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Prerelease:It's Mr. Pants

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This page details prerelease information and/or media for It's Mr. Pants.

This cactus is UNDER CONSTRUCTION
This article is a work in progress.
...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes.

Development Timeline

1997

  • April 16 - Rare registers a trademark for "Animal Crackers".[1]

2000

  • Unknown - the game begins development as "Donkey Kong Puzzle Paint".[2]

2001

  • May - Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers is revealed at E3.
  • October 11 - Nintendo dates Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers for December 7, 2001. (GBX Magazine)
  • November 9 - Rare registers a trademark for It's Mr. Pants.
  • December 7 - The game misses its release date.

2002

  • August - Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers is delisted from forthcoming projects on Rare website.

2003

  • August 11 - Microsoft announces their partnership with THQ for distributing Rare's GBA titles, including the newly-revealed It's Mr. Pants, set for an early 2004 release.

2004

  • November 15 - It's Mr. Pants is released in North America.

2005

  • February 4 - It's Mr. Pants is released in Europe.

The Story of Mr. Pants

The man, the myth, the legend.

The Pants legacy can be traced back to May of 1998, when Rare media/PR writer Leigh Loveday brought the company's website online. Unable to get an artist to provide a new render of a Rare character to use for the Survey section, he hastily scribbled a stick man wearing large underwear and a bowler hat in MS Paint and slapped that on the page instead. And so Mr. Pants the Survey Man was born.

Through his sheer audacity and memetic charisma (inspiring lots of similarly half-baked fanart), Mr. Pants quickly became the de facto mascot of the site, and would soon lend himself to cameo appearances in Rare games such as Jet Force Gemini and Banjo-Tooie. It seemed like it was only a matter of time until he had a title of his own...


(Source: July 1998 Scribes, Rare Revealed)

Michael C. Miller: Why does there even have to be a character in the survey section?
[Leigh Loveday]: A good point, which will only depress me if I think about it.

(Source: September 1998 Scribes)

The Story of It's Mr. Pants

Hmmm...
To do:
Track down an alternate copy of this article, as the Mr. Pants section didn't make it onto the Wayback Machine.

Conception

Sometime in 1999 (though possibly as far back as 1997), Banjo team leads Tim Stamper and Gregg Mayles had come up with a concept for a puzzle game (a genre Rare had never tackled in its 16-year history) on the Game Boy Color. Originally known as "Tartan", it was later redubbed "Nutcracker" when one of the musicians put in a rendition of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite" as placeholder music. Caught in the midst of several other high-profile titles, the project spent a lot of time on the backburner (during which time the GBA debuted and it was eventually moved there), but the team would often return to it as they felt the idea had potential. However, the game still lacked a sense of identity, and needed an IP attached to it to make it marketable. The team experimented with various themes, such as a Sabre Wulf version and "Banjo's Jiggy Juggle" (complete with an animation of Banjo juggling Jiggies, which likely resembled the title screen image in the next section), but the Donkey Kong license stood out due to its easy applicability. Even after it was rebranded, the title went through further revisions such as Puzzle Paint before settling on...

Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers

Hmmm...
To do:
* General gameplay description ([1], [2]).
    • Maybe IGN has some info too?
  • Upload concept documents.
  • Integrate the "Aftermath" section into this one.

IGN Preview

This IGN preview from May 29, 2001 mentions some features that were ultimately scrapped, such as multiplayer and perspective switching:

Even though the game's perspective is at an angle by default, you can easily change the perspective to something more traditional - top down - with a simple button press. The game's using the Game Boy Advance's sprite hardware capabilites, so zooming the perspective to a flat viewpoint is a snap for the system. When it's finished later this year, the game will have several different gameplay options, and yep, it will support four players using the Game Boy Advance's link cable.

E3 2001 Images

Screenshots from Nintendo's official E3 2001 press kit. They have been converted from TIF to PNG.

  • The stylized numbers on the HUD would later be reused for the main menu lettering in the Donkey Kong Country GBA ports.

Aftermath

This 2004 IGN interview with the Rare GBA team explains why the perspective changes were made:

IGN: Any reason for It's Mr. Pants going back to a flat appearance versus Coconut Crackers more styled, 3D camera perspective?

Rare GBA Team: Coconut Crackers actually had both 2D and 3D layouts in it. But there were consistency issues when swapping between both modes and they were hard to solve to everyone's liking. Secondly, the perspective on the 3D board made it hard to play, as squares towards the back of the grid looked a lot smaller than those nearer the front and it was hard to tell what shape you were making. Finally the 3D view just didn't look as nice as we'd have liked. It was very pixelly, that was the main reason why we thought it didn't work.

References