Vicarious Visions were working on a new Donkey Kong game at one point

Vicarious Visions is one of the more underappreciated Activision Blizzard studios, with the team responsible for the excellent Crash trilogy remake as well as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 ultimately being reduced to a support studio for Blizzard. Not only had the team previously been working on a remake of THPS 3 and 4, but at one point were also developing a 3D Donkey Kong game.

First reported by DK Vine (and elaborated upon by DidYouKnowGaming), Vicarious Visions were at one point working on a new Donkey Kong game. This reportedly took place back following the release of Skylanders: SuperChargers – a 2015 title developed by Vicarious Visions which featured Donkey Kong as a guest on Nintendo versions of the game.

Following this, Nintendo seemingly tasked Vicarious Visions with work on a proper new 3D Donkey Kong game. Internally known as Donkey Kong ‘Freedom’, the game would offer a 3D open world environment but in the gameplay style of the DK Country series.

Additionally, the game was going to include new mechanics such as vine grinding – with DK using bananas on his feet to achieve this.

Full details on all the planned features for the game can be found HERE, but unfortunately, the project never came to fruition, with DK Freedom being side-lined by Activision in order to focus more on Call of Duty and the like – ultimately being scrapped in 2016.

The Story of Vicarious Visions has not been the most inspiring, with the team seemingly managing for years to create excellent products in spite of Activision-Blizzard. Hopefully under the ownership of Microsoft, Vicarious Visions will be given a second opportunity to prove themselves worthy of being much more than a simple support branch for Call of Duty / Blizzard.

KitGuru says: What do you think of Vicarious Visions? Would they have made a worthy GK sequel? Will Vicarious Visions ever return to its former glory? Let us know down below.

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