Coleco’s Donkey Kong shrinks Nintendo’s 1981 arcade hit into a miniature tabletop cabinet, complete with joystick, marquee and side art modelled on the stand-up original.
Mario climbs a construction site to rescue his girlfriend from the ape, on a glowing multicolour vacuum fluorescent screen. Of the arcade’s four stages, Coleco kept two: the barrel-strewn ramps and the rivets finale.
Interesting facts
Kong v. Kong. Coleco agreed in 1982 to pay King Kong’s owner, Universal, a royalty on Donkey Kong. Nintendo went to court instead and won: the judge ruled the two had “nothing in common but a gorilla, a captive woman, a male rescuer, and a building scenario”.
Meet Mario and Pauline. The leaflet calls her simply “the girlfriend”. For America, Nintendo named her Pauline, after Polly James, wife of its warehouse manager, while Jumpman became Mario, after Mario Segale, landlord of Nintendo of America’s first offices.
Kong in every box. This tabletop was only part of Coleco’s Kong deal. Every ColecoVision console, launched in August 1982, came with a Donkey Kong cartridge, and Coleco sold some 6 million Donkey Kong cartridges for home consoles in all.