During development, Donkey Kong 64 had its titular ape star equipped with a shotgun, which reportedly horrified legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto when he first saw it.

Given the upbeat, family-friendly tone of Donkey Kong 64 this is surprising to hear, but the story comes from George Andreas who worked for Rare when the studio was developing Donkey Kong 64 twenty years ago. To celebrate the game’s anniversary, he spoke to GamesRadar about bringing the game to life, and the tale of the shotgun is one of the stories that particularly stands out.

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Andreas recalls that he was previewing Donkey Kong 64 to Nintendo higher-ups, including Miyamoto - designer of the Donkey Kong character.

"We switched on the game, they saw the rap, and then I started running around as DK. I swung on some vines, collected bananas, and they were beginning to really smile,” Andreas said. “And then I pressed the button to pull out the gun. It wasn't a textured gun that you might expect but a realistic shotgun with bullets flying out and with horrifying sound effects.”

This gun was a placeholder that Andreas had forgot was in the game at the time due to working with it for so long. It was meant to be replaced with something more suitable to the tone of Donkey Kong 64 but that hadn’t happened yet.

“I'm shooting beavers, turned to my side, and see this look of horror on Miyamoto's face!” Andreas recalled. “Then he smiled and, taking some paper and a pencil, drew a coconut gun in front of us. It had leaves on it and he handed it to me. I looked at it and said 'Oh yeah, that's cool, we'll put that in' and the coconut gun was put in after that."

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A very measured response from Miyamoto there, given the content. And now we know how the coconut gun ended up being designed by Miyamoto.

If you want to read more almost unbelievable stories about Nintendo then check out ours on the lie that helped to build the company into the international giant it is today.

Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.