Donkey Kong (Arcade)

If you asked me what might be the most important video game of all time, I think my answer would be Donkey Kong. Not only did it introduce the world to the most famous video game character of all time in the form of Mario, it was also the start of both his and Donkey Kong’s many video game adventures, both series producing many excellent and genre defining titles later down the line. On top of this, it propelled Nintendo from just another game developer to super stardom, allowing them to be the kind of company that could revive the dying U.S. video game industry later with the NES, the company who dominated handheld gaming almost exclusively for years, and would produce many more of gaming’s best franchises and titles. All because this particular game caught fire the way it did back in 1981… so you think it would play a bit better than it does.

Created back when the platformer genre was so young it didn’t have a proper name yet, Donkey Kong contains a few of the annoying issues we would now condemn in a game that isn’t so monumentally important to the industry.  Mario makes his first turn as a playable character in this title, then known as Jumpman since he would only get the more normal human name later as a reference to a warehouse landlord Nintendo of America rented from. Despite later defining the way platformers should naturally play in Super Mario Bros., here the man named Jumpman has a few issues with his jump. First, it is momentum based, meaning if you jump in place you only go straight up and then down, and if you jump while running, your movement follows a rigid arc. There is no adjusting it after you press the jump button, but the game doesn’t expect a huge degree of precision in the jumps so it’s not as bothersome as some later platformers that retain this style. There is, however, a lot of verticality to the levels in Donkey Kong, the player scaling a construction site split into four unique segments based on how many meters high that portion of the site is. Jumpman’s leap is relatively safe on horizontal ground, but if he drops pretty much any distance greater than his own height, he will die. This makes traversing certain areas with plenty of variability in height potentially dangerous for the wrong reason. Dropping from a great height and dying is a reasonable punishment, but in areas with moving elevator platforms, the window for success can be oddly tight, and sometimes a small drop to a previous platform can end up killing you.

Momentum based jumps and fall damage end up coloring the quality of the rest of the experience. Jumpman needs to scale the construction site to rescue Lady, his girlfriend who would later get renamed Pauline as the characters got more attention in a game that some people cite as the first video game story line to be told on screen. The giant gorilla Donkey Kong has grabbed her and is scaling the building site, stomping on some girders to misalign them and hurling barrels down at the man trying to stop the kidnapping. When Jumpman reaches the top of the stage, Donkey Kong will grab Lady and carry her higher, different hazards appearing in stages with different layouts until Jumpman finally finds him at the top, tearing out the rivets in the girders to send the gorilla falling down and allowing Lady and Jumpman to reunite… until the game loops the levels in a slightly harder version where Donkey Kong gets new tricks like throwing barrels diagonally.

The small offering of stages makes it easy to address what works and what doesn’t in them. The first stage, 25m, is iconic despite its simplicity. At the bottom is a fire barrel that will spit out a flame meant to encourage players to move, Jumpman needing to climb ladders to get between the different levels of slanted girders to reach DK and Lady at the top. To impede you on your way up, Donkey Kong throws down barrels, these either rolling the length of the girders or dropping down the ladders along the way, the player needing to time their movements so they can jump over the barrels properly or avoid the possibility of a barrel rolling down a ladder they’re scaling. This level has the most dependence on momentum jumping because you must do it properly to clear the barrels and also features the drops that look safe but aren’t, and since this is the first level, it will be the one you play the most inevitably. Little moments like the only safe jump being backwards or having two barrels line up in a way where it will be hard to clear them lead to the jumping woes, but you can push through this mostly linear climb, and if you grab the hammers along the way, you can spend a few seconds smashing barrels for extra points before heading up to 50m.

50m is an oddity because it was removed from the NES port and because of its colloquial nickname The Pie Factory. Cement tubs move across conveyor belts in this level and are deadly to the touch, but they do look a bit like pies without knowing the level’s context, hence the confusion. Much tamer than other levels, the cement tubs are easy enough to dodge, but the fire barrel that spits moving flames now is more liberal in creating the living conflagrations. The fireballs mostly patrol a layer near the top that has ladders that retract and extend, but what this level mostly amounts to is a fairly simple climb up until you need to find the right window of opportunity to head to the fireball layer and climb the ladder to the top. 75m on the other hand is where the game is at its worst. Two platform elevators exist, the player needing to time their jumps onto them carefully because if they are a little too low you might die from fall damage and if they’re a little too high when you jump off towards the still platform nearby you’ll die as well. A fireball waits in the area between the elevators and moves randomly to potentially mess up your elevator action, but once you clear the troublesome elevators, you scale some platforms and need to dodge springs as they move through the same bouncing pattern across the top girder and between the small platforms. There’s another randomly moving fireball in this area that can slow you down if it isn’t cooperative, but unless you want to go for extra points by being fast or grabbing Lady’s scattered items, this part of 75m can be overcome with a little patience.

The last level is actually an interesting design in that it’s not about getting to the top. Rivets connect the blue girders in this area, Jumpman removing them if he walks over them. By removing all eight you will finish 100m and a traditional four stage loop, although I’ve found arcade machines that mix and match the order you face these levels in. This level features more dangerous living fire, it moving about the ladders freely, but you can grab two floating hammers here to wipe them out, their return to action somewhat slow. It’s not particularly difficult unless you put yourself in a bind between fireballs, but the change in approach breaks up mostly linear and short level design. Scaling up and down and avoiding the enemies makes this the most variable level, but it’s not so strong that it can overcome the toll the awkward rigidity takes on the previous three levels and their simplistic designs. These issues aren’t so glaring it completely destroys the experience, but it is a case where much of the game is pretty plain and thus the little problems stand out, and while you can get used to these issues, it’s not too rewarding to do so. High score chasers can essentially solve the game to a point little resistance is met once the mechanics are understood and level designs are committed to memory, but at that point getting the score is about committing time to it rather than reacting to the all too linear game design.

THE VERDICT: Donkey Kong has not really stood the test of time, but its historical importance has lead to excusing away its little problems. For its time it was impressive and it paved the way for Nintendo to become gaming’s most important company, but as a platformer viewed with modern eyes, its rigid and a little too linear. Your path is practically set in three of the four levels and the only challenges to it are things like barrels that test momentum-based jumps and elevators that can too easily trigger fall damage deaths. Even at its most interesting in the rivet level, it’s not doing all that much, meaning that there isn’t really too much to Donkey Kong beyond an impressive legacy and little jumping problems.

And so, I give Donkey Kong for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. I almost feel like this could be my most controversial rating, but I never wore any blinders going into Donkey Kong when first experiencing it nor did I on this revisit. I love what has been created from the characters who first appear in this game, but even Nintendo seems to know this game can be improved on immensely, a Game Boy title by the same name years later taking the small selection of stages and appending an entire game filled with new complex stages after 100m is cleared. Donkey Kong was impressive at a time where jumping between floating platforms was so novel we had no name for it, at a time where the act of jumping in a video game could be overly restrictive without question, and at a time where competitors often only repeated the single level over and over with no deviation. It is a game that pushed the medium forward but now it is a musket in an era of machine guns. Overlooking the design quirks and simplicity of the game while judging more recent titles of similar make more harshly feels disingenuous and unfair, so looking at it now, I can’t overlook the problems I have cited as issues with other games. Donkey Kong’s tiny package is by no means awful, but it thrives on its fame now, and while I can see where some people would enjoy it legitimately, it does mean they are enjoying it in spite of the archaic design.

I almost feel like I come off harsher than I intend to here. Some people will identify Donkey Kong as the best game of all time simply because it was a key piece of the medium’s history, something that lead to so much more… but all the things it is important for inspiring are so much better than it. Mario’s had many amazing platform adventures since as has Donkey Kong once he became a hero instead of an ornery adversary, and because of it, it’s easy to look back on the first game they came from favorably. It would be like praising the childhood art of a famous painter though. You may see some spark of what lies ahead for them, but their later work is worthy of admiration because they honed their craft in the time since making those early works. This is Nintendo finding their footing in the genre they’d dominate and it’s not awful considering that, its problems mostly stemming from needing to learn what works for a platformer rather than outright terrible design decisions. Donkey Kong is bad because it is dated, but if not for its contribution to the gaming world, we might not have the excellent games after that make it look bad now that we know better.