DKC Atlas Forum

[Simion32]

"Sorry, I'm a bit of lost in the thread... who is Mr. X?"

"Whose this Mr. X everyone keeps talking about?!"

He's an unused character in DKC2. He was only shown in the German player's guide.

A picture of the elusive Mr. X:

MrX_EnhancedPhoto.png (337.21 KiB) Viewed 130678 times

EDIT:
Official Explanation According to Steve Mayles:
Kackle Replacement in Haunted Hall

FINALLY WE HAVE AN ANSWER!!!
Playtonic answered this today in their Reddit AMA!!!!

[Kiddy14]

¬¬
Thanks for the info Simion... but, oh my god. He doesn't even has a proper description.
GERMAN: Kein Mensch kennt ihn oder hat ihn irgendwo schon einmal gesehen.
ENGLISH: No one knows him or has it ever been seen anywhere.
I wonder where he was going to be used or his special ability, his render looks pretty much completed.

[Mattrizzle]

Upon further inspection of Mr. X's render, I noticed that the bottom of his coat is tattered and he has no legs. Going by logic, he probably maneuvered by floating.

Actually, we don't even know if Mr. X is his actual name. It sounds like a placeholder for an unknown name to me...

[Cosmicman]

I think Mr.X is somehow related to the ghost that chases you in the cart ride. Looks very much alike to him.

[Gnawzooka]

Really? I don't think so.

[Cosmicman]

After a closer look, well not really But they seem to have the sword in the same spot, and they both fly... Or looks like it, I don't see any feet.

Spoiler!

[Gnawzooka]

Sword...Oh, is that thing hanging off Kackle a sword? I thought it was a tail.

[Stone]

Whoa, I've almost forgotten about Mr. X!
Thanks for the picture!

In Kackle's render, you can see his sword more clearly

Edit: Jomingo has found our secret

[Jomingo]

I remember reading about this at the DKU. They speculated that it could have something to do with Kackle or Kloak, as he looks pretty ghostly.

I'll try to find the topic later.

[Swing King]

I like to think either K.Rool would not be the big bad guy but Mr.X would be, or he would be Stronghold Showdown's boss until they decided to remove him from the game.

[DK4Ever]

I think I agree with SK. Mr. X looks like a high-ranking officer, leg-less or not. He may have been Stronghold Showdown's boss, or maybe he was the original final boss (of at least the flying Kroc, and then you find K. Rool in the lost world.)

Besides, he looks too badass to be a normal enemy, even one like Kackle.

Mr. X for SSB4!

[Gnawzooka]

leg-less or not.

Are you sure he's legless? There looks to be something like legs inderneath him, but it blends into the background a little, but so does his shirt, really.

[Rodent]

I think someone should email that Scribes thing at Rare.com and ask about him. We might get lucky.

Spoiler!

That's odd... This topic has 11 replies, but 7 views.
Qyz says: That's because I created it by splitting the 'replies' from other topics. The posts/replies existed before the topic did.

[DK4Ever]

Maybe. I dunno, I don't think Rare has been too keen on answering questions like this before, but it's worth a shot of course.

[Rodent]

Maybe if we try it en masse...

[Jomingo]

Hey, if you go through previous Scribes sections, it's hard not to find 3 or 4 recognisable DKU members having questions answered. I'm sure if we all start asking our various questions in scribes one of us would surely get an answer.

[Qyzbud]

I remember reading about this at the DKU. They speculated that it could have something to do with Kackle or Kloak, as he looks pretty ghostly.

Kackle? Kloak? Perhaps, but I think the similarities to Krook are more striking. Mr. X's close proximity to Klobber in that scan suggests that he may have been a drone, rather than a boss - and if that was the case, his similarities to Krook (who I believe is pictured above him in that scan) are likely, in my opinion, the reason he wasn't found in the game. Having two hooks-for-hands Kremlings was probably deemed unnecessary.

Mr. X does look rather cadaverous, with his pasty complexion, and those red eyes; it's possible that he was one of Rare's earliest ideas for an 'undead' Kremling. And after a bit of thought, it seems almost plausible that this guy is indeed Kloak, just with a less 'covered' look. When 'Mr. X' realised that he could summon objects of his choice on command, he would have been happy to do away with those awkward hook appendages, and he traded his mysterious name for an even more mysterious appearance...

Hmm. Anyway, it will be interesting to check out the DKU-ers' thoughts on the matter, I'll look for their Mr. X topic(s).
Edit: seems the discussion's actually part of a 'scrapped characters' topic, which was a DKL beta element discussion until this post.

Looks like a few of them agree with my Krook notion, although they haven't noticed/pointed out that Krook appears right above Mr. X in the scan...

[DK4Ever]

Mr. X may have been a "boss version" of Krook.

I mean, we had Zingers → King Zing

Neckys ------> Krow/Kreepy Krow

I think it would have worked, and seen as World 6 was FULL of Krooks, it would have worked out well for him to be that world's boss.

[Raccoon Sam]

Just a note, it wasn't the German instruction manual, but the German player's guide.

[Qyzbud]

That sounds right; they seem to take more liberties with storyline and artwork when it comes to the players guides. Still, including a beta character like this, and even putting him among the regular characters, and giving him something of a name and description... it sure seems a little strange. I wonder if any better scans of this guide are out there, and if there are more graphical rarities amongst the pages.

Simion, it's probably a good idea to edit your first post to avoid confusion.

[Rodent]

Does anyone have a picture of the scan where he appears with all the other Kremlings?

[Tiptup Jr.]

Alright, I have a question: If no one's ever seen Mr. X or knows who he is, why is he in the flipping Player's Guide? I think whoever put those pictures in was toying with our minds... I can't think of a logical role for him to play in the game, he just doesn't look like a pirate.

SMALL EDIT: I've written to Scribes twice before, once under the guise of King Tippington III, and they've only replied to me once... and when they did, they took a long and lengthy letter of queries and cut it down to two sentences. So don't count on it, guys.

[Jomingo]

You can't deny the fact that when skimming through any recent scribes you will find at least 5 recognisable DKU members letters. I don't think it would be too hard to get in scribes, that is, if they would actually update the thing already!!!

[Qyzbud]

Tiptup's main point was that they happily go about censoring letters, thus conveniently avoiding the tricky questions...

Those devious cowards.

[Jomingo]

No, they don't. Only at the end of the scribes is there a "snippets" section where they take one question from a scribes letter and ignore the rest. The rest, to my knowledge, are unedited. It's just that Tiptup was unlucky enought to be left in the snippets section.

[Tiptup Jr.]

Wait... That's how they do it?

...I'm sorry, but that is downright idiotic. Loveday responds to the Snippets as if they're just that- Short, one or two sentence letters that aren't meant to be taken seriously by anyone. But now, how are you suppose to know if what you're reading wasn't taken out of a longer letter? I assumed they just cut my letter for the lulz, but... gosh.

[Katastrophe Kong]

This Mr. X guy seems pretty cool huh?

Well one day I said "I wonder what he would've looked like in game"
So what the heck. It's not that good because I just wanted to make a little nice thing to have around in
my pictures, but I might tidy him up abit and give him some badges. That translation kinda sounds like "No one knows him and hasn't be seen anywhere".

[Rodent]

The head needs work, but it looks prtty good. :D

I can't find the Scribes email address, so if someone gets it for us, I think now would be a good time to start a monthly mass of email until we find out who Mr X is.

[Katastrophe Kong]

When I first learned about Mr. X I always thought he'd have something to do with Stronghold Showdown.
So today I was screwing around there and I found some weird sound bit glitches, also a glitch where if you jump really high (with the mega jump code), you'll slowly be swimming back down. Also I fixed my sprite.

[Simion32]

Hmm... looks better, but he may be missing a hat (it's difficult to see in the scan, but it seems he has a hat on ). Also, his skin color (head) shouldn't be as bright. Overall though, very nice!

[Katastrophe Kong]

Thank you .I have a better quality picture of Mr.X that I got from Super Mario Wiki, and I don't see a hat. Could you make a little outline in the picture to show how the "hat" might look? Also I can't choose which palette would be better.

[Simion32]

What little can be seen of the hat shows up in both images, so I'm sure it's not because of JPG-ification or scan artifacts:

This outlines what can barely be made out as a hat on Mr. X.

MrXHatOutlined.PNG (18.72 KiB) Viewed 134150 times

EDIT: It would be nice if we had an ultra-high-quality PNG scan of this, it would help immensely in identifying smaller (or difficult to recognize) details.

[Katastrophe Kong]

I see it now . Is it possible to buy that player's guide on ebay somehow?

[Raccoon Sam]

These three auctions were the only ones available on eBay.. no German ones, though.

Anyone here have any German friends who might have a chance to snoop around old Video Game stores and check for it?

[Simion32]

no German ones, though.

FALSE. You forgot to check ebay.de...
EBAY LINK
Mr. X is right on the front cover of the guide! What?!

As you can very clearly see here, Mr. X does have a 'hat'.
Uploaded this on Atlas in case the eBay image gets deleted.

[Katastrophe Kong]

That's awesome!
Well, I'd better get to work on that hat.Can you tell me which head palette would be better?

[Simion32]

The head palette you started out with was OK, it doesn't need to be any brighter. The bluish-gray color should be more 'defined', if you get what I mean.

Also, the Kremling heads in the background from castle levels resemble Mr. X quite a bit. Could the island originally have been owned/ruled by Mr. X?

[Katastrophe Kong]

Heyy! You're right! Thats an uncanny resemblance you've found, at first I thought that was supposed to be some kind of frilled Slippa. Also, those kremling heads resemble the kremling heads in the temple levels of DKC. Anyway, does this look good? Should I fix the hat?

[Simion32]

The hat looks OK.... This is as close to pre-rendered by rare as it gets, good job! I definitely can't do crazy pixel-art like that...

Well, the temples of DKC do have lots of those heads... but I think that might be because Kremlings that look like that commonly live on DKC island, whereas not many enemies from DKC2 resemble the heads in the castles (Kritter, Klomp, and Mr. X bear the closest resemblance to both). Hmm...

EDIT: After a comparison, the two stone heads don't look that similar. Notice the cat's-eye thing in the castle, where the temple has a plain Kremling head.

KremHeads.PNG (2.69 KiB) Viewed 134097 times

[Rodent]

They still look similar, it's just that the second one has been hollowed out so it can have a candle in it.

[Cosmicman]

Someone please get a hold of that issue, I'm sure there is some info in there if X made it into the cover.

[Qyzbud]

Good point, I'll see what I can do... I'll check with Cyclone first - he's the scan man - but I think he'd have shared with us if he had any juicy details about Mr X. I'm going to get my hands on as much DKC info/printed material as possible to help enrich the collection I'm working on with Cyclone and others. This would be a great document to have scans of.

[Stone]

You forgot to check ebay.de...
EBAY LINK

30 € for the players guide is ridiculous high. If I remember correctly, it was around 12.5 € when I had bought it 1995/1996 from a local videogame store.
The ebay seller even claims " Without this players guide one can barely beat the game!"

[Raccoon Sam]

You do realize that the player's guides were basically the only source of tips and tricks back then?

When I was younger and played DKC2, I never ever got 102%. Now we have the internet.

[Cyclone]

This is the only scan I have of Mr X which came from a Nintendo Power torrent.

I would really be interested in seeing more of that german players guide

[Cosmicman]

Nice find, best picture of him so far. I was thinking maybe he was supposed to be the boss holding that sword from the lava boss level and at the last minute they just decided to make it just a flying sword.

[Stone]

You do realize that the player's guides were basically the only source of tips and tricks back then?

Oh, I thought of beating the game without 102%

I hope I'll find a cheap guide on ebay soon...

[Mattrizzle]

I was thinking maybe he was supposed to be the boss holding that sword from the lava boss level and at the last minute they just decided to make it just a flying sword.

What's comical about that thought is he has two hooks for hands, making him incapable of holding a sword.

And Nintendo Power Volume 76 is the September 1995 issue, which was likely released in August. A rough estimate places the info at somewhere around July of '95, about four months before the game was released in any territory!

I know this because my very first NP Issue is Volume 77, October 1995. And to think, I could have had that issue...

[Cosmicman]

I was thinking maybe he was supposed to be the boss holding that sword from the lava boss level and at the last minute they just decided to make it just a flying sword.

What's comical about that thought is he has two hooks for hands, making him incapable of holding a sword.

Well, I guess RARE was not thinking at the moment, i see the 2 hooks, but i also see a sword on his belt. How was he supposed to use it then?

[Rodent]

I still think a mass email of Scribes would work. :P