Rare was working on a sequel to Diddy Kong Racing called Donkey Kong Racing. A prerendered CGI teaser video of the game was shown at E3 2001, but no actual gameplay footage was shown.[16]

Lee Musgrave, who led the project, explained to Dromble what the gameplay would have been like, "It was a pure racing game, the underlying software mechanics were actually based on car physics, but it also incorporated the idea of riders jumping between different animals mid-race, to always be riding the ones that were bigger or faster ... we had some awesome gameplay in place, and it was lots of fun – we even had a multiplayer version working – and when you fell off, you had to tap-tap-tap (HyperSports style) to run on foot and catch up with an animal. Fun, but it lost some appeal without the DK universe around it, and Microsoft were unsure of its potential with Xbox gamers I think." He then explains what happened after the Microsoft buyout - "Donkey Kong Racing was obviously pretty heavily tied to Nintendo as a franchise, and as Rare approached the finalization of a buyout deal with Microsoft it was clear that the game had no future, at least with the apes as characters. We switched it around to be a 'Sabreman' game, and there was a great early Xbox prototype – but someone, somewhere decreed that it was a little too old-school for the kind of ‘revolutionary gaming experiences’ that the Xbox was capable of delivering, and so it started down a path of meandering changes, updates and ‘evolution’ that finally saw it run out of steam and fall over. There were some great ideas in the game as it developed though, and I still look back to the early racing game design and think we could have done something great with that."[4]

Aside from Donkey Kong Racing, another sequel to Diddy Kong Racing was planned: Diddy Kong Pilot. Diddy Kong Pilot eventually became Banjo-Pilot, a game based on Rare's Banjo-Kazooie.

A Donkey Kong themed racing game was eventually released under the name of Donkey Kong Barrel Blast.