Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 263: Donkey Kong

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

We put together a classic Retronauts lineup (Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Ray Barnholt, and Chris Kohler) to discuss the history of an all-time arcade classic: Donkey Kong. (And also its lesser ’80s sequels.)

This weekend Retronauts, guess what it's on like? Hi, everyone. Welcome to an episode of Retronauts starring people in a podcast. studio. I'm one of those people. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I'm leading this episode. And with me, in this intrepid journey through old video games, we have... Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and this Kong has a funny face. Chris Kohler, didn't we do retronauts on Donkey Kong when I was in my 20s? I was like Donkey Kong as a holistic Donkey Kong, whereas this is just about the arcade games. Okay, okay. I'm Ray Barnhold. I'm

here for some monkey catching action. No, wait, wrong one. No, no. Get out of here. All right. Anyway, enough of this joking around. This isn't about Spanky's Quest? No, it's not about any of those things. It's not even about the Monkey King.

Nope. It's about Donkey Kong. We've done a lot of very granular looks at Mario games and other things to have descended from the Donkey Kong series, but in this current incarnation of Retronauts, which is now six years old, we have not actually gone back and looked at Donkey Kong. We did, as you mentioned, many, many, many, many years ago, look at Donkey Kong kind of as a general franchise, including country and things like that.

But we've never given the games the full kind of modern Retronauts approach, which is very slow and meticulous and in-depth and extraordinarily dull. No, just kidding about the last part. We're very exciting because we talk about very, very detailed details of video games. That didn't make any sense. But yeah, we're just going to talk about Donkey Kong, and that means the original game,

and then, you know, it's immediate sequels. We're not talking about things like Donkey Kong country, and we're not talking about some of the latter, more contemporary-ish Donkey Kong games like Jungle Beat and that sort of thing. I feel like those are kind of an episode unto themselves. This is really about the Donkey Kong arcade legacy

and the games that emerged directly from the Donkey Kong arcade titles. So it's a pretty limited set, mostly clustered in the early 80s, with one very lovely outlier 10 years later. And we're going to talk about those things, or at least we're going to talk about some of them because the modern return-out style

is to put together a lot of notes and then not actually get through all of them in the course of a single episode. Speak for yourself, Jeremy. Okay, well, talk faster. I run a tight ship. You need to drink five cups of coffee Yeah, yeah.

And write out everything you're going to say. Absolutely not. People love my laconic, lugubrious style. It is music to their ears and then they fall asleep. I am the enya of video game podcasters. I can drop some enye in the background. All right, folks, let's sail away to the land of Donkey Kong. Sail away, sail away.

Where did you first encounter Mr. Kong? Bob, let's begin with you. Oh, I don't think I played it until the NES. Really? I encountered many old games in the wild, but not Donkey Kong. So things like Miss Pac-Man, Mario Brothers, and kangaroo, not a Nintendo game, but Donkey Kong-like. It was a Donkey Kong-esque game, yes. But I don't think I encountered Donkey Kong in the wild ever until I was like a teenager or something like that.

I don't know why. So when did you discover the missing pie factory? Oh, I still think I haven't played it. Really? Okay. Yeah. It's still missing for me. Oh, you know, the original arcade game is on Switch.

It is now. Yes, it has the full arcade version. And you can buy FlipCrip. Yes, I wasn't even going to pitch that, but what the hell? FanGamer.com. Yes. All right. Anyway, Ray, how about yourself?

I was also an NES, man. I think it was Donkey Kong Classics, which was the two-pack they released. After the original. That was the return of Donkey Kong. Yeah. Or as close as we were going to get. Probably. A two-pack, great.

That was about it. To answer the pie factory question, that was probably Mame. I probably first saw that. When you first play the Donkey Kong ROM and we're like, what in God's name is this? Yeah, yeah, I think so. But yeah, I never saw a cabinet in person or anything until later. It would have to be, for me, the Atari 800 version of Donkey Kong,

because that's what we had in our house, and I'm sure we had Donkey Kong on that. So that's probably what I experienced long before the NES version. Oh, you know what Chris made me think? I actually played the Atari 2,600 version, but it is so different than the actual game. I don't consider that Donkey Kong. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. And because I'm the old person here, my first memory of Donkey Kong is actually seeing it in the arcade when it was shiny and new and watching the Donkey Kong cartoon and buying Donkey Kong stickers and eating Donkey Kong cereal. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. It was a lifestyle. Yeah, it was a thing. Yeah, yeah. I was fully immersed in the Donkey Kong multimedia sensation that Nintendo hit us with in the early 80s. I arrived just too late for that one. And I never actually played the, quote-unquote, pie factory at the time because I was a little kid and sucked at Donkey Kong because it's actually pretty hard.

And the American version, you have to get through like, I think, six or seven stages before you finally see it, right? Right, before it pops up. You've got to kind of go through the cycle, right? So my first pie factory, cement factory experience, was, one, looking at a Sears catalog and saying, what is this, Donkey Kong's Cement Factory? Or Mario's Cement Factory, that's what it was. Oh, looking at the Game and Watch. But then we had the Calico Adam version, and that did have.

Oh, yes. The enigmatic mystery pie stage. I want some more tales of the Calico Adam at the parish house. Yeah, I have a full Colico Vision, Calico Adam podcast episode plan. Oh, boy. So just you look forward to kids. We're going to sit around the fire

and regale your ears with tales of loading video games off a tape cassette for five or six minutes at a time. Anyway, Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong. I feel like, as I put in my notes, we could probably do this in our sleep. But just going through the history of the original Donkey Kong,

it's so interwoven into the narratives of video games. this time. And as Chris's pointed out, it is a narrative in itself. It is. It is indeed. Yeah. Back when I was researching that book I wrote Power Up back in the early 2000s, I wrote about Donkey Kong as, you know, which I still haven't seen any evidence that it's not the first game to tell a three-act story with, you know, essentially cartoon images on the screen. Donkey Kong, it begins with a cinematic scene of the lady being kidnapped by Donkey Kong, you have the interim, the action in the interim, and

then at the end, you actually have a little ending where the story resolves itself. Now, of course, then it loops around back again, and you start playing from the beginning. But when you look at what the definition of like a three-act narrative is, Donkey Kong, in

1981, seems to be the first, you know, sort of graphic video game to fit that description. Of course, there had been text adventures prior to that. Sure. There was a There was an S-A-K arcade game that showed up on the 40th anniversary collection recently from like 1979 or 80. Yeah. And I cannot remember what it's called, but it has kind of something similar where there's like someone stranded on a desert island and it kind of has that premise and set up and resolution.

Interesting. I can't remember what it is. But the good thing is it is on the S&K 40th anniversary collection. So look for the old-ass game about a desert island and that's it. Ooh, check out. I should have looked that up. Yeah, yeah. But that's me, not preparing.

Anyway, yeah, so I guess we all know the story of Donkey Kong, but for the sake of completeness, we should talk about the fact that Donkey Kong became a thing because Nintendo really, really screwed up. Nintendo of America. Nintendo of America really screwed up. Nintendo of America was very young at the time. And Hiroshi Yamuchi, the company president, told his son-in-law, please go to the other side of the world, get out of my sight,

head up this other company for us and distribute games in the world's largest market. And so Minoro Arakawa did that and ordered like 2,000 copies, I think, of a game radar scope. It was a lot, yeah. Yeah, which was a space invaders-ish kind of game. And that never, one, Space Invaders was never as huge in America as it was in Japan. Yeah. Also, this was like three years after the Space Invaders boom in Japan. Right.

So it was kind of a strange. still popular at that point. They were, but it was a strange horse to put a lot of chips on. Yeah, Radar Scope got hot in Japan, and so Arakawa was just like... Oh, I didn't know that part of the story. It did. It was hot for a second in Japan. It was like actually kind of popular. That was the second when Arakao was like, time to place some orders.

Yep, and he placed the orders, and, of course, it takes a long time for the games to come in, and then, of course, they got to put them on a boat, yeah. And then once they're on the boat, they have their headquarters in New York City, so it's not like they were in Seattle. Right. They had to ship those all the way across the U.S. Yeah, so by the time the game's got there, maybe even before the games got there, you know, I think they looked and realized like, uh-oh, this actually isn't going to be that successful here, and we need something else to put into these machines. You need a better game.

Radar scope is just a terrible name, too. It is. I think it's bad. Yeah, it sounds like some sort of colonoscopy thing. Or like submarines. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it definitely doesn't say space shooter. But anyway, yeah, Nintendo ever resourceful and also not wanting to go out of business,

said, well, let's make a conversion kit for these unwanted radar scope cabinets. And so they put a young kid who was totally untested, green around the gills. No, a green horn, yes, that's it. I don't know if he was green around the gills. They said, hey, why don't you save the company for us? And he did. It was amazing. It's quite the story.

Yes. Aren't you glad we told it to you? Oh, did you want details? I'm so sorry. Yes. So anyway, this young kid, fresh out of art school, was a guy named Shigira Miyamoto, who, you know, he really wanted to be an artist, and that wasn't in the cards for him. He ended up becoming a game designer instead.

And he had done a little bit of design work with Nintendo. He would, well, I mean, he was hired, well, he was hired as like a favor to his dad, but he was hired and put on, like, industrial design type stuff. That is what he had studied. He, like, in terms of, like, the design of products and things like that. And so he had designed, when Nintendo was doing Pong type systems in Japan, he was designing the outer casing for those and sort of, like, the configuration of the controls based on what he had studied in school, which was sort of like human engineering type of thing, like, how do I create controls that people sort of intuitively grasp? And, but he also could draw. and so they had him drawing. He did the artwork for the game SkySkipper, which again, like... It's not great, but he did, you know, he did the artwork for that. And so then, yeah, so basically, I mean, he'd been working with Gunpe Yokoi,

who was designing a lot of the games and learning about game design. And so, but then everybody else was sort of busy, so they're like, okay, well, you've been working with Yokoi, so why don't you, you know, try to design a game for us? And so then he decides, I'm going to design, like, the most complicated, non-workable game possible

which is basically he's like I'm going to design four games and one. It's four games and one. With the biggest characters we've ever seen in a video game. Yep, this whole story of the guy and the gorilla kidnapping the girl

and climbing the tower and they're climbing the scaffolding and there's going to be four different sections and he's like thinking, you know, when I talked to him much later about it, he's like, well thinking back, I guess I would say that I designed it like a four-panel manga strip.

And one of the things I really wish that I had known about when I was writing Power Up is the concept of Kisho Ten Ketsu, which I'm going to ruin this, but it's like, that's what a four-panel manga strip is based on. It's like a four-act story. Then it's like the setup, the expansion of that, a twist, and then the conclusion. And so you see a lot of stories and poems and things like that following a 1, 2, 3, 4 structure. And so it shouldn't be too surprising the

Donkey Kong was like he's got, I've got these you know, it's going to take place in four scenes. But then, you know, people come back to him and they're like yeah, so you're asking us to make four video games first of all. Also this other thing that you have here where the he's going to walk up these diagonal

girders. Well, you can't do that because we can't make things that are diagonal. We can make things that are square because the pixels but you can't make diagonal things. Yeah, it kind of seems like this was sort of, you know, the equivalent of a kid sitting down to do his first Doom mod in the 90s or sit down, you know, to make his first Minecraft creation

and just get like, he doesn't know what you can't do. He doesn't know about opportunity cost. He just wants to make something cool. And that's exactly what he did here. But he had a whole corporation behind him that really, really needed this to be a success. And they said, oh, okay, sure. Well, what ends up happening with the girders was that he went back and he said, okay, well, if we do it this way, I'll draw a sprite, and then the next sprite, the

girder, I'm going to move it up a pixel, and then the next one I move it up a pixel, and the next one move it up a pixel. So they look like they're horizontal, or they're diagonal, but they're actually just horizontal sections moving up. They look like they're moving up by one pixel each, but in fact, it's a straight line, and I'm just shifting the drawing. And they're like, he's like, can we do it that? way? And they're like, yeah, okay, I guess you can do it that way. So that was the first

story that's told about, you know, Miyamoto kind of like solving a technological problem that he created with lateral thinking. And but then also if you look at like, if you look, if you go in to like do a sprite edit on like Donkey Kong and you look at the sprites, there's like shitloads of girder sprites because they had to draw all these different sprites to pull off that effect. But he was like, you know, adamant that like this is a good use of it. And that's why like, even in the title screen, like, Donkey Kong, the title of the game is written in girders. Because, like, there wasn't anything else to write a way. Yeah, that explains it.

Yeah. Well, you know, that's, we'll get to that later, but, you know, we were talking about the cement factory, the pie factory, whatever you want to call it. And that is missing from the NES version because there just wasn't enough space on the cartridge to get that in there when you also had a bazillion girders that they had to account for. So, yeah, that kind of, you know, bit them in the ass a little bit. but it was a pretty incredible technical feat. Like, I do remember when this game was new. And so, you know, I was like five years old at the time, and therefore all my memories are very fuzzy and distinct

and everything was impressive to me. But I do remember this game really standing out. And I also remember that it was the game for quite a while that everyone wanted to play. Like you would have a line of video games against the wall and the one that had the crowd was Donkey Kong. Or even if it didn't have a crowd, it just always had someone at it. Because it was so interesting and so exciting.

and when my horrible uncle-in-law that is no longer part of my family got an Intellivision, that was the game that he wanted to use to show off and not let me play. Yeah, so it was a game with a lot of impact and, you know, it did spawn, like I said, a multimedia empire, lots of merchandise, cartoons, and that sort of thing.

It had a ton of personality. Yeah, the game itself... Hinges on its main character. Yeah, for sure. Like, it's not... Again, I don't want to say, like, the first definitely, but it's like, if you look at the popular video games at that time,

you were either playing a spaceship or, you know, Pac-Man, which was represented as, you know, a circle with a wedge cut out of it. There were very few games in 1981, like you were playing, that actually had a little person running around, a little person looking like a human being. Yeah, I mean, this... Donkey Kong as a very expressive character and that even had, you know, the lady or Pauline,

you know, this cast of characters that this game had were kind of intrinsically in the game itself, really these interesting characters as opposed to, like, other games. Yeah, this was the era of stickmen. Yeah. And, you know, in television, George Plimpton was going on television to talk about,

look at the realistic graphics of the Intellivision. And, you know, you've got little stickmen hitting the ball and running around the bases, but they were better than the blocks that you had on Atari 2,600, so what do you know? Yeah, they got limbs? But, yeah, it's crazy. And, you know, if you really want to kind of dig in,

and I do mean dig, into the history of the prehistory of Donkey Kong, this game really seems to follow creatively on the footsteps of UPL's Space Panic which debuted in 1980 and it was kind of like a 2D platform-style version of Hayanko Alien and was very much about like a stick man running around a maze digging holes

for these weird-looking aliens to go into and you know by comparison Donkey Kong took that sort of grid of ladders and platforms that appeared in Space Panic and gave it more color, more personality, more vibrant characters, more things to do, more ways to interact with the machine. It was just like a huge step forward in so many ways.

I mean, you look at the things that jump man, the protagonist, can do, and it's not just jumping, despite that being briefly his name, he can also carry hammers and climb, and he can fall to his death very, very easily. Yeah. That's a thing he's very good at. I don't know, in eight years, eight plus years of doing hundreds of these Retron's episodes, I found that the first thing

is often not very important, even though it was first. So I don't have anxiety about, like, saying this was the first, but this is what made it popular. Yeah. By no means am I saying that this was the first game to have good graphics or whatever. I'm just saying that... I'm agreeing with you. And Chris. But at the time, like, you know, what

else did you have? I guess Centipede might be kind of comparable in terms of its vibrant color scheme. Right. Right. For sure, yeah. Because, you know, Donkey Kong is very much, especially that first stage, it's about the very bright pink girders, lots of blues. It's a different color scheme.

It was very striking, you know, compared to the sort of whites and blacks and, you know, kind of basic primaries of games at the time. Yeah. So it really stood out. And Mario himself is primaries. He's red and blue. And then he's got, I guess, you know, kind of peach-colored skin, but similar to, you know, kind of in hue to white and yellow.

So you're kind of getting into that primaries, that comic book color palette. concept, whereas Donkey Kong is more of an orange color, which is a secondary color, so he's evil, obviously. Right. That's how it worked in the days of the 60s, and that carried through, you know, the comic inspirations that had an impact on Shigaro Miyamoto. Speaking of comic inspirations,

there was also the whole Popeye thing. Right, right. That initially they were going to do a Popeye game, and then the license fell through. And so Miyamoto already had in his head the love triangle of Popeye, Bluto, and olive oil, and then that There's maps directly onto Donkey Kong, Mario, and the lady.

Right. And that was, like, I have never really read anything about Miyamoto and his views on Popeye. But I just have to assume that was a huge, like a huge show cartoon for him, just given the era that he grew up in. Yeah, probably. I mean, probably it's, I think you're growing up in that era, you're consuming anything and get your hands on at all. And so, yeah. So, I mean, he, you know, when David Schiff did the book Game Over, Miamoto. probably to, in an attempt to make a connection with this person who was interviewing him,

talking about seeing the movie Snow White. But then when Miyamoto did, like, interviews in Japanese, he talked about shows like Japanese TV shows that inspired him. So he was probably just watching anything he could. Yeah, he probably saw Popeye. That was probably something that had moved into Japan at that point, for sure. Based on when the Fleischer ones were made, I think construction sites play into 90% of the gags, which is why Donkey Kong is just nonstop construction sites.

That or Mr. Magoo. Yeah. Yeah, I think people have pointed out that there's like Pop-I cartoons that took place on construction sites, but I'm not really sure. It's like you can't really see it. Yeah, I mean, that was a popular gag, and that's those sort of old cartoons.

Right. But I definitely feel like just given his art style, the way he draws, and the era he grew up in, like he would have grown up on a diet of imported cartoons for sure. Because American cartoons were being broadcast a lot in Japan at the time. And importantly, they went to him. saying, make a game for America. Like Donkey Kong was made in Japan,

and of course it has so many traits of Japanese video games. But it was specifically made because the American side needed a game. So he was probably thinking about American cartoons, you know, at the time. Right. You know, in terms of complexity and design, this game is a huge leap over most of what was popular at the time. I think the only thing I would compare it to would be like Asteroids or Defender, which are very, like they have very complex setups, but they're also kind of difficult to grasp. Like Defender, have you gone back and played that like the actual arcade game anytime recently?

Because it doesn't have a control stick. It has, like, left-right buttons, and then it's got, like, climb and in hyperspace and shoot. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot to wrap your head around. Well, yeah, fortunately for Donkey Kong, you know, radar scope had one joystick and one button, right? So, yeah. But within, you know, with those simple controls, you're able to do so much. And I think that is kind of a hallmark of, you know, a lot of Japanese console design in general is just giving you a lot to do with kind of a very,

straightforward interface. Compare that to, you know, like American PC games where it's like, please use the entire keyboard to, you know, map a single command to every single key. And there's nothing wrong with that style of play. It's just a very different philosophy of interacting with the game and interacting with the virtual world. And, you know, you really get that with Donkey Kong. I mean, it does just have basically one more interface option than Pac-Man from the year before, but you're doing so much more than Pac-Man could. So that button really gets gets put to use. You like to play Donkey Kong?

I enjoy Donkey Kong, yes. I think it is a good game. He had the cereal. How could you know? You know, I'm not as crazy about Donkey Kong Jr. But I still enjoy the original. I still think the original is very, very challenging. But I do enjoy it.

You know, I like the NES version. I like the arcade version. I'm really happy that it finally came to a system and is accessible to everyone. Yeah. Well, I mean, for a while, that arcade version, was, I think a lot of people considered, oh, it'll never get re-released because of these rights problems. Because, of course, at the time, Nintendo did not program video games in-house.

Right. And this, I think, kind of gets back to the complexity of the design we were talking about. Like, even if Nintendo could have programmed a game internally at the time, this was not the game for them to cut their teeth on, because there was a lot happening. So, basically, Miyamoto and Yokoi, we've mentioned, and then composer Hipp Tanaka. They were kind of like the internal staff on this, and they came up with the design and the audio spec and everything, and they took that to an outside contractor that Nintendo had been working with called Ikegami Sushinki. And they're still around. Ikegami still makes, you know, like video cameras and medical devices and things like that. Ikegami monitors are kind of considered a holy grail among classic game collectors who like to play, you know, as a CRT.

Those things sell for a whole lot of money these days. But at the time, you know, they were like so many kind of tech companies in Japan doing sort of the grunt programming work for projects like this because Japan was a little later than the U.S. obviously and getting into video games because basically video games sort of came into existence in the U.S. But Japan really loved them. The audiences were bonkers for them. So everyone was like, you know, we want to make video games. We don't necessarily know how. So let's work with these other guys and have them make. the games for us. And that's where, you know, Tose and Micronics and all these other sort of

white label companies came from at the time. Anyway, Ikegami was doing work with the Nintendo and they put the code together for Donkey Kong. And, you know, digital rights were very nebulous at the time. And it wasn't until like the late 80s where people finally figured out, like what about a video game? What about computer code is copyrightable? Right. Like what belongs to whom? And so... So it was Nintendo? 's position, assuming that it was Nintendo's position, that they did, this was work for hire, that

Ikegami did, they paid them, and then they owned the rights to everything. And then later on, it seems like maybe Ikegami thought, no, actually, we own the copyright to this company that we wrote for you. Right, and I think, you know, from what I've read, the kind of controversy or the

legal issues around Donkey Kong began when Donkey Kong became a hit. And Nintendo was like, hey, you know, we ordered X number of these, and we actually need like five X of these. So instead of going to Ikagami and saying, hey, we need you guys to make more boards for us, they were just like, well, let's

roll them out of the factory and you know, created more boards that I guess they had contracted for. And supposedly they also reverse engineer the Donkey Kong code to make Donkey Kong Jr. Right, because Donkey Kong Jr. in games that followed after that, they made in-house at that point. Yeah, because at that point

they had enough money from Donkey Kong that they could just hire people and actually make games themselves. Right, and not have to worry about the working with an outside contractor. The other thing, I only just found this out through that website and Twitter Supper Mario Broth that I assume we all followed. Wonderful, wonderful people.

There was a, there's a game called Crazy Kong that people assumed was a bootleg version of Donkey Kong, but that in fact was licensed by Nintendo. Really? Yeah. So it was actually licensed by Nintendo, and this is proven there's court documents filed buy Nintendo that say, da-da-da-da-da-da, crazy Kong, which is a product made under license

from us by Falcon Software, whatever was called, da-da-da. So it actually was licensed, and it's like, apparently they were just having such trouble fulfilling all the demand that Falcon, and apparently it's made with, it's a conversion kit or was made with the Crazy Climber. Okay, and it's Crazy Kong. Yeah, so they just remade. So it does not operate the same way. Weird Ersatz Donkey Kong, yeah, just like from scratch, like put it together.

And it has all kinds of weird differences. And but apparently that was licensed. And what about Monkey Donkey was that also? Okay. Hengley Kong? Yeah. So I think you're thinking Hingley, man. Oh, I am.

Yes. Sorry. Now, does that mean monkey stupid? Yeah, it does. Yeah. So what was I going to say? Yeah, so basically from what I... Oh, the re-release on Switch.

Well, yeah, yeah. So for what I've read is that, you know, there were legal, like, this whole Donkey Kong thing was tied up in courts for a long time. And that could be why we didn't see Donkey Kong sequels after Donkey Kong three. I don't know. Oh, potentially. Yeah. But eventually, it seems like they settled out of court, and the settling out of court happened right around the time that courts came down and said. So here's the deal on copyright. So I think Nintendo realized, like, they were not going to win this one and just, like, you know, resolve things with Ikigami. Yeah. didn't see Donkey Kong, like the arcade version, again, except as a hidden secret in Donkey Kong 64, developed by rare. Yeah, but the thing is, it's like people always put it out, it's like, oh, they've never re-released a Donkey Kong arcade game. They probably can't because of the rights.

It's like, no, they settled out of court. And if you think that Nintendo, who has more money than God, is going to go into this settlement and not come out with the free and clear rights to Donkey Kong, like, they just give them whatever money they want. They're a small company, so they probably did. The reason that it didn't come out is because none of the original. Nintendo arcade games came out on anything because they just weren't

interested in doing it. And it took Hamster, the Arcade Archives company, probably coming in and saying like, hey, we'll do it. And they're like, oh, okay, do it. Yeah, I mean, Nintendo created Virtual Console Arcade and we're like, check it out. Virtual Console Arcade. Yeah. Arcade games on Virtual Console.

And guess what they didn't do? They didn't release a single one of their arcade games on that. No, I think that was sort of a sop to third parties that wanted to do that basically. Okay. you do it. Yeah, but I mean, it is hard to say, like, how much of Nintendo's disinterest in the arcade platform

stems from just who cares and how much of it stems from, like, well, there's this, you know, whole nasty, messy, messy legal dispute tying things up. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that it's... Originally that could have been it? I don't know that it's a coincidence

that Nintendo has still never reissued Donkey Kong arcade code itself, like Hamster did. Oh. So, you know, maybe... I don't know. Maybe. I just don't... I think the Nintendo has so many things that they're doing that they had to just sort of offload that to Tanger, basically.

No time for arcade games when you've got a rubber band to sell for Switch. So speaking of lawsuits, we did not talk about the universal lawsuits. Oh, that came later. Oh, that was later? It was. Okay. How much later? Like a few years.

Okay. We haven't even described what this game is. You jump around. There's a monkey. Yeah, we're talking about, yeah, switch lap bands, et cetera. By the time people are going to know what that is by the time. this comes out. It's going to be ugly. Yeah.

Well, this was created in the ES&D and Days, and everything's in history. We're going to be ashamed of our words and deeds. Yes. True. Oh, that's what Quiet wears. That's all she wears. Yeah, right, right. Just that rubber band. That rubber band is going to be Mother 3, and you're going to be so sad. It's the only way to play it. All right, so why don't we talk about the characters here?

Because they were a big part of what sold this game. I mean, character-driven video games already, at this time, 1981, were kind of taking off in Japan. You had space invaders, and the invaders themselves, like they stood out because they looked like seafood for some reason. They did. They were fish invaders, but from space. And then Pac-Man.

Yes, he was a circle, but he was an anthropomorphic circle somehow. And those little ghosts had kind of eyes, and they would track you around, and they'd get scared. That was cute and adorable and likable. And so here you have Donkey Kong, where you also have cute and adorable and likable characters. Even this massive kidnapping gorilla that steals women, like he was pretty cute. He's like this big monkey at the top of the screen. He beats his chest, and he has like little crossy, like grimmises at you, he's got little crosses on his

To denote the fact that he's got teeth He was the good guy in the cartoon Oh yeah And they made him the hero Right, voiced by Supi Sales Well I mean the cartoon came out You know concurrently with Donkey Kong Jr. So by that point

You know Donkey Kong had the heel face turn That's true And the the whole you know The shoe was The worm had turned from Ari He had a family to feed Yeah even to this day Like that's sort of a fundamental

you know, Miyamoto just keeps sort of telling the exact same story over and over and over again with these games even going on to like Mario Galaxy 2 basically, but like he's always like, he really likes, he really likes putting into these games

that the bad guy in his games is really, he's done some bad things but he's really just like misunderstood. There's really very fine people on both sides. Yeah, yeah. Like that's sort of it. And it's like that always kind of happens like in a Mario story is that

there's always some like redeeming I always think of like at the end of Mario Sunshine where Bowser and Bowser Jr. are kind of like, you know, just like leaving and Bowser Jr.'s like, Peach isn't really my mom, is she? You know, it's like, no, she's not, son.

You know, like that's, that to me really, I mean, it really started with Donkey Kong as well because he was thinking about the love triangle and this character. And so that's why the game was called Donkey Kong because like it's really centered around the conflict on the inside, side of Donkey Kong.

Yes, that's absolutely why he named it that. So, of course, you do have Donkey Kong. He is a gorilla or an ape, which is it? It's an ape. Let's not get too into that. Well, I mean, if you check the Donkey Kong wiki by God, they will go into extensive detail about which species of primate every character in the Donkey Kong franchise is. Okay.

Well, that's helpful. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad they did that. You can also learn about the Kong War. You know, there's a lot worse things you can do on the Internet. There is. That's kind of basically. I saw guerrillas up close recently, and I have to say they were very Kong-like.

Donkey Kong-like. All right, there you go. Yeah. So that's it. He's a gorilla. He's a full word. And for some reason, he's like, I'm going to abduct this woman and climb to the top of a building, a construction project. And he does.

Yeah. Because Mario treated him very bad. See, this was part of that. I don't know if it was printed. It wasn't printed on the arcade machine or anything, but I don't know. It's like later it kind of came out. It's like, oh, well, you know. Mario kind of treated him badly, and so he escaped, and then to get back at Mario for treating him badly, he kidnapped, you know, his girlfriend, basically.

So, again. So his girlfriend, by the way, is fault all around. Yeah, I guess Donkey Kong Jr. is a retcon in which we learned that Mario is also a circus employee. Right. And he got Donkey Kong back. That's what they say. Yeah, I don't know if Mario was, like, yeah, I guess he was, they said Mario was a carpenter, but it was also just sort of like, yeah, exactly, exactly. And, wow, that's, okay.

That's my new religion now. Yeah, you've got your Donkey Kong inner conflict. You've got, you know, coming to your savior, your Lord and Savior Mario. But, yeah, he was, also, I mean, I think there was something in there. I don't know where this kind of stuff came from, but the idea that, like, Mario owned Donkey Kong and that he did treat him badly. And then we see, because in Donkey Kong Jr., Mario has, like, the whip, right? There are two Mario's with whips. There's two Mario's with Whips.

We'll talk about other Mario later. Right, right, right. Mary are Twins. Yeah, other Mario. Yes. Not green Mario, but he's not even green. No, he's red. He's a separate other Mario.

And then Mario himself, of course, and I think the really kind of fascinating story about, you know, Mario is that the whole entire design, right, of that character was all done so that he would look really good on a video game screen with things that Miyamoto was thinking about that I don't even think anybody was thinking about at that point and that maybe he didn't even really need to be thinking so hard about. But he's like, well, he has to have a mustache

because if he didn't have a mustache and he just had a mouth, we didn't have enough pixels to kind of like draw a distinct mouth that's separate from his nose. Oh, he has to have a really big nose so you can see it. And then he has to wear a hat

because if he were to jump, when he comes down from his jump, well, obviously, necessarily his hair would have to fly up in the air. And since we can't show that, well, we'll just have to put a hat on him so it doesn't matter. And he's going to have to wear these.

He's got white gloves so that you can see his hands. And he has overall. so that his arms would be a different color than his torso. And it's like, wow, you are way overthinking this. Can you just imagine Miano just like you're slaving over this on a drafting table with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth? Like, no, the hat, no, we can't, no, God, no, mustache maybe? Jump suit, oh.

And people will just be like, are you done with this video game yet? It's like, I don't know what color his shoes should be. Snapping of people. Yeah, I mean, just think of how many sheets, how many reams of graph paper he went through. figuring this out. He did, you know, later on when they released the NES classic, they sat down, like Nintendo itself sort of sat down for an interview with Miyamoto and talked about, really about, like, the design process and everything.

And he was like, yeah, so when I got this assignment, it's like, yeah, you need to turn around this game in a very short amount of time. He's like, well, he was living in the company dorms at the time, which is where a lot of young employees would live, you know, for Japanese companies. They'd live in company housing. And he basically was called all his friends, and he was just like, don't expect to see me for three months I'm just going to work for three months

and he would take baths at the company because they actually had they had a communal bath that used the boiling water that they used to they had a water boiler to heat water to boil the tree bark to make playing cards

and they also used that water boiler for the bath and so Miyamoto just like the police house at Pat Laver and Pat Laver Oh, yeah. So Miyamoto would work until whatever, midnight, one, and then go get in the bath and kind of, like, decompress in the company bath and think about what he had been doing.

And he's like, oh, that's where I got all the good ideas, was in the company bath. Then go back to the company housing and then go back to work again for, like, three months. So he was inspired and he smelled nice. I think you can't overstate that. I think, yes, yes. The fact that he did, he, yes, it's like he crunched like 24-7 for three months, but he bathed. Yes. And that's an important part of the creative process.

Okay. So also the other character in this triangle, we've mentioned her Mario's girlfriend, but she's just called Lady. And that is canonically her name, as was kind of reaffirmed with, Super Mario Odyssey, and where did... Wait, really? Yeah. Like, she's just lady. What?

Oh, boy. Yeah, Lady and Pauline are different characters now. Oh, you've got to be kidding. No, Mayor Pauline is not lady. She's not lady? She's not lady. And if you go back, like, the character's name in Japanese has always been lady. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's just, that's what she is. Right. But now there is also Pauline. And I'm pretty sure in the Japanese version of Mario Odyssey, Pauline is Pauline. Uh-huh. And Lady is Lady. Really?

Wait, where's Lady in Mario Odyssey? know she's she's a memory was Pauline Donkey Kong 94 did she appear? I know that name has been around for a while. It was in the either. That might have been like the cartoon. They named the lady. I got to do some more research on this. This is

interesting. I got to revise that book again. I thought that they I know seriously. I thought they went back and recond it so you know she was Pauline even in Japan even because of Mario Odyssey. Yeah I don't know how much we're splitting hairs on this. No I don't know but either way the Pauline thing turned out to be a misnomer anyway because she was, it said, oh, she was named after the

wife of, the then-wife of Don James, who was a very early into employee. And so Arakawa went to Don and said, hey, what's your wife's name? And he goes, they said, P-O-L-L-Y. My wife's name is Polly. And Aracawa here is Pauline. And so they named her Pauline, and he didn't

have the heart to tell him that he got it wrong. Maybe for the best. Yeah. What's up? I'm just, I'm looking, and I think I was misinformed about this. So, yeah, okay, so Pauline is lady. Okay, so people, okay, sorry, people were making a big deal about this at the time of

Donkey, of Mario Odyssey, but they were just full of her app. I mean, that's okay. It's easy to happen. Yeah, the lady truthers got to us. God damn it, those guys. I'll tell you what. Anyway, so, yeah, she's Pauline and she's also a lady. Pauline is a lady.

Also, the other characters here, barrels and jacks, they are not characters. They are objects that Donkey Kong throws. Oh, yeah, right. fireballs. They have eyes. They have eyes and they also have sentience. They go after Mario. They are always, they have the uncanny ability to be exactly where you don't want them to be. That was the first use of Miyamoto putting eyes on things before they became rare. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, like they were the first

Mario enemy if you think about it. They show up Mario, I guess they didn't have eyes at Mario Brothers. Let's say, let's say Zaku enemy. Yeah, right? Yeah, I mean, they basically became clouds and bushes in later experiences. That's kind of the shapes that you have here. Anyway, fireballs and barrels and jacks are important because they are the things that Donkey Kong throws

out there to keep Mario from reaching him. And this gets to the premise of the games, which we actually have not talked about in the 40 minutes that we've been recording. And the premise is that you are Mario, you are at the bottom of a scaffolding like a bunch of girders being constructed in a skyscraper. Donkey Kong's at the top with Pauline,

a. lady. And you've got to get up there and get lady back. So every stage is Mario trying to make his way to Donkey Kong. So you kind of have like each stage is its own sort of contained space and every stage is designed and looks different than the other, has a different color scheme, has a different theme, has different mechanics. Like you said earlier, Chris, it's four games and one. And the people who had to program this were probably very angry about this. But, you know, the games, the game does use consistent physics across all levels. Indeed. And this is

the thing that sets Mario part. He runs and he can jump and he can jump up in the air. He can also jump forward or backward. And you use these jumps to evade hazards and objects. But then you get to the second stage and there's ladders and

elevators that you have to jump onto. And then you can't just jump over enemies because the enemies are jumping. They are jacks that Donkey Kong is throwing at you that bounce forward. Like a terrible noise. That level is so noisy.

Oh, yeah. And then the third stage, you've got the sentient fireballs, but also conveyor belts and a giant pie in the center. You have to avoid the pie because it's made of cement and will kill you. There's also fires. No, it's no pie at all. No, it's actually cement. But then the final stage is fireballs again. This is the boss fight.

This is where there's nowhere to, if you can climb up to don't. Donkey Kong, but if you do that, he'll kill you. Yeah, he will straight up murder you. Yes. And so now it's time to murder Donkey Kong. Yeah, every time you get to the top of stage one, two, and three, Donkey Kong is like, well, I'm taking my lady and going home. So he climbs up the scaffolding to the next stage of the, yeah, how can you get?

It essentially gets to the spire of the building, the top of the Chrysler building, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, and then if you go up to him, we're like, oh, I've got you now, Donkey Kong. He kills you instantly. Right. And you're like, why was he running away in the first place? But for whatever reason, he was running away. And now all of the rivets now.

Yes, he's trapped. Yeah, he's trapped. There's nowhere else to go, nowhere to run. Yep. And so, yeah, you remove the rivets from the girders, and once you've done that to all of them, somehow that causes them all to collapse simultaneously. Indeed.

Sending Donkey Kong careening down to the ground where he smacks his head. Lady, however, Pauline is safe, and she kisses Mario. Or at least they stand and look at each other in their heart. I don't know. Anyway, there's a lot going on in this game, considering that it is a 1981 arcade game. Like, you know, before this, the most popular game in the world was Pac-Man, which, you know, the maze changed colors every time, didn't it?

Actually, no. No. The maze didn't even change color. That's the thing. That's the thing. That's the thing is like, you know, Donkey Kong demands individualized skills per stage, right? But in Pac-Man, you know, you can just basically figure out the ghost patterns and then, you know, you've got it all set, basically. You only have to do one thing, essentially.

Yeah, the fruit always appears in the same space. Yeah. The monsters always behave the same way, just faster. Yeah. Yep. Tunnels are always the same. Yeah. So there was a lot happening here, and it made it kind of exciting because every time you beat a stage, you didn't know what was going to be next.

And, you know, the U.S. version, I believe, was designed in a way so that instead of seeing all four stages in a single playthrough, you would see stage one, then stage four. And then the next time you would see, like, stage one, two, and four. And then finally, you're on the third iteration. the third loop, you would finally get to the cement factory. And that's... And that's where people's game usually ended if they got that far because all of a sudden it's like this... You know, there's moving platforms, you know?

There's like a conveyor belt, so you have to move against the physics of it while avoiding fireballs and like flaming pits and what the hell is going on. So, yeah, it was like a real monkey wrench to throw into the experience that late in the game. I get it.

Oh, I didn't... Sorry. That wasn't deliberate, unfortunately. You get a golf clap. Oh, great, great. Anyway, sort of as the bonuses here, you know, as an extra test of your skill so that you can earn points, you get points for jumping over barrels and for completing the stage quickly, but also you can occasionally in some stages jump up and grab a hammer

that will automatically just smash the hell out of anything in sight. And you get points for doing that. And then somehow Pauline has dropped all of her personal accessories, her purse and her hat in her umbrella because she is a lady who carries you know finery with her wherever she goes

even in the skyscraper while being inducted by a monkey and you can collect those for her and get pulled points and that is pretty much it there's also some weird R&G involved in so the barrels in the first stage will be rolling down

the girders but occasionally they will go down a ladder and you're completely screwed if it does and there's also the diagonal barrel that goes falls down the screen yeah it feels like super awkward so yeah

There's about five different directions barrels can hit you from. Meanwhile, that fireball in the oil can at the very bottom is creeping up behind you. And it can jump, it can move through gaps in the ladders. That's one of the great things about the first stage. You know, Chris was talking about how the girders aren't even, and that's because they start out even. And then at the beginning, you know, Donkey Kong climbs up the ladder to the top of the girders, and then he jumps up and down, and it causes them to buckle and warp.

And the ones that are, you know, the ladders that are at the, the parts of the girders that separate and pull apart, the ladders become broken there, and so you can't climb up there. But then, you know, other ladders become compressed and you can climb those. It's just super well thought through. It's really, really detailed. And especially, again, you know, it starts off

with, you know, Donkey Kong just quickly dropping a barrel straight down to go into the oil can to pop out as a fireball. I mean, it's just like, there's so much thought there that you don't really see. I mean, it's crazy that it was all done in a abbreviated

time period on a really strict deadline as well. Yeah, it was just one of those like completely fortuitous situations. Like this game could have been a disaster, it could have been overambitious, it could have been poorly programmed, the design could have not worked out well, it could have, you know, gotten in its own way, it could have been assigned to someone else entirely who would not have had this idea and just come up with, you know, another wrote video game, hey, here's a Pac-Man clone, because that's what's popular. Yep.

But that's not what happened. And so it was like this completely new video game experience. packed with personality, packed with challenge, packed with interesting things to do. And it became a huge hit. It was a massive hit, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. It was a hit everywhere, Europe and back in Japan. It really hit kind of like as, you know, Pac-Man had been out for about a year. You know what I mean?

We're looking for that next thing. And it was just wildly different than anything else in the arcade because it was so completely original in so many ways versus other people that were sort of like looking for, okay, well, what can we do that's a space shooting game? Okay, Pac-Man came out, okay, what can we do that's a maze type game? Yeah, and it was a great spectator game.

It was a game that was a lot of fun to watch because, you know, the game is always changing every time you get to the top of the screen, there's another stage, you know, it changes up. And it's a difficult game that requires skills. So people who play it and get their asses kick before they even beat the first stage, like they fall back and they watch someone

play who knows how to do it well. And it's very impressive to watch. So it was, yeah, it was just kind of like that perfect storm of a lot of different things. And so it was like that immediately took Nintendo from being a company that had spent a century trying to figure out what the hell it was. And, you know, especially had spent the past 30 or 40 years trying to find the next hit looking for the next, you know, ultra hand. The next thing that would make it big. And this was it. And this basically set Nintendo on the path of.

making video games forever. Because at this point, they've been making games for like four or five years. Yep. And maybe a little longer. But, you know, if this had been a flop, they could have said, well, clearly this is not for us. And they've gone back to toys or, you know, making computers or something, making cars. Who knows? Right, because so many of, I mean, Nintendo's products prior to this, a lot of them had been really derivative.

I mean, they, Nintendo also made Space Invaders rip-offs. And Nintendo also made, like, you know, generic pong systems and stuff like that. And generic Lego blocks. The end block. Yep. So, I mean, for them to have something that was so uniquely, you know, Nintendo.

And I think, you know, I think the game was born of necessity because Nintendo had a U.S. distribution and wanted to, you know, forge its own way in this country. And that kind of bit them in the ass at first. But it also meant that once Donkey Kong

became a huge hit in the U.S., they owned it. They had it top to bottom. Like there was no one else to share, publishing rights or manufacturing rights with, it was a Nintendo game, and that really positioned them for success. So, you know, when it came time to release the NES, they looked to partner up with Atari, but eventually they had enough, you know, infrastructure and distribution and partnerships that they could just go on and do it on their own.

Going back to Radar Scope, it's funny how that game sort of set up a chain of recycling for Nintendo. So Radar Scope, they were converted to Donkey Kong, and then by the time Donkey Kong was cooling off, they had purchased too many monitors, which the punchout arcade machine. Right, right. And then nothing came out after that. Outside of, like, arm wrestling. That's right.

Then you had Playchoice Tins, which were basically, yeah, yeah. Kind of the same setup as Punch Out. They were the swimming in monitors, then, I guess. Yeah, they have so many monitors. Yeah, if you see a red-colored Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, that's the converted radar stuff. See a blue one that is the original Donkey Kong. But I know of.

But, yeah. Yeah, so Donkey Kong was a huge hit, like I said, and it showed up naturally on tons of game systems because Nintendo did not have their own game system at this point. And it kind of became like a litmus test for the quality of a platform. Like, you know, the Atari 2,600 version, not so good.

Intelivision, a little better. Atari 8-bit PC versions, pretty solid. Klico Vision was okay, but then Klico Adam had the missing pie stage. And then the Famicom version, the NES version, stage, but, like, the NES was actually designed specifically to play Donkey Kong. That was the spec that they designed it at.

So even though it didn't have enough memory on the cartridge for that third stage, it only had, you know, the other three, it still was pretty close to being a perfect arcade conversion. Like, aside from, like, some difference in the pixel dimensions of the screen because it was a vertical monitor arcades, it was the real thing. played right, it sounded right, it was just spot on. And so that was kind of the initial for A, the initial salvo for Nintendo's entry into the console market. So it, you know, kind of got them their start in arcades and, like their first big hit in arcades and then

their first big hit with consoles. So kind of a big deal, I would say. That said, let's take a break. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to be able to. All right. Hi, everyone. We're back from our break. We have had some water and some snacks and used the bathroom.

Now we're ready to talk about some more monkeys. Anyway, Donkey Kong was a huge hit, as I have mentioned, multiple times over the past hour. And now we have proof in the fact that there was a sequel almost immediately. The next year, Donkey Kong Jr. came out. And because by God this was Nintendo and Miyamoto overachieving, it was not just Donkey Kong too. They could have said, let's just do more of that. Let's bring Donkey Kong back and have Mario go save him or like save something from him and stop him. But that's not what they did.

No, they said now Mario is the bad guy and so is other Mario. Double Marios. Yep. Mario and Mario, the Mario brothers, as it were, have abducted Donkey Kong in revenge. for Donkey Kong abducting lady. And now, Donkey Kong Jr., a small monkey, has to go save the big monkey. I almost feel like maybe it just picks right up exactly where Donkey Kong left off. Because, I mean, it leaves off with, you know, Donkey Kong falling down and smashing his head on the bottom of the girders.

But importantly, not being dead, yet being stunned, being put back in his cage. Right. And Mario immediately had a helicopter right there waiting. Which makes you wonder, Mario leaves down his hammer, picks up the whip. Why didn't Mario just choplift into the top of the skyscraper and head Donkey Kong off at the past? Was that helicopter last seen in Mario Land, too? Maybe.

Yeah. I was going to say also talking about using the bathroom as a good segue to Donkey Kong Jr. Because this game is shit. Oh, no. Listen, listen. Although there are birds that drop stuff on your head. Already 40 people have tweeted at me, so hold on a second.

Right, yeah. I enjoy the spirit of the game, but it is very difficult for me to play it. but I am very attracted to that cabinet. Every time I see it, I play it. I give it a chance like every five months because I go to a lot of classic gaming conventions, but I have a lot of problems with it. Yeah, so they did not do more of the same.

And what they did with this game was give you, it's a platformer with a character who's not very good at platforming. That's bold and brave. Why would you do that? Well, it's because Donkey Kong Jr. is a monkey, and therefore he is better at climbing than walking. So Donkey Kong was a game where you moved in a horizontal space, like back and forth, and you used kind of a verticality jumping as sort of your modifier to the gameplay,

whereas this is much more a game about moving at a vertical plane, and when you have to be on the ground moving horizontally, it kind of sucks. It's like that's not where you're supposed to be. You're supposed to be on the vines. And Junior is really good at climbing vines. He can reach over, do like, hand over hand to move. across vines and chains and so forth, and he can reach out with two hands to climb up vines quickly, and then he can reach and grab just one vine and slide down quickly. So there's kind of

like this sort of variance in how you play, depending on, you know, where you are, what the configuration of the area you're in is laid out like, and what you need to do, it kind of affects how you play. At the same time, there are things patrolling the vines and the chains, trying to kill you, and you have to avoid them as well. So there's some complexity here, but there is the fact that Donkey Kong Jr. really sucks on the ground. I think the ice climbers have better jumps than he does. Yeah, the thing about Donkey Kong Jr. is that he's really wide.

He's a really big sprite, which is a technical achievement in an arcade game from 1982. He is a huge guy, and unfortunately that makes his sprite very sort of ambiguous. especially because he stretches out when he jumps. So it's kind of hard to judge. Like, at what point can you walk off, you know, like lean over the edge of a platform without falling? There's a lot more ambiguity about the controls and about your interaction with the world than there is in Donkey Kong. And I think that's the root of my frustration. Like when you have to do that springboard thing and grab onto the moving chains, it's kind of rough sometimes.

Like that stage sometimes, yeah, sometimes I accidentally fall off just like the mushroom platforms before I even get to the springboard because I forget exactly how far off the edge I can walk with Donkey Kong Jr. before he falls and dies. Anyway, that's my thoughts. Wait, let's back up a bit. I want to try and figure something out. You've been calling him a monkey. Is this been established anywhere? No, I mean, if he's junior, then obviously he's a gorilla. Yeah.

If that's what Donkey Kong is. Yeah, because Junior has no tail. Right. opposed to Diddy Kong, who does. It is a monkey. Diddy is an unrelated monkey. I thought we said we, there was, okay. No, I just wanted, you know.

I'm just saying monkey because it's, it's just a catch-all for a simian. He's a primate. He's a leap and primate. Animals and ape escape are not apes. No. But they don't have tails. So figure that out. But okay.

Nevertheless, thank you, Jeremy, for clarifying. Yeah, not a huge donkey. young junior fan over here. I haven't really thought about it, you know, too deeply as to why I don't like it, but it's probably those reasons I just wouldn't have been able to articulate them. He's a big pancake. He is. His hipbox is like a Rorschach test.

You're just like, maybe this bird will get me. I don't know. It's, uh, again, I love the, the arcade cabinet art for this game. Yeah, I have the marquee. Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. And I, every time I'm at a classic gaming convention, I try to play this game again. and I still hate it.

But I don't know why I'm drawn back to it every time I feel like I should like it. Well, the game is pretty and neat. I think conceptually you like it. Yeah, well, when Junior is climbing, when he's on vines and stuff, it's really fun because there is so much variety and so much strategy you can use and how you navigate those. But there's just not enough of that. Like the stages are kind of small and they're more platforming than climbing. And that's not playing to junior strengths.

I mean, the third stage is. pretty much just platforming. It's kind of a reprise of Donkey Kong level one, where you're moving back and forth up girders, and this time instead of dodging barrels, you're dodging sparks. Some of them are rolling down from Mario, and then

some of them are just orbiting the platform. And it's not that great and not that fun. That same play style, that same play mechanic, was much more enjoyable in the original Donkey Kong, because Mario was better suited, too.

it. Oh, well. I don't know. It does at least, you know, show some variety between the stages. The first is pretty much just like get the handle on climbing. Then stage two, you also have to deal with springboards and moving objects that you have to climb on while birds are dropping eggs at you. The third stage is the sparks. And then the fourth, you get back to that sort of girder rivet thing that you're doing in the original Donkey Kong stage four, except here you're putting keys.

You're sliding keys up chains to liberate Kong and give Mario the boot. I've always found the last stage to be the easiest one in the game. It's really easy. I would say stay my way to it just to experience the entire game. But then once I got to that stage, I could finish it without getting hit once. Right.

It's a nice victory lap, I guess. Yeah, it's kind of weirdly not a complex stage. It's just, you know, there's eight chains dangling and you slide keys up the top of them by pushing them. Like if they had put some other elements in there besides birds that, you know, swooped down back and forth to get you, it might have been more challenging. But I guess I'm not really complaining because, like, the other stages are frustrating enough. So this one, I guess it's kind of good to have, you know, the let go of your bicycle handles, take your wheels off the pedals, and coast downhill stage. Well, if I can say something nice, I do like the fact that the graphics have variety in each stage, you know, as opposed to Dyn Kong, which it is basically just girders all the way.

essentially, like Donkoan Jr. It's like a jungle. And then, you know, the jumps ahead to like the weird spark level, which is kind of like the world's first Mega Man stage. That's like a Spark Man. It's this weird neon tube level with a... I mean, that level is actually straight up paid homage to

in the NES version of Bionic Commando. The final enemy base, like you've got all these platforms and sparks and you have to use the swinging mechanic to obey the sparks. Yeah, yeah. Sparks have eyes. Yes. Just like the Fireball.

There's also, like, midway through the game, there's also these giant guys who are throwing these spiked balls at you that roll down. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. There is a lot of Donkey Kong and Bionicamando for some reason. How about that? Yeah, I mean, at least they tried to, you know, make it look much different. It wasn't just... Yeah, and even with the added variety of graphics,

they managed to get the whole thing into the NES cart as opposed to the original. Yeah, you know what? All four stages. And I was thinking back while you guys were shitting on this game. I probably played it... Oh, come on. I probably played it more. than the original on Donkey Gone Classics

when I was a kid playing down the N.S. Maybe that was because it had one more stage, or maybe it was because the graphics variety, but I don't know. I kind of, I think I enjoyed it a bit more. Yeah, it's amazing what you can get out of graphics variety. You don't just fill the entire thing up

with girders and various configurations. Yeah, I mean, I had both of these games on Clico, Adam, and I played this one a lot. It was not a disappointment to me. But going back to it, it's definitely a harder game for me to enjoy now than the original Donkey Kong. And, you know, I covered both of these games

for the NES Works video series, and I didn't just trash Donkey Kong Jr., but definitely said that it's not as good a game as the N.E. or as Donkey Kong. And for the most part, people agree with me, but there are some people who feel very strongly in favor of Donkey Kong Jr., and that opinion is valid. I don't agree with you,

but I am not saying that you're wrong to enjoy it, because there is a lot to like about this game. I just don't think it's as tightly created and as timeless as Donkey Kong. So the character of Donkey Kong Jr. has been written out of history because if you... So Rare's continuity and lore took over after Country.

In a country, it's inferred that Cranky Kong is Donkey Kong from the arcade games. Yeah. And Donkey Kong, presumably, in that game, is Donkey Kong Jr. or a lesser Kong who is now in his own series. But Donkey Kong, Jr., I think, he only appeared in Mario Carts. Yeah. Super Mario Kart, the first one.

He's in Donkey Kong 94. Yes, he is. He's in Mario's tennis for Virtual Boy. Right. That was his last appearance. Yeah, so I guess towards the country reign, there were a few weird cases, but they kind of wrote him out because it was too confusing, maybe. Well, and then he was in, you know, some of the Game and Watch gallery titles.

Right, right. That's kind of unavoidable. I think it's just because he's just because he's. he was an existing thing that they have to remake. But yeah, I don't know if anybody talks about this or cares, but it is a weird continuity thing that Rare just sort of did as a whim.

Yeah, so according to the Donkey Kong Wiki, Donkey Kong Jr. vanished sometime after the Great Ape War. And they have, there is a render of him. He's like a Kong wearing a fedora.

And just, I don't know. Okay. And in the cartoon? There's some wild stuff out there regarding the DonkeyCon continuity. Donkey continuity. Donkey continuity. I hear Ken Burns is working on it. Yes. Absolutely. Anyway, there's not really much of a legacy to this game as opposed to Donkey Kong.

You know, there were ports for various computers and consoles, and then NES version is probably the best one. It's on Switch now as part of the arcade archives, and little bits and pieces of it showed up in Donkey Kong 94, like mechanics and stuff. But that's pretty much it. I guess you could almost consider Donkey Kong jungle climber, sort of a variant on this

with its emphasis on grasping, but it's also kind of a Clue Clue Clue Lans. Yeah, more like that. Yeah. Yeah. So who even knows, man? Doesn't he even have cameos, the Kudu Kudu characters, aren't they

in that game? They might be. I don't know. Like, it definitely, yeah. That's for another episode, though. The weird spin-off Donkey Kong games. Another weird one single-screen Nintendo games. Yeah. Anyway, Donkey Kong Jr. gave way to Donkey Kong 3, a game that has nothing to do with any of the other Donkey Kong games except that Donkey Kong's in there for some reason.

Yeah. Well, that was at that point, it was like the Mario brothers, Mario and now Luigi, had branched off into their own series. Right. And so Donkey Kong necessarily had to move on by himself without the Marios, who were done tormenting him. They'd sold him, I guess. Back to the sewers, squishing bugs and crafts. They just drove out to the country and led him out of that car. Go.

Just go. It's like that scene in Toy Story, too. Yeah, so Donkey Kong 3 is weird. I like it. I'm a fan of this game. I think it's weird and bad as a Donkey Kong sequel, but I think just as a shooter on its own, it's really good. It's fun.

I like it. I remember playing it in the arcades and being like, sure, why not? Why shouldn't this be a Donkey Kong game? Why shouldn't I shoot Donkey Kong in the ass? Exactly. Like, he probably deserves it. He probably needs, you know, some DDT up to the old spiel Cooper. Would you say this game is a simulation of office politics because you're blowing smoke up the big guy's ass?

Anybody? Absolutely. No, because it's probably more like vaporized poison. So, sorry. It's literally DDT, though, right? It is. Before that was known to endangering animals. I think at this point we knew.

Oh. And they were like, whatever. Well, he doesn't use it on his plants. No. He uses it on bugs. Listen, if a monkey crashed into my greenhouse, I wouldn't be worried about the potential effects of the particular pesticide that I was using on his... That's true. That's the thing, though, is why is a gorilla just tormenting greenhouses?

Like, that seems so mundane. It seems like such a step down. He's gone from being King Kong. Like, literally that is what Donkey Kong is. It is King Kong. Just like, I'm going to fuck with just this one guy. Like, I'm going to mess up some greenhouses. Who cares about plants?

He seems to have allied himself with the insects and some sort of grander plan we don't know about. Before it was about kidnapping one woman, now he's getting along with all these bugs who are protecting him. Oh, yeah. I see. So he's kind of like the ant-man

of the Nintendo cinematic universe. I'll say. Okay. Yeah, so anyway, the premise of Donkey Kong 3 is that you are Stanley the Bugman, Nintendo's most famous hero, and you are protecting your greenhouse

from Donkey Kong and bugs, because the bugs want to steal all the plants and do whatever bugs do when they steal plants. And Donkey Kong just wants to kill you, I guess? I don't know. He punches bee hives and makes bees come out, and he's on these two poles at the top of the screen, slowly inching downward,

and if you don't pay attention to him, he'll eventually drop down and for some reason kill you. I'm feeling Miyamoto wasn't involved here. Like, I don't know if he participated in the making. of this game or whether he'd basically moved on at that point. I think it's okay for Miyamoto to have made some games that just didn't work out. That's fine. He's not perfect.

So this was, you know, like, I don't know why this game happened the way it did. But, you know, in a way you could kind of look at it as a, as them taking a mulligan on one of their older games, Space Firebird, which was an arcade game, a shooter that has a lot of the same mechanics. Like the way the bugs move, they're kind of Gallagia-ish. like this is a definitely a shoot-em-up and the bugs will kind of come down at you but then there are other bugs when you shoot them they'll explode into a spray of thorns or deadly bug parts

you have to avoid those there's caterpillars that inch across the screen and you can't kill them but you can stun them but you kind of don't want to because if you stun them in the wrong places they will block your shots and keep you from chasing Kong off the screen.

So I guess there's like two ways to win a stage. You can kill all the bugs, and apparently there are a lot of them, but you can wipe out all the bugs on a stage, or you can cause Kong to scoot off the screen. Like every time you zap them with DDT on the butt, you'll inch up a little bit in shock and dismay because there's poison in his ass.

And if you scoot him up far enough, he'll go on to the next screen, the next greenhouse. So I look this up, and, yeah, Miyamoto and Yokoi and Hipp Tanaka all made this game. Yeah, yeah, just. I think sometimes it's just like, well, you know, let's pay the bills. You've got to try some things. You got to just get out there and...

And again, you know, like I said, this does kind of tie into one of their previous games. So I think it was just an experiment to, you know, modernize that concept and still bring a little bit of the Donkey Kong platforming element into it. Because that is the one thing that sets us apart from like a Gallagher or something. Stanley the Bugman is not just running back and forth across the bottom of the screen in Invader style. there's like risers that the plants grow on inside each greenhouse and you can jump up and down on these risers so you're moving closer to your targets so you can really just zap Kong's ass as fast as you can

but by standing close to Kong you're making yourself more vulnerable to the bugs that have less distance to come down and swoop at you so is there no final stage in this game? I don't believe so. Yeah, it just keeps going. I've played like eight or nine stages into it. It's really hard, and it never seemed to end. It's just like the colors change, the plant layouts change, and I don't know, I've read there's like 20 or more different stages.

There's less of a narrative, I guess, in this than the other two games. Yes. The narrative is you're a guy who's shooting Kong in the butt. That's it. Be in. And like the one gameplay modifier is that a super gun, like an ultra poison, falls down, and you can grab that. Of course. And you can spray Kong in the butt really fast.

And you can basically, like, if you start a stage with that, like carry it over from the previous stage, you can actually complete a stage in about three seconds. Oh, okay. And he scoots up and you're done. How do you lose it? I think it runs out after a few. Oh, okay, okay.

After so many shots or after so much time. So there's some sort of like stage-to-stage, long-term, mid-term planning you could do with this thing. Yeah. Like there is some persistence between some of the stages until I think you go to a new greenhouse. Oh, okay. So, like, plants that go missing because bugs take them will stay missing until you get to the next greenhouse.

Gotcha. So, anyway, this game has even less of a legacy than Donkey Kong Jr. It's on Switch, and it's, it was on NES. And I don't know that it's been on any other platform, has it? I mean, it probably, like, virtual console. No, it's probably a virtual console. Yeah, but, like, getting ported around. Yeah, by the time this came out, Nintendo had its own console, so they were like, I don't know.

they, you know, they let Atari Soft do Mario, Mario Brothers, but I don't know if this one was ported to anything. Maybe even Atari Soft was like, I'm, no, we're good with Mario, thanks. Good be, good be. I will say there is an ending of sorts in that one screen has a beehive at the top that you sort of push him into and then he falls, but it's not quite as satisfying as, you know, being reunited with your loved one or father. Okay, you're right, yeah, but then it just cycles and it's the same thing over.

So, yeah, it's interesting. There are, there are not a whole lot of ports of it, or it doesn't seem like there are non-N-N-N-Dentdo system or like non-NES ports of Donkey Kong 3, which you'd think that there would be, but maybe it just sort of came too late. Yeah, I think at this point they had said, nope, you know, we're going to make our own home ports exclusive for our system. Yeah, well, with the minor exception of... Yes, Donkey Kong 3, Dai Yakushu.

Yeah, which is super weird, like, follow-up slash sequel, slash... I mean, basically, it's what they, in Japan, on the Japanese computers, HudsonSoft actually, even into the NES era, HudsonSoft would make Japanese computer versions of Nintendo's games because they had a really buddy-buddy relationship with them. They did Super Mario Brothers Special and Punch Ball Mario Brothers and stuff like that. And I think the thing was, I think they realized that the Japanese PC formats really couldn't handle the games as they were. So they would actually really make some significant changes to them to make them more sort of custom. for the limitations of the Japanese PCs they were porting them to.

And so, like, when you look at Donkey Kong 3, Dai Gakushu, which was this version that they made, so it didn't have platforms that Stanley the Bugman jumped on. He did just run along the bottom of the screen. Yeah. Yeah, and you're shooting the stuff that comes down, and, like, it is very different. But then also, there's all of these, like,

photorealistic backgrounds and things like that, which is really kind of fascinating. And he's not climbing on vines. He's got parachutes in his hands or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really bizarre. Yep. Yeah, so.

And the weird, so this game, nobody dumped this to the wide internet until last year. Yeah, I thought it was recently. Yeah, it was very recently. Well, people knew that it existed. It was just that it was all in the hands of Japanese collectors who don't dump things. Right, yeah. It didn't sell that well. Yeah.

And I found out about this game when I was doing a Donkey Kong three video retrospect of a few years ago. But the only footage was, like, like this tiny little thumbnail size, like filmed on a potato kind of garbage. Yeah. And the thing is, there's still versions because they made this for many, many different PC formats in Japan. And there's still versions of it that are undumped. They've only gotten one or two, I think, at this point. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, there's this whole... There was one that the shop beep in Akihabra, like they advertised that they had it, and people tried to get some money together to buy it, but it was just gone instantly. Yeah. Yeah, there's like this whole line of Nintendo games that, came out on Hudson and Sharp computers, including, like, golf and a few other games. Yeah.

Golf and tennis, yeah. Yeah, and I think balloon fight and maybe even ice climber, like a lot of the early Famicom games, like there were like computer versions of them. Yeah, I'm not sure about the NAC stuff, but my understanding is that the Sharp came about, the Sharp connection came about because Sharp actually released something called a family computer, and Nintendo licensed the name Family Computer Famicom. Oh, did they? From Sharp.

Like, this was something that I saw online. maybe like a year ago or so. So I think... Oh, I don't think it was a family computer. I think it was like a microwave. It was called a Famicom. Oh, okay. But it was like an irrigation for something else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, air conditioner or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think regardless, yeah, Sharp and Nintendo were also Buddy Buddies. Yeah, they were buddy-bud. And you were seeing Sharp ports of Nintendo games as late as Clu-Cloo Land for the Sharp Zaris, which was like 15 years ago.

I'm sure everyone bought that one. Anyway, so yeah, that's a weird one. And if you actually watch all the footage of the game from start to finish, the weird photorealistic scan backgrounds actually tell a kind of story. It's like an alien abduction or something. You know, there's like a cornfield, and then there's a UFO, and then it's like you're being experimented on by the aliens inside the UFO, and then finally you're out in space.

And that's why this was the last Donkey Kong for many years, because he was actually gone. He was abducted by aliens and disappeared for a decade. Like, canonically, it actually works. A real X-File. Okay, so there was one other Donkey Kong game released for NES. That was Ray's favorite, Donkey Kong Jr. Math.

Yeah. No. You specifically said you wanted to talk about this game. Yeah, I do. Okay. I have a weird sentimentality for it. I never really played it all the way through or I never played it, you know. There's no ending, actually.

Well, not all the way through. What I mean is, you know. Just like numbers. I never played it to, um, educate myself. Okay. But yeah, it is an educational thing where you basically

just solve a bunch of platform, no, platform. You solve a bunch of math problems in the Donkey Kong Jr., quote unquote, engine, which makes the worst user interface Nintendo's maybe ever made.

It's pretty bad. Because you are Donkey Kong Jr. climbing up a vine to select menu items and numbers and things to fill out these math equations. Yeah, this is very much in the stack-up genre of Nintendo games of like, hey, they didn't actually finish this and it doesn't work very well.

Yeah. You don't even get the robot in this one. No. At least you had someone to play with it. Right. Yeah. So this is only a two-player game. You can play it single player, but there's going to be a little pink Donkey Kong Jr. on the other side of the screen.

And if you play it by yourself, you're just making sums. And it's just like the goal of the game is to make sums faster than the other person. but if you're not playing with someone else, then you're just doing math problems. Yeah. What fun, right? And that was the educational series of NES-ROMB. Yes, there was one.

Yeah. Now, if you look in Japan, it's really, it's interesting that you can, it was two games, it was supposed to be three, and it was really interesting about it, is that you can kind of tell what they were going for, which is that, like, so these were very early Famicom games, right, the educational games, and they clearly wanted to make one educational game

for each of the three launch titles of the Famicom. Well, they wanted to repurpose the assets of each of those three launch titles. So Popeye, Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong, Jr. Yep, so they had Donkey Kong Jr. Math. Popeye's Fun with English. Because... They can teach kids how to spell spinach.

And then finally, Donkey Kong's Fun with Music, which probably turned out to be, like, too difficult a design to really pull off. Yeah, the first two games that actually did come out, make use just like straight up graphics from the other two games, like the games that they're based on. Whereas the screenshots that I've seen, like the early prototype screens or whatever,

promo screens I've seen of Donkey Kong, fun with music, they're a lot more complex. It's like there's Pauline with an upright bass and, you know, Donkey Kong with drums and Mario with a trumpet or whatever. Well, that was going to be... So, okay, so we now have a lot more information about this game because your friend in mind,

Steve Lynn, decided to spend the $200-something dollars to buy a flyer which is a very early Famicom flyer that actually had a lot of information about what this game was supposed to be which then let Frank Sefaldi do really high-res scans of the tiny

images so we can see them. Oh, and so it's all up on the Video Game History Foundation website and so we took a look at the flyer and the scans and like translated all the captions and everything and And so we find out that number one, so yeah, there were basically going to be two modes in this game. One was donkey band, which was singing karaoke into the controller two microphone along to the songs that the donkey band was playing. Oh, look, you added to the notes.

And then you also had music quiz in which you had a small line of sheet music, essentially, on the screen. And then Mario holding the hammer ran around the keyboard and hit the notes for the. pieces of music. Two pieces of music that are called out by name in these screenshots. One of them is, I've been working on the railroad, so that would have been one of the pieces of music in there. The other one translates to

doggy policemen, which is why the policeman in Animal Crossing is a dog, by the way, because it's a very popular with children's song about a dog policeman. And it turns out that dog policeman actually was used in another retro video game, which is Frogger. So the theme song to Frogger,

that is dog policeman. So that would have been a song that you would have played in the game too. And that's pretty much all we know about this game. And the thing is, that was probably pretty much all the game was. And that's probably why they didn't release it. Yeah, yeah.

It was like hit notes on a keyboard, fun. Or like sing and have it badly recognized in the microphone, like whatever five songs they could probably get into this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there were ultimately some karaoke games for Famicom, but those came later when the cartridges were more than like 8K. Yeah, there was a whole, there was a whole

karaoke system, essentially, like, with a microphone and handheld mic and everything, yeah. And, of course, beat Takeshi's challenge, right? Yes. Yes. Takeshi's challenge. Yep. Anyway, so... You could pretty much

sing karaoke in the microphone for any Famicom game, and it would have approximately the same effect. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, that was it for Donkey Kong games. Nintendo Power did solicit something called Return of Donkey Kong circa 1988 and no one knows what that was. It's a mystery.

People have asked people at Nintendo and they're like, oh. Was it in that black player's guide book? Yes, yes. It's a great book. Yep. And, you know, they did release Donkey Kong classics, so that's maybe it. But no, supposedly Donkey Kong Return of Donkey Kong, you were going to control

Donkey Kong or something? Yeah. It's going to be like Donkey Kong country-ish. I mean, it makes sense. But six years early. Why not? You know, why not make a game starring Donkey Kong? Kong, right? Ben one. But then they didn't. Then they didn't do one.

Yep. Mario was just that big. To wrap up, we should go through the game and watch games. I think we're going to skip Donkey Kong Game Boy for a future episode because we never make it all the way through these notes. I told you. You didn't believe me, but I told you. That is one episode.

That game deserves one episode. It pretty much is. So look forward to that in 2025. There's not much to say about the game and watches. No, we can get through these really quickly. Everyone, who wants to explain what a game and watch is? Bob, you've been fairly quiet this episode. You got your game and a watch.

Whoa. They put a clock in a game. existing product, and then they had magic. Well, it's a two-screen... I thought they put an existing product on a clock. It's a chicken egg thing. Either way, you're wrong. But two-screen gaming looks like a little DS, but it's LCD gaming, which means

there are predetermined shapes on the screen that can light up or rather darken based on the programming. And this gave players the illusion that they were playing a game. So very simple games. They were playing a game.

but not a video game. Very, very rudimentary illusion of movement. Right. But yes, I mean, if you're a child of the 80s, you play Tiger Electronics. I think they were really way more popular than the Game and Watches, at least in my neck of the woods. Well, Tiger Electronics came out later.

They were more like the second half of the 80s, whereas Game and Watch was much more heavily based in their first half of the year. Popularity is relative. Tiger just released a whole shitload more. I saw one Game and Watch in my childhood. I saw like a thousand Tiger. or electronic things.

But it's basically that, and these are some of the more ambitious ones and that there are two screens and they're trying to approximate an existing game in some way. And this is what led to the invention of the D-PAD because, again, Gumpai Yoku was sitting here trying to think of, okay, we got to make

Donkey Kong into a game and watch. It's going to be a big hit. You know, how are we going to do this? We cannot put a joystick on a game and watch. They experimented with joystick. And actually, this is really funny. They experiment with a joystick. and then they were like, okay, it's too fragile.

The thing will close and it's going to snap the joystick. We can't have it. And they're like, he's like, okay, what if I had the joystick and then sort of had a hemisphere that was around the joystick that would protect it so you could still have a joystick, but it would be sort of a larger, sort of a hemispherical thing with a small nubbin at the top. And then this became known as the boob controller.

And then they didn't do that. And then eventually, you know, just had that burst of inspiration where he was like, oh, you know, if it's in this sort of a shape. Because the thing is, he wanted to have an array of four buttons that the player could press to move around. But then he was like, wait. That's terrible. No one would ever do that. Well, no one, well, he thought to himself like they're not going to be able to feel what button their hand is over. It's just going to be a button and they're not going to know if that's up down, left, right.

Then he kind of hit on the cross shape and he's like, oh, when a player puts their thumb, on this, they can feel what direction they're hitting. It's distinct from the other directions. And so that ends up being the D-pad. And then literally, you know, they arbitrarily made the decision to because JoySix on arcade machines

were on the left-hand side, they put the D-Pat on the left and the button on the right, even though he was thinking, well, wouldn't right-handed people want to use the D-pad on their right-hand side for more fine-tuned movement? It's weird that it works so well, even for those of us who are right-handed. But yes, the Donkey Kong Game and Watch

specifically was the invention of the D-pad. And it was not the first multi-screen game and watch. It was the second game and watch. Oil Panic. Yes. There you go. Okay. This is my hasty research last night reading my history of Nintendo, the Florengorges, you know,

French-translated history of Nintendo volume two. Yeah. And I also found out from that book, they sold 8 million Donkey Kong game and watches. And yet people want like 150 bucks for them. Yeah. Well, these days. Yeah. They're not in common at all. You should have bought them all when they had, when Super Potato had, you know, tons of them in that big glass case,

those are gone now. So, um, and I did, so I played this last night. And it's, it's actually pretty fun and it was really rethought for the game and watch. So that it starts out on the, you start on the bottom screen and you are just dodging barrels. Um, you can't jump whenever you want. They, they set it up so there's gaps in the girders. And so you can only jump, and there's like hooks that you jump onto. That's, uh, the top screen. So the bottom screen is just jumping over barrels and climbing up ladders, and then once you get to the end of literally just two rows of girders, you climb up to the top screen. The top screen, Donkey Kong is still throwing the barrels down at you, but you have to move

to the left, operate a switch by pressing up, and that switch starts a hook swinging on a chain on the right-hand side of the screen. The hook only swings once. It does one sort of complete swing back and forth, so you hit the switch and have to move quickly over to the side of the screen and then jump off the girder while the hook is swinging towards you to grab the hook and then once you do that he grabs one key i think off of a chain that's hanging next to donkey cong you that four times you grab all four keys and you collapse the girders that donkey Kong is standing on and that's it that's the one stage because they can't

change it because it's silk screened lcd lcd yeah and then they end up very very quickly after the same year. They end up making not one, but two versions of Donkey Kong Jr. for Game and Watch. There was Donkey Kong Jr., which is a single screen, little one, which is just climbing on vines, and then actually doing something very similar, you climb on vines, get to the second half of the screen,

and then there's a swinging thing, and you have to jump off it and grab the hook again. And then there's Donkey Kong Donkey Kong 2, Roman numeral 2, which is, again, another version of Donkey Kong Jr., but it's a double screen vertically stacked one as well. Yeah, Donkey Kong Jr. is kind of of like a combination of stage one and two of Donkey Kong Jr. Arcade. Yeah.

And Donkey Kong 2 is kind of like combining stages two and four into a single game. Yeah. So they are different experiences, even though they're both Donkey Kong Jr. Yeah, but Donkey Kong Jr. should not have gotten twice as many game and watches as Donkey Kong. No, no. It just seems wrong. Yeah, who knows. Who knows what was going on there. And then Donkey Kong 3 got its own game and watch. And this was part of the same series as Donkey Kong Hockey. Yeah. Which is maybe the most ambitious game and watch, where it was. was like a unit with two separate detachable controllers.

Yeah. So two people could play head to head. It's the Game and Watch switch? You each help. Yeah, you literally, yeah, you opened this, you opened the casing up, and you pulled out these two tiny little pads with D-pads and buttons on them, and then you each looked at the little screen which you sat on a table. It was like switching tabletop mode.

Yeah. So it was like, yeah, so you had Donkey Kong hockey where Donkey Kong and Mario play hockey against each other, and it's a pretty good, you know, Game and Watch style rendition of hockey. The controllers for hockey. Yes, they are. They're like little apple mice, but 15 years early. Yep. And then Donkey Kong 3 is, it kind of reminds me of what they did with the Apple 2 version of Breakout, where, you know, breakout in the arcades was like basically Pong, but there was a wall at the top that you were breaking away. But on Apple 2, they turned it sideways

because it had wider resolution or something. I don't know. For whatever reason, that's what they did. So you're like bouncing. Yeah, basically. you're bouncing the ball left and right to break the bricks on the other side of the screen. Well, this kind of does the same thing. Donkey Kong 3 in arcades is a vertical shooter, and this becomes a horizontal shooter, but it's two-player. So basically, you're like trying to blast bugs with DDT and send them over to the other character's side of the screen, which is a mechanic and concept that UPL would steal a few years later with penguin wars. So Donkey Kong was stolen.

from UPL's Space Panic, and then Space Panic, stole it right back to make Penguin Wars. Yeah. It's a circle of theft. Not bad. Anyway, it's a very different take on Donkey Kong 3, but it seems kind of interesting, and it's neat that it's a multiplayer game. And, you know, they really were just, like, going crazy ambitious with the sort of mid-80s game and watch systems.

I guess the most ambitious would have been Yakuman, which was like a $200, uh, Mahjong system that could actually be linked with other players. So if you and three friends had $800 to spend, you could play virtual mahjong. And this was the Japanese bubble economy. Oh, yeah, yeah. No shit. Oh, man.

So was that arrows linked cable? Yep, pretty much. Anyway, so yeah, that was... Yeah, that's it. God bless the game boy, I'll tell you that much. Yep. Couldn't have come along soon enough. Yeah, once you got to the point where it was literally like a game and watch

that sat on a table and each person held a little control where it was like, okay, can we just... What are we doing here? Yeah. Can we shut this down? Oh, it's the one thing. Sorry, so we left people hanging about the Universal thing. We never circled back to it.

Yes. Bring it home, Bob. It's very, very simple. Universal saw Donkey Kong success and said, hey, we own King Kong. We're going to take you to court. And this is all in Chris's book, by the way, power up, correct, Chris? Yeah, some of it. Most of it.

But it turns out that Universal was able to make the King Kong movie in 76-ish because it was a public domain character. So because of that court case, that was discovered, which made it so Donk a Nintendo's quote-unquote parity could be legal and not, you know... They didn't even need to get into what it was. They could have made a game called King Kong, and it would have been fine.

Yeah, just the idea of a giant monkey named King Kong is anyone can do it, Peter Jackson can do it, anybody can do it. So, yes, it's all fair. So basically that's it. But it was at the center of two lawsuits this game. And that was one of them. Yeah.

And their lawyer got a boat. called Donkey Kong, because he made Nintendo a lot of money. Yep. Was it like this Kirby guy, their lawyer? Yes. Okay, yeah, no wonder. I knew it. A little guy named Twinkle Popo.

And he said, suck it. Universal. Universal and UPL Universal are two different entities, however. Oh, yeah. And, you know, another thing that happened recently was that, and this, unfortunately, this got taken down pretty quickly, but somebody found a VHS tape of, Minor Arakawa's retirement party at Nintendo during which they showed a bunch of slides

and one of them was a photograph of the Donkey Kong butter sculpture that they had at a Nintendo Holiday Party one year. Oh yeah. So after Donkey Kong was a huge hit, they had the Nintendo Holiday Party and they commissioned somebody to make a butter sculpture of Donkey Kong as one does. Yes, as you do. And it was this terrifying looking, you know, Donkey Kong

and then, you know, sort of shillacked and covered in. Or it was just, it was like, you know, painted over with the butter, I don't know. Oh, lovely. And then they talked about, they hung it from the rafters in the warehouse until it turned green, until it basically turned into the television version of Donkey Kong. Fine-aged butter. Anyway, that wraps it up for our journey through the early days of Donkey Kong. I could tell you what, that butter sculpture is one piece of merchandise.

Little Jeremy didn't have. Nope, I definitely did not. I had the fuzzy stickers, but they weren't fuzzy in the same way that the butter sculptural loves. Right, right, right. After about a year. Anyway, yeah. So Donkey Kong was kind of a big deal. Launched 1,000 ships, or at least a whole lot of video games.

And it was kind of the basis for one of the biggest empires and legacies in video gaming. So kind of a big deal. Anyway, I feel like we've done it pretty good justice this past hour and a half. I think so. And there's still so much more to talk about, including, like Bob said, a full episode on Donkey Kong for Game Boy. And all of those spinoffs.

Oh, yeah, we can do those too. All the minis, they keep marching. They can't stop marching. I will jump in and say, speaking to Game Boy, get the Game and Watch Gallery games, which do have renditions of those Donkey Kong games. There you go.

It's pretty good. It's probably better than trying to hunt out of Game & Watch. Yeah, not only are they, do they recreate the original, like, the Game and Watch versions, but then they also include remakes with sort of like 8-bit-style, 16-bit-style graphics that are really nice.

They are nice. And refined mechanics and more complexity to kind of modernize them. So, yeah, so that's good stuff. And again, all of these games that we've talked about, well, at least the three arcade games, are available on Switch Arcade Archives,

thanks to Hamster, and they're like eight bucks a piece. So it's, in my opinion, a fair price to own a slice of video game history. You can only play them with a flip grip. You have to buy that first. Yes. Otherwise, they won't work.

So amortize that in there. So they're more like $12 a piece. Yeah. Sorry, folks. Anyway, that's it. That's Donkey Kong. Not Donkey Kong country, just Donkey Kong. Yes.

Back before the Great Ape Wars, before Fedora Donkey Kong Jr., disappeared into the salt mines or whatever. Before they went cart racing, before they played sports with Mario, it was just Donkey Kong and a very, very unhappy garden. So thanks everyone for listening. This has been Retronauts.

And I have been Jeremy Parrish. You can find Retronauts on various podcasting applications such as iTunes and, I don't know, whatever else. But you can also find it at our website, Retronauts.com. And you can subscribe to Retronauts at patreon.com slash Retronauts. And get every episode a week early with a good bitrate quality, higher bitrate. bit rate quality than you hear on iTunes and that's three bucks a month

so it's a very kind thing for you to do and you get something in return for it as well and that's great. Anyway guys where can we find you? Let's go this direction. Well when I write things they're on Kotaku.com that's K-O-T-A-K-U dot com. Kotaku

dot com. Like a small otaku? Like a small otaku exactly. Oh, that's what it means. That is what it means. It means nothing but if it meant anything it would mean that. Oh, okay. I'm on Twitter as RDBAA, where you can find me demanding

a new game with Stanley the Bugman and Donkey Kong Jr. together. I think maybe it'll be a road trip. Maybe it'll be a road trip RPG, like Final Fantasy 15. I mean, they just announced so much more DLC for Smash Ultimate, so they still hope.

They're going to add more characters. So, yes, Stanley the Bugman. At least the Me Fighter costume for him, right? Two bucks? Three bucks. I buy it. Well, I better start that letter campaign. Let's see what else.

I also make games as a company called Bipel Dog. That's also on Twitter as under the same name. No spaces, obviously. Yeah. Hey, it's me, Bob. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. I do some other podcasts about old things. They are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon.

You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons for all kinds of extra stuff, including extra mini-series. We're doing one in the fall of 2019. So maybe by the time you hear this, it will be out or out soon. So check it out at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Thank you. And finally, you can find me personally on Twitter as GamesSpite, or you can find my YouTube channel where I talk about games like this and others.

That's just YouTube. Look for My Name, Jeremy Parrish, 1R in Parrish. Thank you. And that wraps it up. That's it. We're done. So please go and play some Donkey Kong. And look forward to another episode of Retronauts in a week. And actually, in just a few days, on Friday of this week,

there'll either be a new bonus episode on our website or on Patreon, one or the other. It's bi-weekly, you see? So there's just more old video game opinions than you can handle. Do your best. Hey, hello, hello, we're back. Hey, hello, we're back. What was that a reference to? The Simpsons.

Okay. It's a reference to hemorrhoids, but, uh, okay. I know, felt right. I enjoyed it. Felt better than hemorrhoids. We are recording. Did you get that last? I did, I did.

I wasn't trying to see you up for that either. This week in Retronauts. That was better than hittero hymn rides. That was not a setup, by the way. Okay. Hemorrhoids, a sequel to asteroids.