"Sorry Donkey Kong, you're just not a draw anymore."


Donkey Kong(1981) - Arcade

The point of this blog is to write about my experiences about the Mario series of games, unfortunately, this means getting off to sort of a rough start. It's almost embarrassing to admit, but I hadn't played a Donkey Kong coin-op machine until this summer, and my main knowledge and appreciation of this game stems from the bastardized NES port that cuts out an entire level. Nevertheless, I would feel this blog would be guilty of false advertising if I didn't at least make an effort to cover this one, so I'll give it a shot. Just for you, the reader. I guarantee I will get no enjoyment out of this. The NES version is just three levels repeating over and over, I wouldn't have it any other way.

My first experiences with Donkey Kong are fairly vague at best, I was familiar with the concept as by the time I came of age and knew who Donkey Kong was, I had already been subjected to thousands upon thousands of pop culture references to it. Donkey Kong was huge for it's time, I can imagine. My family, however, has never been big for authenticity. My experience with Donkey Kong began about 16 years ago when, at dinner, my parents reminisced about the old Mattel Intellivision we used to have, and that it was probably stuck in some crate somewhere in my brother's room, or that we simply threw it away. Needless to say, as soon as dinner was over, I spent the next half hour or so digging through my brothers crap he had left here after he moved away to college. I finally managed to find it amidst a collection of old He-Man action figures and old Dungeons & Dragons game books. Overjoyed that my digging through his room might have actually reaped some benefit. I hooked up the Intellivision to the television in the basement. I dusted off the cart and placed it firmly into the Intellivision and turned the console on, hands twitching with anticipation as I would finally discover my idols humble roots, battling primates atop a scaffold, battling for his one true love.

Nothing happened.

Frustrated, I pulled the cart out and blew on it repeatedly, a practice I can only imagine will be completely lost on future generations of gamers. I'm already preparing that to be my "walked to school for 5 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways" story when I'm an old man berating children from my rocking chair as a I smoke a corn-cob pipe. I blow on it again, I q-tip it, I go through all the motions. Nothing would get the motherfucker to work.

For the first and perhaps only time, I gave up trying to get an old, dusty cartridge to work. I kept digging through his collection. I found a lot of old gems, Lock N' Chase, Pitfall, Nightstalker, Tron's Deadly Discs, all of them were pretty fun games, however, the one that struck the biggest chord was this little cart called Beauty And The Beast. curious about the title, I popped it in and it loaded up immediately. I lead the protagonist up a large scaffolding dodging barrels and fire and realized "By George! This is an exact, shameless, rip-off of Donkey Kong!" Shameless is an understatement. This was an exact replica of Donkey Kong's gameplay in a cheap disguise. I ended up playing that game for hours, easily the most addictive of all the Intellivision games I had come across. Which I guess, in the end speaks much for just how fucking brilliant Donkey Kong was. It's a timeless classic, it's so good that even it's imitators destroyed everything else on the market at the time. Humble beginning or not, the Mario franchise certainly started strong, and it's a truly remarkable that somehow, things only got better from here.