Chris Sutherland (programmer)

Chris Sutherland (born February 1, 1956) is an English video game programmer and voice actor. He is best known for programming several titles while at Rare, including Battletoads Arcade, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, and Banjo Kazooie, before co-founding Playtonic Games with several other Rare employees. During this time, he also voiced several characters for the company, including Banjo and Kazooie, Diddy Kong and the announcer of the Killer Instinct series.

Biography
In 1989, Sutherland joined the British video game company Rare as a programmer for The Amazing Spider-Man (1990) on Game Boy. Later, he became the lead programmer for Donkey Kong Country (1994), and was responsible for implementing the game's pre-rendered graphics, a process he described as challenging due to the need to reduce the characters' frames of animation. He continued to act as lead programmer for its sequel, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (1995), and Banjo-Kazooie (1998) and Banjo-Tooie (2000). During this time, Sutherland provided voice acting for characters in several Rare games, including as Diddy Kong in Diddy Kong Racing (1997) and Donkey Kong 64 (1999), as well as the Banjo-Kazooie series' eponymous characters in all of their appearances. Additionally, he has appeared as the announcer for all three games in the Killer Instinct series.

In 2014, Sutherland left Rare and became one of the founding members of Playtonic Games, alongside other Rare employees including Steve Hurst, Steve Mayles, Gavin Price, Jens Restemeier, and Mark Stevenson.