I was never really much of an audio guy. Time signatures, tempos, measures—these were all abstract ideas. I knew they existed, but never what they meant or represented. So, if someone were to ask me in 2019 whether I’d ever work on anything even adjacent to a rhythm game, I’d say not a chance.

That is until my curiosity about a cartoon gorilla got the best of me.

In late 2019, during a conversation about cover songs in rhythm games, my friend Ian asked a harmless and throwaway question: can the cover songs in Donkey Konga be replaced with their originals? That was enough to send me down the rabbit hole. Let’s crack open the game and see what’s inside. What I found in the first game was promising: you could swap out the audio, but the notes were more complicated. It was not impossible to edit, but it required more work than I was willing to put in. I replaced the game’s version of All-Star by Smash Mouth with the original, and it worked. That satisfied Ian’s original question, but now I wanted to do more.

I shifted my attention to Donkey Konga 2 next. It turned out to be much more modular than the original. The songs used the same audio format as Donkey Konga 1 but kept the notes in easily modifiable MIDI files. In fact, you could even modify the metadata for each track, including the song title and assigned genre. This meant it was actually possible to replace the game’s existing tracks with entirely new ones. Jackpot!

Working with my friend Dexter, I put together a pipeline combining Reaper and a series of community-made tools to author tracks that can run in the game. I thought about writing a guide covering this process and sharing it online, but I kept procrastinating. Then, one night deep into the COVID-19 lockdown, I thought, “You know what’s better than writing a guide? An editor dedicated to making Donkey Konga tracks.” Konga Beat was born.

It was an imperfect process. What was supposed to be a short project ended up taking years. Some weeks, I would get swaths of features and bug fixes done; others were much less fruitful. For at least a year, I didn’t touch the project at all. Still, I jumped into it the same way every time: slowly chipping away at it, doing a little bit here and there until it transformed into something exciting and unexpected.

The first time I got a Konga Beat-made track to load in Donkey Konga 2, I nearly jumped out of my chair in excitement. Although I was always tempted to pursue other projects, I knew I wanted to see this one to the end. I loved the process of gradually putting everything together. So even if no one uses Konga Beat, that’s fine. I’m just glad I made it.

In that way, this project is self-indulgent. The Donkey Konga franchise is not popular enough to warrant a custom editor, much less the entire documentation infrastructure that goes along with it. A simple walkthrough, as others have posted in the years between me learning how to make custom tracks and releasing Konga Beat, would have been sufficient. There were several points in the development process where you could reasonably say Konga Beat was good enough to ship, but I couldn’t resist. Making the editor, assembling the site, commissioning artists, writing this preface—it was all too damn fun.

More than that, over the past four years, Konga Beat became a reliable port to keep returning to amidst the rolling storms. Life can be unrelenting and unforgiving, but Konga Beat always provided a much-needed reprieve. It’s fun, goofy, and unserious. How can you see Donkey Kong wailing away on bongos and not laugh?

If anyone does work with Konga Beat to make a track, I hope, above all else, it’s enjoyable and easy to use. Writing new tracks for a 20+-year-old GameCube game should be fun. Otherwise, why bother? Whenever you’re having a rough day, jump in, kick back, and enjoy some quality Konga time. Maybe it’ll give you the break you need, just as it did me. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned while working on this project, there’s no better cure for the stresses of life than a giant cartoon gorilla banging out tunes.

This is Konga Beat.