Donkey Kong (Atari 7800) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
233A playthrough of Atari's 1988 action game for the Atari 7800, Donkey Kong.
Nintendo has a reputation for being fiercely protective of their IPs, but their games haven't always been exclusive to their own hardware platforms. The most famous examples are probably Hotel Mario and the Zelda games for the CD-i, but several found their way onto PCs and non-Nintendo consoles throughout the 1980s.
In 1983, a couple of years before Nintendo established a presence in the western console market, Atari obtained the rights to produce home versions Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros. for non-Japanese markets, meaning that Donkey Kong for the Atari 7800 was an officially licensed port.
The game was also available on the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision, but the 7800 version hits much closer to the arcade game than those earlier versions managed. It doesn't fall far short of Nintendo's NES port, which is quite a feat considering that the NES was designed specifically for Donkey Kong. At least, it would have been if the 7800 had been released in 1984 as intended. By the time 1988 rolled around, any impact the game might've had was entirely diminished by the release of the superior NES version a few years earlier.
But if you had a 7800 and not an NES, this would've been a top pick. The graphics are a fair representation of the arcade's and the gameplay is rock solid. The sound is laughably bad (the 7800 uses the same sound hardware as the 2600!) and the last stage is missing (like in the NES cart), but it's difficult to criticize the game too much considering the hardware it's running on.
"Too little, too late, oh well," could well have been the slogan for Atari's home division from the mid-80s onward, but this does make for an interesting relic of the shadowy history shared between Atari and Nintendo during the heyday of 8-bit gaming.
NES version: https://youtu.be/Q_MUSH0F0bA
Game Boy version: https://youtu.be/t2iicAjF9xI
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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