Then there was Donkey Kong, the other industry-shaping arcade classic.
You could say that ours has been a complicated relationship.
Really, my history with Donkey Kong closely matches my history with Pac-Man. It had a very similar trajectory. It even started the same way: I came across Donkey Kong while I was sampling games from my brother's Atari 2600 collection. I first played it not in an arcade but instead from within the confines of my own home (in my brother's bedroom, specifically).
At the time, I didn't know much about Donkey Kong. I'd seen it in arcades, sure, but only from afar. I stayed away from it because its cabinet's artwork, much like Pac-Man's, was goofy-looking and gave off strange vibes, and thus it filled me with the sense that the game's action was weird in an uninviting way. So I always went out of my way to avoid Donkey Kong machines. And consequently I never got a read on what the game actually was.
Though, for two reasons, I was pretty stoked when I came across the 2600 version of the game. The first was that Donkey Kong was a big-name game, and so its appearing on the 2600 felt like a huge deal (in gaming, there was no event more special than a popular arcade game coming to a home console); and the other was that its opening image made a very interesting revelation: Donkey Kong, it turned out, was a classic platformer, and that was exciting news to me because I loved the platforming genre.
Donkey Kong's action, I learned, wasn't weird or uninviting, no. Rather, it was right up my alley!
I knew that the 2600 wasn't as powerful as an arcade machine, yeah, but still I felt safe in assuming that 2600 Donkey Kong was a faithful port of the original game. "This is no doubt the exact same game!" I thought to myself as I traversed the opening stage. "Whatever content is in the arcade game is surely in this version, too!"
And because I was so impressed with how "faithfully" the 2600 replicated arcade Donkey Kong, I felt as though Atari had as much right to it as arcade-owners. In time, I even came to see Donkey Kong as an Atari-exclusive property. As far as I was concerned, Donkey Kong, Mario and Pauline were--much like Pitfall Harry, Frogger, Q*Bert and other Saturday Supercade regulars--2600 superstars. They were purely the product of Atari's little wooden wonder box!
Because I had no knowledge of arcade Donkey Kong, I wasn't aware that the 2600 version retained only two of its stages. It contained the iconic opening stage with its sloped girders (which are colored purple in this version) and endless wave of rolling barrels; and a second stage in which you had to loosen a number of rivets (or "jump over glowy squares," as I was apt to describe the act) for the purpose of collapsing a blue structure whose separate levels were being patrolled by what looked like pudgy snakes (these stages, as far as I knew, didn't have names, so I simply referred to them as "construction sites").
And that was pretty much it. There were only two stages, and once you completed the second one, you'd start a new loop. And the only thing different about each successive loop was that the barrels and snakes moved faster than they did in the previous loop.
But even though Donkey Kong wasn't exactly loaded with content, I still liked it a lot, and I still considered it to be a top-tier 2600 game. I saw it as an essential piece of our 2600 library.
And for years, Donkey Kong stood proudly among my arcade-style favorites--among beloved games like Lost Luggage, Fast Eddie, Kaboom and Mouse Trap. Usually I'd play them all in succession and attempt one-shot endurance runs. When it came to Donkey Kong, I could reach as far as the fourth loop. That's about when the barrel-rate and enemy movement speed would become too much for me; also, there was an increased likelihood that barrels would drop down ladders, and this would usually spell trouble for me whenever I was running about Stage 1's top level, on which barrel-dropping was far more sudden.
Donkey Kong was a good-looking game, too, especially in terms of character design. With 2600 games, it was usually the case that characters had very rudimentary designs; they were represented either by squares or stick figures. In Donkey Kong, though, characters had real form to them, and they were easily recognizable. There was never a question as to who they were or what they were doing.
I mean, sure--Mario looked more like an amorphous blob when he was climbing ladders, and Donkey Kong had the appearance of an angry gingerbread man, but still the two of them were convincing representations of the famous characters. They helped Donkey Kong set a new standard for character design.
Though, it was more so the game's sound effects that helped it to establish its standout personality. Mario's boingy jumps and 7-note death jingle brought the action to life in a memorable way, and these sounds were so amazingly iconic that hearing them even independently would trigger images of traversing sloped girders, hopping barrels and hammering snakes (or fireballs, which is what they actually were). Every 2600-owner knew them well.
And to the mainstream, 2600 Donkey Kong's sound effects, much like 2600 Pac-Man's, were regarded as the sounds of video games. For decades, they endured as stock material that was used in TV shows and movies to represent the sounds being made by video games. They were being used even as recently as 2010--as sound effects for Xbox 360 games! That's how iconic they were.
So even though 2600 Donkey Kong wasn't the original game, it still managed to be highly impactful. It meant a lot to all of us 2600-owners and the world at large.
"Though, it's still pretty much the same game," I thought. "It has, as I expected, all of the same content."
But when I entered the second loop, things started to get weird.
After I cleared Stage 1, I was taken not to the blue-colored "rivet" stage but instead to a brand new stage! This one was pink-colored, and its level design was much more complex than the previous stages'. It contained moving platforms--two multi-platform elevators that were moving in opposite directions; separate segments; and bouncing springs, which Donkey Kong was tossing out one after another.
I'd never seen this stage before, and for that reason, I wasn't immediately sure what I needed to do. And because its level design was more complex and thus demanded more calculated movement and a greater precision, I had a lot of trouble traversing it. I just wasn't prepared for the jump in difficulty.
It was hard enough to cleanly move and climb around the dual-laddered center structure, which was being patrolled by a fast and unpredictable flame creature, but then I had to deal with something that was much more daunting: the the springs that bounced across the stage's stop level! For the life of me, I couldn't get a read on their movement-patterns or figure out the timing for safely passing beneath them. So what I resorted to doing was planting myself on the second-highest ladder's top portion, waiting for what felt like an opening, and then madly dashing toward the top ladder. My strategy was basically "go for it and hope for the best."
My success-rate was about 33%. Sometimes I'd make it, yeah, but the majority of the time, I'd be clipped on the leg at the last millisecond. Usually I'd Game Over in this stage, and even when I was lucky enough to clear it, I'd be so beaten up by it that I wouldn't have any lives left, and thus I'd have no chance of enduring past the third loop's opening stage.
Because of how it was structured, arcade Donkey Kong was such an oddity to me. "It's so weird that you have to play through successive loops to access additional stages rather than being able to sequentially play through all stages from the start," I'd always think to myself while playing the game. "That's just not how stage progression is supposed to work!"
For a while, I thought that maybe its unconventional structuring wasn't something that was intended--that maybe the units I'd been playing were defective or that maybe the original game had since been replaced by a hacked version (without anyone noticing). It was only about, say, 12 years ago that I became aware that it was intended--that Miyamoto and his pals consciously designed it to where the game adds in a new stage in its second and third loops and then shuffles all of the stages around in the following loops.
I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't so much as catch a glimpse of the Pie Factory stage until 1999. Before then, I never played past the third loop, so I wasn't even aware that the game contained a fourth stage. And all that time, I'd been playing home adaptations of Donkey Kong (the 2600, ColecoVision and NES versions), all of which lacked the Pie Factory stage. It wasn't until I played through Donkey Kong 64's version of Donkey Kong, whose stages were properly sequenced, that I got the chance to play through the elusive Pie Factory.
And, really, it was about time.
What's sad is how badly Nintendo handled Donkey Kong in the years following its release. Its master plan, apparently, was to release a comprised port of the game, resolve to never provide it a worthy sequel, and then proceed to ignore it for the next two decades (I understand that certain legal agreements prevented Nintendo from re-releasing the original Donkey Kong, yeah, but still I'll always maintain that the company should have fought for its baby and been more aggressive in finding ways to make its legendary arcade game available on its platforms).
It was just an inexplicably awful way to treat the game that put the company on the map. Donkey Kong deserved so much better.
The best we could get was NES Donkey Kong, which looked and sounded the part, certainly, but like all of the other Donkey Kong ports, it was sadly missing content. Because of "cart-space limitations," Nintendo had to cut out an entire stage--the Pie Factory. So all we got was three stages. And that was the closest we could get to the genuine Donkey Kong experience.
When I say "we," though, I'm talking specifically about mainstream audiences. I, personally, never owned this version of the game. Mostly I played it at my friend Dominick's house and only for brief periods. The two of us preferred to focus our attention on better, more-complete-feeling games.
I didn't touch the NES version again until the late 90s, when I discovered emulation. I gravitated to it because it was a known entity, and that's what I was apt to do whenever I was entering a new space. And though I never thought too highly of this version, I wound up enjoying my time with it. It was worth spending an hour or so with it if only to soak in its classic 8-bit vibe and let it remind of all of the fun times I had back in the NES era, about which I hadn't reminisced since the mid-90s, when the SNES and N64 took over my life.
Also, I put in some practice and finally nailed down the timing for safely passing beneath those damned bouncy springs! Once I did that, I was able to clear several loops without any real trouble, and I was now on my way to becoming a Donkey Kong master!
In the 2000s and beyond, I enjoyed Donkey Kong in a couple of ways. I spent a fair amount of time with the 3DS version of the game, which I got for free when Nintendo launched the 3DS Ambassador Program. I grabbed the Wii U Virtual Console version when its price was reduced to 33 cents, and I played that one a few times (admittedly, though, I downloaded it more because I was interested in seeing how Nintendo handled NES emulation on the Wii U, and 33 cents was a reasonable price to pay for that privilege). And in the times in between, I played a lot of arcade Donkey Kong on MAME. Whenever I needed a quick-and-satisfying arcade-platformer fix, I'd be sure to turn to one of these games.
I spent the majority of my time with arcade Donkey Kong because it was easily the best version of the game. It was the most visually appealing (largely because of its increased resolution), it had the most engaging sound design, and, of course, it had all four stages! It was the most authentic Donkey Kong experience you could have!
Whenever I was playing it, though, I'd always think to myself, "Wouldn't this game's action feel all the more pleasing and enriching if it were being experienced on actual Nintendo hardware? Wouldn't it be great if the company that created this game did something special and made it available in one or all of its digital stores?"
I was always wishing and hoping for game companies to take measures to preserve their histories and do whatever they could to keep their older games relevant. And what I desired most was for Nintendo to proudly acknowledge its arcade history and finally bring all of its arcade classics to the home market.
Well, about a decade and a half later, my wish was finally granted: In June of 2018, Nintendo, at long last, re-released arcade Donkey Kong! The Hamster Corporation, its chosen publisher, brought it to the Nintendo Switch eShop as part of its long-running Arcade Archives series. I hurried to purchase it for the same reason I was quick to grab a copy of Archive Archives Mario Bros.: I'd promised myself that I'd buy any official Nintendo arcade re-release on principle--to help send the company a message that fighting for the right to re-publish your classic arcade games is the correct thing to do and something you should continue to do.
That was the only reason. Like with Mario Bros., I thought, "I'm probably not going to play it much or extract much value from it, no, but that's fine because at least I'm contributing to a worthy cause."
But once again, that's not how it worked out. Donkey Kong, like Mario Bros., wound up fully engrossing me! Its action was way more addicting than I remembered, and I came away craving for more of it. I kept desiring to replay it and perform better than I did in my previous attempts. And that's what I've doing ever since then; I've been returning to Donkey Kong on a regular basis and trying to set a new high score and thus move my way up the online leader board. (I'm currently at 98 with a score of 122,000. I'd be even higher if it weren't for those darned bouncy springs, which become almost impossible to consistently dodge in the fourth loop and beyond!)
And I've been having a whole lot of fun in the process! Donkey Kong's action is exciting and intense, and for that reason, I'm always able to derive great enjoyment from it.
My only regret is that I didn't spend more time with arcade Donkey Kong back in the day. Had I made a more earnest effort to engage with it and gain a deeper understanding of its gameplay, I would have realized, at a much earlier date, that it was one of the best of its kind. I would have know then, as I do now, that Donkey Kong is the quintessential arcade game, and thus it deserves to have a strong presence in my life.
Now there's only one thing left for me to do: finally become a Donkey Kong master!
I'm going to aim for the top and let no bouncy spring stand in my way!
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