Plug the cartridge into the SNES adaptor and flip the switch: what was once monochromatic was now technicolor, framed to look like a television was an upright cabinet from 1981. With “Donkey Kong” on Game Boy and their new Super Game Boy adaptor, Nintendo’s prestidigitation turned back the clock, making the black-and-white handheld game into a full-color at-home arcade machine. The first blockbuster 2D platformer (“Super Mario Bros.”) became the first blockbuster 3D platformer (“Super Mario 64”). A simple PC adventure game (“Castle Wolfenstein”) turned into a genre-defining first-person shooter (“Wolfenstein 3D”). This sleight-of-hand was the industry’s stock in trade in the early to mid-90s: Taking old games and unraveling them, impossibly, into something new. Mario then embarks on a brand new adventure, scrambling after his nemesis through 100 unique levels with a gymnast’s nimble alacrity. Kong falls, something remarkable happens: He gets back up, takes Pauline away again, and instead of a return to those iconic construction girders we see something “Donkey Kong” never had: A world map. They mimic almost exactly those that repeat in the arcade. Nintendo keeps up the charade through the first four levels. To an unknowing player, they’ve bought the arcade game to play on the go. Though colloquially known as “Donkey Kong ‘94,” the official title is the same as the one from 1981, thirteen years prior. But earlier, in July, Nintendo released “Donkey Kong” on their green-and-black Game Boy. “Donkey Kong Country” on SNES arrived in November, a massive success that foretold Nintendo’s desire to push limited hardware in the face of the competition’s emphasis on horsepower (Sony would release its PlayStation weeks later in Japan). But it was the first time they pushed “Donkey Kong” onto their portable Game Boy, in 1994, when we saw how flexible and ambitious their sense of revisionist history could be. They went onto package and release its own arcade classic on their world-beating NES to much success. If Nintendo has learned anything, it’s how to re-sell their old catalog of games. And as any parent knows, the young get away with what they can, forever testing boundaries until learning the way things work. That such a transparent kind of sabotage was accepted speaks to how young this industry was in the early 80s. Though ports of questionable quality remain a problem even today, this was a different brand of banana: Coleco developed each port, specifically making the versions for its competitors’ consoles vastly inferior. The ColecoVision “Donkey Kong,” was a valiant effort, and a far superior version of other ports built for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Instead players received three separate versions of the arcade game: Each off in certain ways, notably similar in others, the way you might recall a memory by the stories others have told you. What has become somewhat taken for granted today–a port being more or less the same between different systems–was not the case then. Because Nintendo did not yet have their own home console in 1982, they licensed the game out to Coleco to make for the home systems of the time. The same can’t be said for the first time we saw “Donkey Kong” at home. Zoom in closely enough and you realize, nearly forty years later, not much has changed. The groundwork had been laid for games to be more than score-chasers your protagonist, more than simple geometry zapping or chomping foes. That these elements repeat ad nauseam was simply a requirement of their platform: No more game meant no more quarters. And so it followed a narrative arc, requiring new locations, an evolving conflict, and an ending. While many earlier games relied on a single-screen playfield, a kind of digital board game where you moved pieces around and tried racking up a high score while destroying an abstract threat, “Donkey Kong” was built around a story. “Donkey Kong” is the ur-game for our modern industry. In many ways, DK and his evolutions have been a bellwether for the larger gaming landscape. With “Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze” getting a second chance on Nintendo Switch after releasing to critical acclaim but muted sales on the beleaguered Wii U, it’s high time to reconsider the agile ape and his legacy of games that are constantly reconfigured for a new audience, platform, or playstyle. But more interesting are those ports that result in fundamental changes to the game itself, providing new life to what had become just another old thing on the growing heap of history. Games are often moved from one platform to another because there’s money to be made when a title, already designed and completed, can be released to an audience who hasn’t had a chance to play it.
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