Donkey King – “There are four screens”

1983 was a big year in video game history. In Japan, Nintendo released the Famicom console, later known elsewhere as the NES. Nintendo would go on to sell 60 million of that console worldwide, and it was the first home for many of their game series which are still getting sequels today. In the US, 1983 marked a video game industry crash, as an Atari-led boom period ended and sales fell precipitously. It was the end of an era, and would eventually set up the start of another one.

In the UK, we were quite detached from both of these events in 1983. Interest was surging here in computer games, not console ones. In March, VNU Publications started a new weekly UK magazine called Personal Computer News, which would run for the next two years. Right from its first issue, PCN had charts of which microcomputers were selling best across the UK. In June, it added a chart for games, too. It appears to have been the first to compile such a chart based a range of shops and across the whole country.

I will be using that UK games chart and its successors to tell a story of games in the UK, and a thriving culture with its own character. Things here were different. How better to demonstrate that than by starting with the #1 in that first chart… a Donkey Kong clone.

Well, we weren’t totally cut off from the rest of the world. Many of the same arcade machines made an impact here. My parents were teenagers at the end of the 1970s and told me of memories of playing Space Invaders, Galaxian, and Asteroids. So, just as conversions of arcade games were crucial to the success of Atari’s consoles in the US, we would see a lot of versions of American and Japanese arcade games succeed on home computers through the ‘80s and beyond. I played many of those myself. Generally these conversions would be of the officially licensed variety, but not always.

Donkey King for the Dragon 32 is a story which joins up across three continents. Nintendo’s breakthrough success came when they published the arcade version of Donkey Kong in 1981. A tale of man versus gorilla with girders, jumping mechanics and narrative sequences, it was the work of Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi, both of whom we’ll be hearing more about eventually. We’ll also hear more of the game’s star, who by 1983 Nintendo had retroactively named as Mario.

In the USA, Donkey Kong was the most successful arcade game of 1981 and 1982, so it made sense for people to convert it for playing at home. In 1982 Chris Latham, working for Tom Mix Software of Michigan, was one of those who did just that. His version for Tandy’s TRS-80 Color Computer won plaudits for its accuracy, and its audience didn’t see profiting off copying someone else’s work as a problem.

Without the licence for Donkey Kong, Tom Mix changed one letter of the name to make it Donkey King. This gave some not-really-plausible deniability and nodded back to the original’s obvious King Kong inspiration, itself the subject at the time of an active legal battle between Nintendo and Universal Studios. Latham would also do a version of Nintendo’s Popeye renamed as Sailor Man.

Meanwhile in the UK, one of the popular new microcomputers to appear in those PCN sales charts was the Dragon 32. Produced by a company based in Swansea, Wales (hence the red dragon), the computer was based on the same architecture as Tandy’s Color Computer. That made it an easy task to port Donkey King to it. It’s not clear whether Latham or others were involved in doing so, but it is very much the same game with a different colour scheme. It plays the same, it looks the same, it sounds the same. It’s just a lot more green.

That means that it looks and sounds very much like Donkey Kong, too. Chris Latham had a job in an arcade, and after hours he took his “magic key” and gave himself thousands of credits on Donkey Kong to better understand every detail. He took a tape recorder to capture its sounds and try to reproduce them with the computer’s synth capabilities. Donkey King looks as much as possible like the original, to a fault. The bonus counter sacrifices readability to reproduce Donkey Kong’s exact arrangements of lines around the number.

There were limits to the reverse engineering Latham was capable of. He wasn’t able to work out how to reproduce the behaviour of the barrels you have to avoid. His best solution was coming up with a switch so that, at intervals, the barrels either chase after the player or ignore them, but he later acknowledged setting the chasing as a bit too frequent. The strategies of jumping and avoiding barrels at the micro level are pure Donkey Kong, down to the satisfying jingle when you do jump over one, but at the macro level Donkey King requires a more fraught strategy of avoidance. This may have influenced one of the game’s few original elements, in which you have the choice of either getting the standard three lives or taking on a “practice” mode where you get twelve lives but your score does not count towards the high score table.

As a version of the Donkey Kong experience with surprisingly few compromises, Donkey King is pretty good. Reviews at the time of both Color Computer and Dragon versions show that, like Donkey Kong before it, Donkey King stood out at the structural level for having four significantly different screens to play through. “Not only does Donkey King have all of the boards, it presents them in the same sequence in which they appear in the coin-op game” marvelled Owen Linzmayer of Video & Arcade Games. C.D. of Home Computer Weekly, who appears to have not been familiar with Donkey Kong, also noted the four screens and signed up to the “barrels of fun” slogan on the Donkey King box.

By the third time the game appeared in the Personal Computer News UK games chart, having fallen to #4 over the course of a month, it did not appear as Donkey King but under the name The King. Publisher Microdeal was keen to play down the impact of this change, a move forced on them by the company Computer Games which had pointed out that it owned the copyright on the title Donkey Kong. Computer Games Limited (CGL) was a London-based company which imported portable games to the UK, and its deals included one with Nintendo to release its Game & Watch handhelds. That did include a Donkey Kong, if not quite the same one as Donkey King‘s.

The success of Donkey King was not a sign of things to come for the Dragon 32. The #1 spot would never again be taken by a Dragon game. Only two other Dragon games appeared lower in that first top 20: Space War and Cosmic Invaders (if for the latter you guessed “Space Invaders but green”, well done). Less than a year later, the company producing Dragon computers went into administration.

Outside of Donkey King, the rest of the top 5 were all games for the ZX Spectrum, which was selling at £99, half the price of the Dragon 32. The Spectrum is where this story will largely be heading for the next couple of years of the 1980s. That will include plenty more games as derivative as Donkey King, many without even the same attention to detail. It will also include a lot of thrilling new ideas.

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Sources:

• PCN charts, Personal Computer News Issue 1, 18 March 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• PCN charts, Personal Computer News Issue 16, 29 June 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Live interview with Chris Latham, author of Donkey King and Sailor Man for the Tandy Color Computer, ogStevieStrow on YouTube, 2017
• Four great games for the Color Computer, Owen Linzmayer, Video & Arcade Games Volume 1 No. 2, Fall 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Dragon software reviews – Donkey King, C.D., Home Computing Weekly Issue 7, April 1983, accessed via Every Game Going
• Changes forced on Donkey King, Dragon User Issue 2, June 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• The Dragon 32, Nostalgia Nerd, 2016
• Donkey Kong, handheldempire.com
• CGL, handheldmuseum.com

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