I've already written at some length about the NES version of the original Donkey Kong, and I won't waste space rehashing those ideas here, but suffice it to say that while I appreciate a great deal about this game, it's not one for which I'm overly reverent. It was, in my estimation at least, simply the first domino in Nintendo's long history of producing games that were ultimately much better than Donkey Kong. But still, that's a pretty important position to occupy -- making it all the weirder that Nintendo has such a spotty history when it comes to preserving this game.

For reasons unknown, the 1983 Famicom release (and 1986 NES release) excised the second stage of the arcade version, which features treadmill-like conveyor belts that can fling uncareful players off the edge of the map. Perhaps the variable player speed created by the conveyor belts caused issues on the home console. Perhaps, as Nintendo has claimed, there wasn't enough space on the cartridge for the entire game. (This claim strikes me as dubious, given that Donkey Kong Jr. boasted the same file size and had no levels cut. It was released on Famicom the same day as Donkey Kong.) Perhaps Nintendo simply wanted to make home-console gamers feel there was still a good reason to play Donkey Kong at the arcade. Who knows?

At any rate, Nintendo decided to finally make the game available in its original version with Donkey Kong: Original Edition on 3DS. Surely this would be the definitive home release, right? Well...

The good news is that stage 2 is back in the game. But unfortunately, most of the animations and interstitial scenes cut from the NES version -- such as the pre-stage image of an orangutan-looking version of DK who asks, "How high can you get?" -- are not. From watching videos of the arcade original on YouTube, it's clear that item and enemy placements are different here as well. By all appearances, this game is simply a romhack of the NES port as opposed to an earnest attempt at emulating the arcade version. Pretty disappointing!

I felt compelled to replay this after my recent playthroughs of BurgerTime and Popeye, both games that owe a lot creatively to Nintendo's first big hit. I've always felt a little underwhelmed by Donkey Kong, but it wasn't until playing those other games that I could articulate the reasons why.

For starters, what I appreciate about the gameplay in both BurgerTime and Popeye (and, to some extent, in other early platform games like Mario Bros.) is that at all times they promote the player's awareness of the entire stage. Because both the objective and the enemies are constantly changing locations in those games, you need to think several steps ahead in terms of navigating the stage. In Donkey Kong, however, it never really matters what's happening two or three platforms away from you. The game is easy enough that by the time you get where you want to go (which is almost always just "up"), even if there's an obstacle in your way, there's usually an obvious solution for dealing with it.

To be fair, this starts to change a bit as the difficulty increases. In the first stage, for example, DK eventually starts to throw two barrels in a row, which prevents you from simply leaping over them. But in the elevator stage and the final stage -- a BurgerTime-esque level in which the player must run across the locks on each platform to collapse the girdered structure DK has made into his fortress -- it's rarely necessary to look beyond the immediate sphere of the player character. These stages are a cakewalk, even in later phases of the game.

And speaking of sweets, it's worth mentioning the fact (which I discovered only today) that the NES version of Donkey Kong entirely removes the "pie factory" level that was present in the arcade release. (I'd felt like there was something amiss when I played the NES version on Switch a year and a half ago, but I couldn't put my finger on it at the time.) Being as easy as it is, the original game's best asset is its gameplay variety -- the fact that it's essentially four games in one -- and the NES version unfortunately spoils that quality.

Donkey Kong is an important game for many reasons, but I would argue its being "timeless fun" isn't one of them. The game's best qualities were eclipsed within a year of its release by games like Popeye and even Donkey Kong Jr. That's not a slam on this game so much as an affirmation that Donkey Kong was just the beginning in a long corporate trajectory, whereby Nintendo would gradually perfect its sense of what constitutes great game design. Not coincidentally, I'm hard-pressed to think of a less fun Nintendo "classic" than this one -- the game that started it all.

According to Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario and Donkey Kong were conceptualized only after Nintendo failed to secure the Popeye license for the game that would eventually become Donkey Kong. (The company apparently met with better success just a few months later.) Miyamoto's fondness for the brand is clearly evident in Popeye, an excellent game that sadly has fallen out of the public consciousness in recent years.

While from screenshots you might naturally assume that Popeye is just another Donkey Kong ripoff, it's actually a "falling objects" game that not only features DK-like stage design; it also looks, sounds, and arguably plays better than its more famous cousin. The title character here provides essentially an inversion of Mario's skill set -- Popeye can punch, but he can't jump -- and it's amazing how much that one variation, combined with great level design, can result in such a different game.

Popeye's relative absence from discussions of Nintendo's formative years is especially remarkable given the company's confidence in the game at the time. As one of three launch titles for the Famicom (alongside Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.), Popeye was effectively a brand ambassador for the very concept of home gaming. Even today, I would play the heck out of this on Switch -- and I bet a lot of other people would, too -- if Nintendo were to iron out the licensing issues and make it available for the first time in almost 40 years.