Game:

Donkey Kong (1981)

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#Gamevember2019 continues with more Donkey Kong.

The Donkey Kong arcade game was extremely big back in the days, almost as big as Beatles. This success is most likely why Nintendo joined the console market.
Anyway, Taito tried to buy all rights to Donkey Kong, but Nintendo said no after 3 days of discussion.
Multiple companies tried to buy the right to port the game, and in the end Coleco got the exclusive right to produce Donkey Kong cartridges (with $1.40 per sold cartridge going directly to Nintendo) and Atari got the rights to produce Donkey Kong for home computer systems.
Coleco released it for their console, Colecovision, but only in a bundle with the console. So if you wanted to play the extremely popular game at home, you had to buy a Colecovision, even if you already owned one. And they sold extremely well.
Things were different in many ways back then. Consoles had no license fee and the console producers couldn't prevent anybody from releasing games for it. They didn't get a single cent from thirdparty games, all they got was a bigger game library that might result in somebody buying their console.
So Coleco released a Donkey Kong port on the rival consoles Atari 2600 and Intellivision 6 months later. Those console owners were happy to finally being able to play Donkey Kong at home as well and sales were high again.
...the only problem was that Coleco had made those games bad on purpose...
The Atari 2600 and Intellivion were not directly powerful, but they could produce much better looking games like that. Heck, the Intellivision port only got two of the four levels!
Which resulted in them giving up and buying a Colecovision just to be able to play a good version of Donkey Kong.
In the end, Coleco sold over 6 million cartridges of Donkey Kong for different consoles.

As for the game...
Yeah, it is a really bad port. Looking much worse than what the Intellivision could do and it only got two stages!
The level option at the start of the game only changes the difficulty, nothing else.

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