The tune that plays whenever Troff and Scoff open a boss door is actually from Banjo-Kazooie, where it plays whenever Banjo enters an area containing a Stop 'n' Swop item. Part of it also sounds like the tune that plays when Dingpot fills all of your items in Banjo-Tooie; worth noting is that this theme still predates Donkey Kong 64, as it was Dummied Out of Banjo-Kazooie.
There is a 5-Banana Coin in Fungi Forest that went undocumented (though several people had already collected it many years before by purely goofing around near the nearby DK barrel, not thinking much about it if the YouTube comments on several videos about this are of any indication) until January 28, 2017, seventeen years after the game's release. The collectible was found when Isotarge, a member of the game's speedrunning community, datamined the game and found data for a 977th 5-Banana Coin located here; prior to his findings, it was assumed that there were only 976 of them in the game. The coin in question can be found in a dirt patch hidden in a patch of tall grass surrounding the DK Barrel just outside one of the mills.
The game has a "hint" that ejects the player from the level with Squawks advising the player to go somewhere else or have someone help them. However to get it to trigger, the player must pause and unpause 1,501 times, Monkeyport in certain areas 1,501 times without leaving, or crouch or run for 4 hours straight.
Chris Sutherland voices Diddy Kong, Lanky Kong, Chunky Kong, King K. Rool as well as the Krushas.
Eveline Fischer voices Tiny Kong, Candy Kong, the Banana Fairies and the mermaid in Gloomy Galleon.
Creator-Driven Successor: This game owes Super Mario 64 (from Rare's then-parent company Nintendo) and Banjo-Kazooie (from Rare themselves) big time for its existence. It even uses the same engine, text font and soundfont as the latter.
Development Gag: The artwork on the cartridge depicting Donkey Kong standing by himself in a jungle area was supposed to be the main box artwork before it was changed to what we have today.
Executive Meddling: Shigeru Miyamoto didn't like the idea of realistic guns being in the game, so he sketched DK's Coconut Gun during a meeting and asked Rare to implement it.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: For many years, fans were left speculating as to why Nintendo hadn't rereleased this game on the Virtual Console. While Nintendo, not Rare or Microsoft, owns the rights to the game because they created Donkey Kong, many speculated that the inclusion of Jetpac, an original Rare IP that is now owned by Microsoft, prevented the game's re-release. However, Nintendo finally rescued the game in April 2015 when it was announced as one of the first N64 games to hit the Wii U Virtual Console. Though the game reached this status again with the shutdown of the Wii U eShop at the end of March 2023, and the game having yet to see a release on Nintendo Switch Online.
Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Donkey Kong 64 required and was bundled with the Expansion Pak because it fixed a Game-Breaking Bug that Rare couldn't patch up before the deadline, right? At least, that's what former Rare programmer Chris Marlow stated at the beginning of a developer's commentary on Conker's Bad Fur Day. Marlow never worked on DK64, but since he still worked at Rare at the time, he was considered a primary source and the story stuck around. The truth, as per lead Donkey Kong 64 artist Mark Stevenson, is that Marlow probably mixed up two different things about the game's development: the team was forced to package the game with the Expansion Pak, and there was a game-breaking bug, but the two things were unrelated. It was decided early in production that Donkey Kong 64 would be a Tech-Demo Game to show off the benefits of the Expansion Pak, with that being the reason for the mandate, and while there was indeed a major game-breaking bug found near the end of the development, the Expansion Pak didn't solve the issue - they just fixed it before release, like every other bug they probably found during development.
Throw It In!: The DK Rap was originally written as a joke by Grant Kirkhope, but the developers liked it enough to include in the game.
Several, the most notable being one room in Creepy Castle only accessible through Tiny's Monkeyport, containing some bananas and a stone pedestal with nothing on it. The room appears to be useless apart from said bananas. King K. Rool's control room also features five steel kegs with the Kongs' faces painted on them. Probably nothing more than a little detail, but it sparked some speculation back in the day.
The fact that this was the first Donkey Kong game since Donkey Kong Country not to feature a Lost World sparked a lot of urban legends back in the day.
Fungi Forest was going to appear in Banjo-Kazooie as Fungus Forest, but the level was (among other levels) scrapped from that game due to time constraints.
The game as a whole was initially planned for the 64DD add-on but repurposed for cartridge after that peripheral's failure.
If one uses glitches or GameShark codes to load the multiplayer-only character Krusha into the main game, he will be referred to by name by NPCs, and will have a few animations that he never uses in multiplayer (albeit ones which actually belong to Chunky). Whether this means that he was intended to be playable in the game's singleplayer mode is unknown.
Snide's original reason for betraying K. Rool was that he was always given menial chores to do, and was turned down when he asked to work on the Blast-O-Matic.
Early in development, the game was intended to combine 2.5D and linear 3D segments, in what the development team later described as a mix of Yoshi's Story and Crash Bandicoot. Neither Nintendo nor the Rare higher-ups much liked this gameplay style, however, and so the development team was told to scrap everything they had done and remake the game along the lines of Banjo-Kazooie, Ironic seeing that Banjo-Kazooie was going in the same gameplay direction at an earlier point and the franchise went down that direction in Donkey Kong Country Returns and for Mario in Super Mario 3D Land.
The game originally had Donkey Kong wielding a realistic shotgun. The sight of this weapon horrified Shigeru Miyamoto so much that he grabbed a piece of paper and drew what would be the famous coconut gun that Rare would implement in the final game right then and there. However, according to some developer anecdotes, the shotgun was only a placeholder and was never intended to be used in the final game.
Armiesnote Or at the very least a similar armadillo, Re-Koils, a vulture different from the usual Neckies, an insect, a robotic fish, and 2 Jack in the Box enemies, one that looks like a clown and another wielding boxing gloves were considered to be part of King K. Rool's Blast-O-Matic plan before being scrapped from the final game.
, the player must pause and unpause 1,501 times, Monkeyport in certain areas 1,501 times without leaving, or crouch or run for 4 hours straight.