Put your hands together if you want to clap.

In the last few days we’ve had a spate of video game anniversaries with Pokémon Gold and Silver, Super Smash Bros., Donkey Kong Country and the Nintendo DS all celebrating significant birthdays (by which we mean one that ends in a five or a zero). Well, there’s another Donkey Kong game that launched this month 20 years ago – almost five years to the day after Rare’s first crack at a game featuring Mario’s erstwhile enemy debuted on Super NES.

Donkey Kong 64 is a game with a reputation; a 3D platformer which arguably marked the end of the ‘collectathon’ craze of the mid-to-late ’90s; the ultimate expression of that genre, with everything turned up to eleven. After taking the general platforming principles established by Super Mario 64 and embellishing them with beautiful visuals and a healthy dose of British humour, Rare had proved with Banjo-Kazooie that it knew what it was doing in the 3D platformer space. Banjo was arguably the closest any developer got to beating Nintendo at its own game.

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