Collection essentials #32: Donkey Kong (Game & Watch)

 

Donkey Kong was Nintendo’s first big hit in arcades (more on that another time), so it’s not surprising that they made a Donkey Kong Game & Watch. Of course, there was no way they were going to come anywhere close to actually replicating the experience of playing the arcade game on an LCD screen. So rather than try to recreate the game exactly and fall well short, this is more of a reimagining of it that is more tailored to a quality Game & Watch experience, which was smart on Nintendo’s part. The level shown here is similar in concept to the first level of Donkey Kong, but is obviously not a copy of it, and in fact your objective is a little bit different. In this one, your goal is to dodge the barrels while ascending up to use a lever to raise a crane that has a dangling hook, then you have to time your jump to grab onto the hook (instead of falling on your face) and pull out one of the things supporting the beam that Donkey Kong stands on. Once you pull out all four, Donkey Kong falls down and you get extra points, before the whole cycle repeats and gets harder.

There’s something very significant about this Game & Watch unit that motivated me to get it. See that “Controller” thing on the left shaped like a +? If you’re a gamer at all, you’ll know that that’s called a d-pad, and is used to control player movement. Every successful game system of the past 40 years has had one of those on its controllers. This Game & Watch was the first ever d-pad in history! Before then, using a joystick, buttons or a knob were generally how you would move whatever you were controlling on screen. The d-pad was an improvement and soon became a new permanent standard for controllers on home and portable systems, though arcade games continued using their old methods as their cabinets lacked something for the player’s hand to grip for maximum thumb-to-d-pad comfort.

The design of this Game & Watch may have also inspired the design for the Nintendo DS over 20 years later. 

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