Somebody should make that happen.

You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find conclusive evidence of who owns Timber the Tiger. I had assumed that all the characters went to Nintendo because of Star Fox Adventures. That was a very similar case of a game full of original Rare characters getting a main character and title from a Nintendo license and Nintendo very clearly owns Krystal as a result. Why would Nintendo own Krystal but not Timber? The situations are virtually identical. There does appear to be a consensus online that Microsoft owns the DKR characters but unless I’m missing something that belief appears to be based on a copyright notice in the DKR instruction manual, which predates any ownership decisions that were made when Nintendo and Rare split, so while it may suggest Nintendo’s attitude concerning those characters in general it’s hardly conclusive. All that said, I think you’re actually correct here. It’s extremely nonspecific, but there is a copyright notice in the DKRDS manual that says “Certain characters licensed by Rare.” It doesn’t say which ones, or who they’re licensed from (Nintendo or Microsoft?), but the wording of the statement does heavily imply that not all the characters are owned by the same entity as only certain ones needed to be licensed. Since we know for a fact that Nintendo owns Diddy Kong, that must mean there’s at least one non-Nintendo character in the game and I’m at a loss for who that could be except for Timber and his animal friends.

Timber was the original star before they added Diddy Kong. That puts him in the same camp as Star Fox's Krystal, protagonists that were pushed out of their own game. They should get their own spin-off together where they start a DETECTIVE AGENCY!