Donkey Kong is a game that I actually beat a few months ago on my NES, but was reminded of my completion of the game through its presence on my NES Classic Edition, so I wanted to give it a quick review here.
This is a difficult review for me. I can largely appreciate how unbelievably important a game like Goldeneye 007 is, even while recognizing how far we've come with first person shooters through the lineage of Half-Life and Halo. I can appreciate it because I was there to see what shooters were like before (Wolfenstein 3D), which makes it easy for me to understand the huge leap forward that Bond's N64 adventure was for gaming.
Donkey Kong is far more difficult for me to appreciate because my literal first video game I can remember playing is Super Mario Bros., which built upon the developments of Donkey Kong, but I wasn't even aware Donkey Kong ever existed. As such, it's challenging for me to see the hyper polished, fast paced, brilliantly designed masterpiece that is Super Mario Bros. and also be able to tease out the foundations present in that game that were created, largely from scratch, in Donkey Kong. So all of that is to say that playing Donkey Kong is pretty boring to me in 2018, and was boring to me the first time I ever played it (maybe in the arcade emulation in Donkey Kong 64?). But I'm going to try my best to review this thing from the perspective of someone experiencing it for the first time in 1981, informed by the games that followed after.
It's hard to overstate Donkey Kong's level of influence over approximately 2 decades of console video games in which platforming was king. But aside from that, Donkey Kong's influence spilled over from platforming to video games more generally, changing our conceptions of what was possible in a video game, as well as how video games tell stories.
Prior to Space Invaders, video games were primarily sports titles. Prior to Pac-Man, video games were primarily shooters. Prior to Donkey Kong, video games were primarily shooters or maze games. Each of these genius games were game breakers that changed the conception of what was possible in video games. Each of these were also developed by Japanese companies, a trend that would ensconce Japan as king of the arcade and console market for a very long time, while American companies primarily focused on PC gaming.
Donkey Kong created the jump in video games, which is somewhat bizarre if you think about it. I mean, how often do you actually jump in real life? But jumping has become a core mechanic is almost every video game, to the point that if feels strange to play a video game without it! Go ahead, try to play Skylanders: Giants, and tell me you aren't hammering that X button, jonesing for your little guy to take flight. It just feels weird when it isn't there, but that wasn't always the case.
It's an odd bit of path dependency that jumping diffused from Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros. to hundreds of platformer imitators to first person shooters and RPGs when jumping is such a strange mechanic to us in real life, but there you are, jumping in Skyrim and Halo.
But the jump gave video games a sort of three dimensional feel to them that was largely lacking in video games before this. You could go left and right, up and down, but you could never go over obstacles before. It's hard to overestimate how much influence this mechanic had on the video games that I consider to be among my absolute favorites, and for this, it deserves a tremendous amount of credit.
The actual mechanics of the jump and Mario's movements more generally in Donkey Kong are far more realistic and far less satisfying than they are in Super Mario Bros., in which you can speed up to influence how far you jump, change directions in mid air, bounce upon your hated enemies, and have a certain inertia to your movement that feels just right. But the building blocks are there, and there's definitely something profoundly satisfying about leaping over a barrel and being awarded points for it, and this level of sophistication in movement was probably all that we in the video game playing public could handle in 1981.
Donkey Kong also popularized the use of having multiple levels, a concept that had been utilized a few times before this, but never with the level of notoriety that accompanied Mario's quest to rescue his beloved, yet quickly forgotten, Pauline (Pauline in Smash Bros. Ultimate?). Mario has to move through conveyer belts, elevators, and steel beams on his quest, and each level has its own distinct feel and strategy to it that would have given the player a very revolutionary feel to it in 1981.
Along with Pac-Man, Donkey Kong popularized the use of cutscenes to develop characters and storylines in a video game, which was particularly lucrative in marketing and developing merchandise and licensing. There's a reason that there wasn't quite the same push to market Space Invaders as there was for Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, each of which had their own television show based on the characters. Unfortunately, I played the NES version of the game, which lacks these more polished touches (how awesome is it that we have consoles and PCs now that can handle just about anything standalone arcade units can do?).
The NES port of Donkey Kong seems fairly faithful to me, minus stripping out some of the arcade polish, as well as one of the levels. I'll need to go back and play the arcade version in Donkey Kong 64 to get the whole experience again, as it's been a few years since I played it. But Donkey Kong is a true landmark in video game history, even if its been largely surpassed by its children, including the sequel Donkey Kong Jr.. I'll give it a 9.5/10.
Up next on What I'm Playing is my maiden voyage through a fiendishly difficult NES game, teased below.
-TRO
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