When I was very young, we had a few video game consoles: the classic Nintendo, the PlayStation, a Game Gear, a Game boy Pocket, and our trusty Windows 98. Keep in mind this was when the Nintendo 64 had already come out and everyone was marvelling at Project Dolphin. I didn't know there was any other consoles out there until a couple years later When we got our first Xbox.
My Dad had downloaded a couple of emulators at one point (the NES emulator "Jnes" and the SNES emulator "ZSNES") with a BUNCH of roms for both of them. Back then I thought this was the normal way to play all these games as I didn't exactly know that the Super Nintendo existed. There were a bunch of roms I liked to play, but some of my favorite were the Donkey Kong Country games. The sprites looked really cool, the music was nice to listen to, and the game was overall fun to play.
Back then me and my brothers couldn't get past the first few levels of any of the DKC games so I just figured every game only had one world and the final boss was at the end. Until one day when I was trying to beat Ropey Rampage. I kept losing so my older Brother took control. I was so amazed when he beat it and so astounded when he kept getting to the next level.
Pretty soon the same thing happened to me with the other two games. At first I though the boss of DKC2 would just be a Kannon with a wooden sword and I thought the boss of DKC3 would be a naked K. Rool sitting in a pile of bananas on one of those "dock" levels (probably since all the other Kremlings didn't wear clothes as opposed to the Kremlings in the other two games). When I got further into each of the games I couldn't believe how different they were from the other games I had played. They had great music, graphics, they were creative, and had very addicting gameplay (I often likened the series to the Oddworld games because they were both platforming masterpieces).
Before long I was hooked on the series.I would hand draw the sprites of the game (until I found out how to rip them myself), I would make little comics with sprites from the few obsucre sprite websites that were up at the time, I frequented Donkey Boy's
http://donkeyboy.tripod.com/index.html and various other Donkey Kong Country fansites (I can't believe Nintendo took down their promotional flash websites
), I started my world famous render collection when I discovered DK's Jungle Vine (Now known as Donkey Kong Universe) and collected screenshots, fanarts, and anything Donkey Kong Country I could get my hands on.
Something years later I still love the series. It's been with me all my life and I love everything about Donkey Kong Country