It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
Donkey Kong Country was one of the first games for a mainstream home video game console to use pre-rendered 3D graphics
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
Rare invested their NES profit in Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) Challenge workstations with Alias rendering software to render 3D models. It was a significant risk, as each workstation cost £80,000.
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)
Admittedly, this game doesn’t look particularly good on a CRT, either.
The hype about the visuals being “3D” was so weird and misinformed, and you could absolutely tell at the time.
It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)