The crunch of apples was imitated by chewing cookies.
Nintendo developers donated an entire watermelon harvest to record realistic sound effects for Donkey Kong Bananza. This was revealed by the game's sound director, Naoto Kubo, in an interview with the Japanese website Nintendo Dream Web.
The technique of Foley was used to record the sounds — a post-production method in which realistic noises are added that were not captured by the microphone during filming. For example, for the crunch of apples in the game, the team recorded themselves chewing cookies. But things turned out to be more complicated with watermelons.
Recording the sounds of crushing watermelons was difficult. We were working in October, when summer was over, and there were no good watermelons left.
Kubo-san recalls that the team had to wait until the following summer to buy more watermelons and continue recording.
