tasked with bringing Donkey Kong to life on the Super Nintendo

Kev Bayliss! What an industry legend. I first learnt about Kev Bayliss for his work on redesigning Donkey Kong for the Super Nintendo Release of Donkey Kong Country. Of course, Donkey Kong existed long before Kev had the pleasure of bringing him to Donkey Kong Country; a 16bit Super Nintendo staple title nowadays. Kev's industry experience also existed long before some of you were born.

You see, I recently learnt that Kev worked on California Games on the NES! That was my first Nintendo Entertainment System experience. You can also find Kev's work in Battletoads, Diddy Kong Racing, Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark and much more. Kev Bayliss was a RARE games legend and his reach in his work continues today. Check his IMDB here.

Kev and I speak from time to time, and having met his at the 2023 Notts Video Game Expo, I decided to ask him for an interview.

1/ So Kev tell us a little bit about your personal gaming history
When it comes to games, and actually playing them, I really started out with a ZX81 in the early 80's. My parents bought it for me in the 'Tenner and Under' section in the Tamworth Herald. I loved it, even though it is rubbish by today's standards, it was great fun to learn to do a bit of basic programming and get an understanding of how games work. Prior to that, I'd only experienced games on my brother's Atari 2600 or wasting my cash in the arcades on holiday in Hunstanton! lol.
I eventually upgraded my Zx81 to an Acorn Electron, which was similarly great to work on and I was creating my own little games and bits of art software. But, I really wanted a Commodore 64 because the music and graphics were so cool at the time. I bought one when they were phasing them out, but shortly after that I started working at Rare, and was introduced to the NES. From then onwards, I was well and truly into the world of Nintendo. I bought myself a Sega Megadrive when I bought my first house, and it was the done thing to have a console at home for 'lad's night'. We'd spend all night watching martial arts movies or playing on the console. I don't really play games any more, I am too busy doing other stuff which I guess is related to them, or making them at Playtonic. But - it's in my blood now and I get all nostalgic whenever I see something that reminds me of how it all started.

2/ I read that one of the first games you worked on was California Games. What can you tell us about working on that?
I think I'd only been at Rare for a short while and they started me out with quiz show games for the NES. However, one day they received the go ahead to convery CG to the NES, and as I'd been a fan of it on my C64, I was really excited to be able to work on a 'proper game' that I'd bought with my own money a year or so earlier. It wasn't easy though, there were a lot of issues with colours and the dreaded 'sprite per line' issue (when more than 64 pixels appear in a horizontal line as sprites, that move around, pixels start to disappear and flash) - so I remember the BMX track being tricky. The bike was quite wide so it often flickered. Also - I remember the guys at MB games wanted me to make the characters blonde (for California) where possible, but I would have had to layer more sprites over the top of the palettes I'd used for the graphics - so I talked my way out of it, because I said it'd make things disappear. lol.

3/ You’ve worked on a lot of AAA Video Games, such as Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing and Killer Instinct. What was your personal favourite to work on?
That's a tricky one. I LOVED working on Ki because it was my main ambition to create a fighting game. I was a martial artist and so it was amazing that we also got the motion capture technology to beta test, and I was able to create moves wearing a suit we made ourselves that held all of the motion sensors. It was like magic watching yourself move around, and then seeing a Dinosaur that I had made mimic my movements. Ki was amazing, and there was no other time like it. But if I have to be honest, Diddy Kong Racing was so much fun to work on, because the whole environment was 3D and it was a new and exciting way to work, on a brand new console. We were all fans of racing games on the team, and we all just got on so well. It really wasn't like going 'to work' - it was just this amazing place where we were all working together in a brand new barn conversion, doing what we really loved. At the end of the project we all travelled to Japan to celebrate and visit the SpaceWorld show that year. So - I think yes, Diddy Kong Racing would be my favourite.

4/ You were responsible for bringing the character of Donkey Kong to the SNES. Can you talk us through that process please?
I'd been experimenting with building fighting characters for Killer Instinct, and when Nintendo saw what I had done, they immediately wanted to have graphics which were rendered in 3D on their Super Nintendo.
I had been given design faxes to refer to from Nintendo which were actually drawn by Shigeru Miyamoto. I still have the faxes at home. I never really looked at them though, and just started scribbling down compact looking little Gorillas which looked like they'd behave well in a 2D platformer. I made the eyes look like my Battletoad designs, and then began modeling the character using the 3D software and SGi hardware which Rare had just invested in. I was really the only person aside from Tim experimenting with the system at the time, which was lucky for me because I was the only one who knew how to build the characters at that point.

5/ You’ve worked on game animation from the 8bit, 16bit, right through to Yooka Laylee. What’s been the most difficult console generation to animate on?
I think it's harder now. Purely because there is so much more setup involved. Years ago if I wanted something to do a specific move, I just 'drew' it. You could always 'play with' or 'tweak' your graphics to make things look right, or to make the fist of a character reach something, even when the arm probably wasn't long enough. Just add a few pixels here and there. Make a character 'duck'? Easy - just chop off his legs and draw feet and usually his fists would cover any detail around the middle. But now, you have to make sure your character actually works. You can still play with things, but there is a lot of design that goes into the mechanics of making a character model now. Then, there's the whole 'setting it up' as mentioned, so that it can actually work in the game. It might work in your 3D software, but putting it into the game is also quite complicated sometimes and often you have to go back and look at the structure of your model to make it work in a better way. Again - years ago, this wasn't so much of a problem because you had less definition anyway and people couldn't see the holes in your work. Also, people were more forgiving because nothing looked that real, and although it was 3D, it was quite triangular looking and so people expected things to distort a little. But you can't get away with that now. Well, you can, but the standard of graphics is so much higher now, there's a lot more work that you have to put in.

Kev Bayliss and some of the old RARE devs

Meeting Kev at Notts VGE 2023

Kev signed a ton of my Retro Games

6/ You’re very active on Twitch. What do you enjoy about live streaming?
I usually stream old video games that I've worked on. I particularly like playing Diddy Kong Racing because it's still a fun and exciting game to play. People love watching that around Christmas time becuase those people who owned it as a kid, mostly received it as a Christmas present. But recently I've discovered painting, and I'm spending some time painting characters that I've been involved with, which also makes for a good stream!

7/ Diddy Kong Racing or Donkey Kong Country. You can only keep on?
Diddy Kong Racing. I never played DKC. (SHOCK HORROR!) I was so focused on the games I was working on, I never really spent time playing the other games we created. I think that may have been true for a lot of Devs at Rare (perhaps it's just me) because we were so busy, and then onto the next game. Plus you really wanted to make that next game better, and for me I didn't want to look at the other games, because they weren't related to the kind of games I was working on. Even after DKC was released, I never played it. I appreciate it, and love it, but as a game - it's not the kind of game I'd play or have the patience to complete. I like fighters, old arcade games racers and the odd adventure game.(I have never played Mario Games other than Mario 64)

8/ What piece of work would you say defines your legacy as a video game artist?
I guess, ironically after answering the last question, it's the re-creation of DK. I love that I've made a character that still looks the same as he did back then (almost).The Donkey Kong Country game was so significant in game development and I am SO lucky to have got the chance to do what I did. It'll never happen again, and I am so grateful for that. It's one thing I love about my life, I managed to step into the industry just at a time where 'it all started to happen' - generations of different tech, the console wars, the transition from 2D to 3D. It's all happened now, and I am a lucky guy to have got that job at Rare when I did back in 1987.

9/ Pineapple on pizza?
Yep. And Prawns.

10 Kev, tell us where people ca find you online

http://Twitch.tv/Kev_Bayliss
http://instagram.com/diddykongsdaddy_kevbayliss
http://x.com/Kev_Bayliss

Interview by: Gemma @ Juicy Game Reviews / TheGebs24