Prerelease:Super Monkey Ball 2

This page contains notes about Super Monkey Ball 2's development.

Early Development
Super Monkey Ball 2 was already in development before Super Monkey Ball debuted in Japan. Originally the game was intended to be a level pack for the original game with new worlds, stages and possibly a new character, rather than a full-blown sequel. Early versions of the game ran off a stripped Super Monkey Ball engine (see photo). As seen in the screenshot, the world backgrounds were already completed early in development. This version was a tech demo given to various gaming media.

Worlds
Amusement Vison originally planned to bring back something from early Super Monkey Ball releases - a new world every stage. As seen in various screenshots by IGN, GameSpot and other media, the stages were to take place in different worlds. However, switching to an entirely new world would mean having to load the (huge!) models from disc, and put it into VRAM and render it, and proved to be resource-intensive. Early builds had lag issues when switching from level to level. Something interesting to note is that levels (even in the final version) do not load their textures from a central source, all level textures (for example, the common grass texture found in the Jungle world) are loaded from the levels specific texture file. Of course, using a centralized texture bank loaded into memory would be faster, but the developers dumped the idea because the way they were using was already fast enough. EDITOR NOTE: FINAL BUILD OF SMB2 WAS COMPILED ON OCTOBER 10TH 2002