Yeah, Dinoman is 100% correct. There's clear preference at Nintendo for re-releases to either be handled at their original team, or for original staff to oversee the project:
- Advance Wars: supervised by Intelligent Systems
- all Zelda remasters were produced by EPD3, the Zelda team, and had EPD staff attached
- ditto for Samus Returns, which had the Metroid staff at EPD7 in charge
(To be clear: "produced" does not mean "developed" - it's the language used to indicate who is in overall control of a Nintendo-published project)
By and large, Nintendo tap the original staff or team in some capacity. As has already been established, that includes the Another Code remakes, where the original studio was defunct but senior staff from the games were at Arc System Works. Who would produce and take charge of that hypothetical remake is an important question, because it's the board of producers at EPD who decide who does what and which things get made. Right now there's no clear advocate for Donkey Kong 64 to get remade, not least because we don't really know who will be in charge of DK as a franchise. Zelda has a clear production structure and management group at Nintendo who remain in charge of Tantalus and Grezzo's work on the franchise; DK has no equivalent.
And, as I've also said, it's not just Donkey Kong 64 missing from NSO. A whole bunch of DK franchise titles haven't made it to NSO:
- Donkey Kong Junior Maths
- Donkey Kong Land
- Donkey Kong Land 2
- Donkey Kong Land 3
- Donkey Kong (1994)
- Donkey Kong 64
- Diddy Kong Racing (seems fair game for NSO)
- DK: King of Swing
- Color and Advance ports of DKC
That's quite the list. Sure, a bunch are the handheld titles, but it's bizarre that after more than a year, not
one handheld DK game has made it to NSO, yet Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Metroid even Pokemon (in the case of GB) are represented in the handheld selection on NSO. Some of those DK titles missing wouldn't be all that odd, but
all of the possible handheld titles not showing up yet really is strange.
I think we might get a big DK NSO update, perhaps timed around the theme park opening. Maybe Rare's titles from the franchise: the DK land trilogy for the base tier, DK64 and Diddy Kong Racing for the Expansion Pack.