10 Video Games That Owned Themselves

Rare's sparkling capacity for self-deprecation was in full evidence years before a portly Banjo huffed and puffed in pursuit of a ziggurat of joke jiggies, as seen in the Twycross company's watershed platformer, Donkey Kong Country.

After Nintendo became mightily intrigued with the Stamper brothers experiments' with SGI technology, they rather trustingly signed over one of their most important albeit dormant properties, Donkey Kong, to the Brits. The result was 1994's eye-popping swing-a-thon, which helped re-establish the long-absent ape, whilst making stars of Rare in the process.

You'd think, eager to please their new bosses, Rare would have treated gaming's first gorilla's legacy with appropriate respect and decorum. Nope: the OG DK was re-contextualised as an onerous, faded mascot, perpetually put out by the modern era's polygons and colour palettes. When he's not handing out withering insults masquerading as 'tips', 'Cranky' Kong rants at his successor about the parlous state of '90s vidya games, including cracking quips such as "I bet they wasted half the memory already, just on this section alone!" and "I've got more game play in my little finger than you've got in this whole game!"