Diddy Kong

Diddy Kong (Japanese: ディディーコング, Hepburn: Didī Kongu) is a character created by the British game developers Gregg Mayles and Kevin Bayliss. He is a major character in Nintendo's Donkey Kong franchise and also appears in the Mario franchise. Diddy is a nimble monkey and a member of the Kong family. He is Donkey Kong's friend and usually appears as his sidekick. He wears a red shirt that has a star pattern, and a red hat that used to have the Nintendo logo on it, but now has a red pin with the yellow initials "DD" on it. Diddy debuted as one of the two protagonists of Rare's Donkey Kong Country, a 1994 platform game, alongside Donkey Kong, and later starred in Donkey Kong Country 2 as its protagonist with the character Dixie Kong. He has appeared in most Donkey Kong games since his introduction, as well as Donkey Kong 64 and Diddy Kong Racing. He continued to appear in Donkey Kong games after Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, and also appears in Mario games such as the Mario Golf and Mario Kart series. He also appears as a playable character in the Super Smash Bros. series. His design was conceived as a redesign of the character Donkey Kong Jr., but Nintendo did not like the idea, so they used the design for a new character instead. The design was made with the idea of creating a smaller, more agile character than Donkey Kong, and he went through multiple names before they landed on Diddy.