When I was younger, my brother and I used to play the original Nintendo Entertainment system. We had Duck Hunt, Super Mario Brothers, Bubble Bobble, and many others. One of the games that we enjoyed the most was Donkey Kong along with its sequel Donkey Kong Jr. in which you got to play an ape swinging from vine to vine. I still have an old NES, and I can occasionally be found revisiting my old glory days. In those days it wasn’t about the graphics or the sound. It was about quirky fun button pushing games.
In Donkey Kong, you play as a little Mario figure who is racing to rescue Pauline, Mario’s girlfriend (who looks a lot like princess peach and has been kidnapped) from Donkey Kong, a large ape. Mario sure knew how to pick girlfriends. Donkey Kong does his best to stop your advance by rolling barrels at our little hero, who must dodge them while climbing from platform to platform. The controls were simple. You could move left and right, up and down, and you could use the A button to jump to avoid barrels. If you jumped too far down then you lost a life.
There were only three stages. The first had an oil barrel in the corner. It could kill you, but it was easy to avoid. When the barrels that Donkey Kong was throwing at you reached this oil barrel, however, some of them turned into fireballs. In the second stage you have to jump, use ladders, avoid fire, and not touch the ground. Donkey Kong throws bouncing springboards at you in this level that you have to go under. In the last stage, you have to use hammers to break six blocks that make Donkey Kong tumble to the ground. You also have to avoid fire enemies. It goes without saying that if you touched the big ape in any level he would kill you.
You started with three lives, and they were easy to lose. It was possible but hard to earn extra lives because you got an extra life with a million points. My favorite part of playing Donkey Kong on the original Nintendo Entertainment System was the hammers. There were only three items that Mario could collect, and two of them were only worth points. The hammer changed the music, and for a few brief moments, Mario, fed up with running and dodging and jumping, grabs this hammer he finds laying around and just starts whacking. He whacks up and down repeatedly smashing through anything that gets in his way. Barrels splinter and fire scatters before its wrath, but swinging wildly with the hammer did mean you couldn’t climb ladders (busy hands), so they had to be used strategically.
Even though you cycled through the same three levels over and over, there was an addictiveness to the simple graphics. You never knew if the barrels were going to roll all the way off the platform or roll down the ladder to kill you as you tried to climb up, but every time you avoided them and made it to the top was satisfying.
Marley Martinerin is a regular contributor to a number of sites and writes articles about such topics as collectible video games, and final fantasy.
