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What is the Donkey Kong Universe?
One of the questions we're frequently asked is why we don't report on one game, or why we do report on another. The answer is we only report on "Donkey Kong Universe" games. What is the Donkey Kong Universe, or DKU? It's a term invented by us to help differentiate games featuring characters spawned from Rare Ltd.'s version of Donkey Kong, and Shigeru Miyamoto's original design. Why don't we include both as one series? One of the reasons is because they're so different in look and feel. The Donkey Kong Arcade games had little to no plot, while Rare's Donkey Kong games feature an ongoing tale (or tales) in an ever changing world. Rareware's Donkey Kong Country was the start of the reinvention of Donkey Kong, and that's the reason we look at it as the first DKU game.
Being the obsessive nerds that we are, we follow the television rule of the shared universe. Since it can get confusing, here's a quick explanation, in comparison with TV's Cheers.
1. You have the core franchise, the thing that began it all. This would be Cheers. In our case, it's Donkey Kong Country and all games starring Rare's revised Donkey Kong.
2. Occasionally, a character that first appears in the core franchise is spun-off into their own. This is a spinoff, the child of the core franchise. In Cheers terminology, we had Carla's ex-husband Nick get his own program with The Tortellis and Dr. Frasier Crane get his own program with Frasier. While not Cheers, both are part of the Cheers family (or Cheers Universe). Examples of this with the DKU are Banjo and Conker, going from being Diddy Kong Racing characters to having their own games.
3. Going from that, a character in a spinoff can be spun-off into another franchise. This is spinoff of a spinoff. This would have happened if the Niles Crane character from Frasier would have gotten a program called Niles Has The Diarrhea, Oi. Its parent would be the show Frasier, making Cheers its grandparent. For us, an example of this is Roysten going from the Banjo games to a quick appearance in Grabbed By The Ghoulies. The Banjo games are GBTG's parent, the DKC franchise is GBTG's grandparent.
4. Sometimes, the franchise (franchise A) can cross over with another franchise that exists seperately (franchise B). It happens when a character from one franchise appears in another, or vice versa. When Norm and Cliff from Cheers appeared on the show Wings, that episode of Wings was part of Cheers continuity, but not any past or future episodes (unless another crossover occured in the future, such as when Frasier and Lilith or Rebecca Howe showed up). Examples of this in the DKU are the cameo games where a character from one of the three classificaitons above appears in another franchise, like Mario. This does not retroactively make everything in the crossover franchise B part of the first franchise A. Only the crossover itself is part of the franchise. However, and this is debatable, if a new character appeared in the crossover, then that character would be followed in both our universe and the crossover universe as a shared property.
5. For any of this to ring true, there needs to be physical appearances by the characters themselves. References such as cheeky mentions of a character, images of the characters, the appearance of a previously-seen location, and so forth do not count. When Peter Griffin (from the show Family Guy) watched Frasier and Niles on television, it didn't make that episode of Family Guy part of the Cheers Universe. It's a jokey reference, not an actual appearance by the characters themselves. For the DKU, this happens all the time. For example, a character that looks somewhat like Rare's Donkey Kong appears in Animal Crossing, but it's not actually DK himself.
While we hope we didn't confuse you too much, this is how you (and your friends!) tell whether a game is DKU or not. Now please don't ask us why we're not covering Final Fantasy VIII because Square also made a Mario game and Mario is in cameo games with Donkey Kong. If you do, then we'll commence with the anal sex.
Up your butt.
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Donkey Kong Universe is an independent game news source with no affiliation to Nintendo, Microsoft, or any other developer. All original content copyright © 1999 - 2008 File Two Productions.
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