Miyamoto's Donkey Kong Country quote:

[JonnyCGood]

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"Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good." 

There's a quote attributed to Miyamoto which is used to claim that he didn't care for the DKC games which a lot of people treat the quote as a fact. So where does it come from? Turns out these scans aren't just pretty colors, but actually useful for determining these sorts of questions.

An early web source is this 2006 featured article from 1-up.com (2006).

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When it was first shown off in 1994, folks assumed that the slick pre-rendered graphics of Donkey Kong Country were for a next-generation console. But it was an extraordinarily impressive SNES game that almost single-handedly saved Nintendo's 16-bit business during the rocky, transitional mid-'90s. Sadly, for all their technical merit, none of the three DKC games that Rare released in rapid succession were especially fun to play. But don't just take our word for it: even Miyamoto slammed the series in an interview with Electronic Games a year later, saying "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good."

It refers to the quote as coming from an Electronic Games magazine article from 1995. Unfortunately it is not scanned. The article is an interview of Miyamoto and Tim Stamper of Rare by Steve Kent. People on twitter claim that it doesn't contain the aforementioned quote. Who knows.

In terms of print sources, the quote appears in Edge magazine issue 93, which is in turn a section from Steve Kent's book "The First Quarter". And it also appears in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games (page 518). These all date from around 2001, 6 years after the supposed statements were supposedly made. Here we see there is some attempt at a narrative showing that Miyamoto's Yoshi Island project and Rare's DKC were in some kind of rivalry:

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There is an interesting story behind Yoshi's Island. When Shigeru Miyamoto first demonstrated the game to Nintendo's marketing department, it was rejected because it had Mario style graphics rather than the waxy, pre-rendered graphics of Donkey Kong Country. Rather than change to an artistic look he did not like, Miyamoto made the game even more cartoon-like, giving it a hand-drawn look. The second version was accepted.

Miyamoto, who is rightfully proud of his work, was offended the first version was rejected. The same month, I interviewed Miyamoto and Tim Stamper, creator of Donkey Kong Country, together and noticed that Miyamoto was a bit hard on Stamper, making such statements such as "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good."

He also says the quote in an episode of G4's Icons.

In 2010, Miyamoto himself addressed this.

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IGN: I was interviewing them earlier, and even though you weren't directly involved you were definitely very inspirational in making sure certain things were done in that game correctly. I'm wondering, which parts of Donkey Kong Country did you like versus not like? And what did you address with them?

Miyamoto: The first point that I want to make is that I actually worked very closely with Rare on the original Donkey Kong Country. And apparently recently some rumor got out that I didn't really like that game? I just want to clarify that that's not the case, because I was very involved in that. And even emailing almost daily with Tim Stamper right up until the end.

What to make of all this? Taken together, since the earliest version of the quote that can be confirmed is a good 6 years later, and not sourced directly to Miyamoto himself but a journalist, I'm a little suspicious of this. And, it seems unthinkable that a Nintendo employee would bash a game in an interview. It might be that he made an off-hand comment which was then misunderstood or mistranslated and then a journalist wanting to push a dramatic and contrarian narrative picked up on it. It's telling that 1up and G4 have people straight up bashing the game calling it "boring" or not very good.

Edited January 21, 2021 by JonnyCGood

[SynthMilk]

In an interview in Next Generation issue 2, Miyamoto was asked about his involvement in Donkey Kong Country which, interestingly, the interviewer attributes primarily to Miyamoto, referring to it as "your game".  His response only refers to the character design process, translating hand-drawn images to CG, and it's unclear whether he had any involvement beyond that.  Perhaps he was trying to distance himself a bit from it, if the rumours of the Yoshi's Island and DKC internal rivalry are true.  Hey, maybe that's why Nintendo passed on acquiring Rare in the early 2000s. lol

Having read through that NG interview numerous times over the years, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the statement the OP is referring to was made by Miyamoto, just because some of the responses are a few degrees spicier than you'd expect from such a prominent figure at Nintendo.  If it's true, then it is surprising that it wasn't removed at the request of some Nintendo PR person prior to printing; but both that interview and the OP's quote are from an era where, if Miyamoto so much as smoked two cigarettes while leaning against the cubicle of a programmer working on some first party title, he'd be credited as a producer, so maybe he felt he had some latitude to speak his mind. lol

I like DKC, btw, although playing it on a modern display is pretty painful.  Those dithered CG visuals really benefit from a consumer CRT with fat scanlines.