List of Donkey Kong Country pre-release and unused content

This article pertains to the beta elements of Donkey Kong Country.

Beta elements
In an old Scribes page on the Rareware website, there was mention of there once being a giraffe Animal Buddy planned to appear in Donkey Kong Country; this Giraffe character was dropped for unknown reasons, though one of his mentioned abilities was that he would allow Donkey Kong to crawl up his neck and reach high items and secrets.

It is debated whether or not the plans for this giraffe buddy were actually real though, as Rare could have simply been making a joke at the expense of fan who had made a rather odd request for a giraffe to appear in an upcoming Donkey Kong game.

There are also many unused sprites in this game, such as a Puftup from Donkey Kong Country 2, and a jungle plant. Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong also have unused sprites.

The preview video, Donkey Kong Country Exposed, also contains a few beta elements that never made it into the final game, such as a 3-Up Balloon at Snow Barrel Blast and a nighttime version of Jungle Hijinxs. There were also a few instances where binary digits were seen underneath the lives counter, which may have been a debug menu of some sort. Also, in this build, it was possible to exceed one hundred bananas, whereas in the final game, the banana counter would reset once it reaches that number. Lastly, Donkey Kong was unable to kill the regular Krusha enemy by jumping on him. Unlike the final, Krusha will laugh after Donkey Kong does so, as he would if Diddy had done that. This also applies to Klump, hinting there might have not been character differences in the early game.

While hacking into the ROM, hackers have managed to find other bits of beta material, such as unused dialogue, beta character names, and many others. Early on during the development phase of Donkey Kong Country, there's unused dialogue, where Cranky Kong was shown to be much friendlier than he was in the final game. There are also some level hints that he gave out, which didn't make it to the final version. Also, the beta name of the Slippa enemy was "Hister". Lastly, there's been quite a few enemy palette swaps that never made it, as well as a few unused sprites of Donkey Kong's, with one of them being what appears to be a pushing sprite.