Donkey Kong 64

Grant Kirkhope was asked to make the DK Rap as bad as possible. It became famous anyway — for exactly that.

Donkey Kong 64 was released in 1999 as the first game to require the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak — a mandatory purchase for anyone who wanted to play it. The Expansion Pak doubled the console's RAM, and the game used that expanded memory to build what remains one of the largest collect-athon experiences in gaming: five playable Kongs across eight worlds, each collecting a different color of banana, each requiring a unique instrument as a gameplay key, each with their own individual collectibles tracked separately across every level. The DK Rap, which introduced the cast over the opening sequence, was written by composer Grant Kirkhope with explicit instructions to make it as intentionally bad as possible — a parody of rap music, not an earnest attempt at it. Kirkhope has since expressed ambivalence about its legacy: the song became one of the most recognized pieces of game music from the N64 era, referenced and remixed decades later, famous precisely because it was designed to be ridiculous. The line between intentional parody and unintentional artifact was erased by time. The game itself attracted retrospective criticism for the volume of its collectibles — the sheer quantity of items required to reach the final boss became a reference point in later game design discussions about content that adds length without adding meaning. Donkey Kong 64 was not the first collect-athon, but it became the genre's most extreme example, and subsequent developers cited it when arguing for restraint.