Alleged concept art from Vicarious Visions’ canceled Donkey Kong title, Donkey Kong Freedom, has emerged on the internet.
The leaked concept art from Vicarious Visions’ Donkey Kong Freedom was shared by Reddit user BirdonWheels. They claim to have found a hard drive containing a small amount of promotional material and concept art for the game.
Donkey Kong Freedom Leaked Concept Art
The aforementioned leaked concept art from the alleged Donkey Kong Freedom can be seen below.
Back in March, 2023, Nintendo Prime podcast participant Nathanial Rumphol-Janc had shared some alleged details regarding the canceled Donkey Kong Freedom. According to him, it was an open world game being developed with the aim of turning Donkey Kong into a top-tier franchise. He pointed out that the project began development at Vicarious Visions during the 2017/2018 period.
As per the source, Donkey Kong Freedom would feature an open world that would allow Donkey Kong to swing across trees in order to cover distance quickly, similar to how the traversal mechanic works in the most recent Tarzan game. It was also claimed that legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto had been heavily involved with the project. However, the podcast participant added that Nintendo internalized development after a certain point, taking the project away from Vicarious Visions and handing it over to an internal team at the company that had developers who had previously worked on Mario Odyssey.
The podcast participant had hinted that the Mario Odyssey team had been split into two teams: one for a new Mario game and the other for Donkey Kong Freedom. He mentioned seeing concept art and even a 40-second video of the game in action, but he wasn’t able to share them. Over a year later, the concept art has surfaced on the internet, though the gameplay footage has yet to be found.
