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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Did Donkey Kong actually come out on the 2600? I would have imagined Nintendo would have shut it down, like they did id software's Mario Bros PC port.

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Nintendo licensed DK to various markets. Coleco got the 2600 rights (anyone could make a 2600 cartridge, there was no copy protection system on the console). Atari bought the rights to make a DK cartridge for the 400/800 computers (I wrote that one, it was fun).

I think that Atari also did the PC version later on, which was largely a mechanical translation of a cartridge implementation (might have been the 400/800 version, don't really remember -- I only know that I never got any royalties or bonuses, and that many other people did).

Nintendo licensed the console version to Coleco. They produced a version for their own console, the Colecovision (where I believe it was a pack-in title), as well as a version for thr Atari 2600.

There were a few somewhat popular unlicensed clones out there back in the day, as well as a lot of crappy ones on the home computers. Mainly, the game "Donkey King" on TRS-80 CoCo (released by Tom Mix Software), later re-released as "The King" with unchanged gameplay. Not sure if the name was changed due to Nintendo or not. The CoCo was filled with unlicensed game clones.

The NES wasn't released at that point, or even the Famicom. Nintendo relied on Coleco and Atari for distribution of DK in the US.

Nintendo later gave Atari the opportunity to distribute the NES in the US, and Atari turned them down!

Nintendo had Donkey Kong for the Atari 8-bit computers. I have the official cartridge. It's actually a pretty good version.

Atari 2600 Donkey Kong is still one of my go-to's on a Friday night. It's crude, but close enough. And the game play is challenging but not too hard.

As recently as two Fridays ago.

And in fact, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and even Mario Bros. were released for the Atari 7800, which came out after the NES and was meant to be a competitor to it, due to Atari still having the license.

Also pretty sure that if there isn't actually code heritage, the 7800 versions of those games were ported using the NES version as a reference. Is it possible Nintendo either programmed the 7800 version themselves, or actually provided the NES source code for Atari to modify for 7800 hardware? The similarities are too big to ignore (and too specific to the NES version versus the arcade version, which other computer and console ports tended to be more similar to).

The 7800 version was far, far superior. It had all the levels, much better graphics and gameplay.

That said, the 2600 version (and Coleco version, which was basically the same thing) was incredibly popular.

It was officially licensed, along with several other Nintendo games. They did stomp out a 2600 homebrew called Princess Rescue though.

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