DKC Atlas Forum

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. It seems a lot of people spit on the classic DK Arcade games because they prefer Rare's games. But I have a new theory. I think that Rare themselves were all DK Arcade fans. Here are some things that brought me to this conclusion:
-They asked Nintendo if they could make a game starring Donkey Kong. They must have been fans in the first place to approach them like that.
-They created Cranky, a character that does nothing but praise DK Arcade and trash talk DKC.
-They've put all the DK Arcade adventures into the DKC backstory. They aged DKJr. and made an older version of DK Sr.
-In DKL, they made Big Ape City, the location of the original DK Arcade.
-In DK64, they included the DK Arcade game in it I believe.

So that's a lot of backstory and references. What d'you guys think, was Rare a bunch of DK Arcade fans?

I agree with you, somebody at Rare definitely had an affinity for the original arcade game. In addition to your already impressive list of evidence, I note that the intro music from DKC was from the original, and Cranky appears atop the old construction site in the same intro.

Rare asked Nintendo for Donkey Kong? I thought they were just demonstrating their nifty ACM conversion tools, and Nintendo said "Here's Donkey Kong and a few Silicon Graphics workstations, go nuts". Though granted I lost the interview in question.

I believe it went more like this:
-Demonstration of nifty ACM conversion tools, which were originally for a boxing game.
-Nintendo goes crazy and buys 25% of Rare.
-The Stampers asked to make Donkey Kong.

Badda bing...

I've thought of a couple more possible pieces of evidence for this theory:
- The klaptraps, klampons, and krimps from the DKC trilogy are quite similar to the snapjaws from DK Jr.
-This one is a stretch, but the plots of two games of both trilogies involve having to rescue kidnapped friends.

Yeah, klaptrap could very possibly be an homage to the snapjaws of DKjr.

I don't think, however, that the kong-napped adventures are really throw backs to the arcades. That's just a very popular and cliched video game story line.