An exceedingly rare Donkey Kong game has recently been released on the Internet. Now everyone can play Donkey Kong 3 The Great Counterattack after being lost for more than 30 years.
In the early eighties, games developer Hudson Soft received the permission and license from Nintendo to port its arcade and NES games to PCs in Japan. Most of these ported games have since been playable via emulators on the Internet over the years. However, Donkey Kong 3 The Great Counterattack has remained elusive since it was originally released in 1984 with the Japanese title Donkey Kong 3 Daigyakushuu, that is, until now.
This was all made possible when a group of enthusiastic fans pooled their money to buy a rare Sharp X1 version of the game on Yahoo Auction for £350/$415 in December 2017. Contained in a diskette, ancient by today’s standards, these fans meticulously extracted the data and made it so the game is now playable on an X1 emulator.
Donkey Kong 3 The Great Counterattack is basically the original Donkey Kong 3 game with some significant gameplay changes. In the original game, players assumed the role of protagonist Stanley The Bugman, jumping on tiered platforms while shooting bugs as well as preventing Donkey Kong from climbing down and attacking them by shooting him with bug spray. Due to limitations of the PC platform compared to arcades, The Great Counterattack simplifies the gameplay by placing Stanley on a single platform at the bottom of the screen and having Donkey Kong floating down on balloons instead.
We think it’s great that a forgotten Donkey Game classic has finally been rediscovered. However, there’s actually three different versions of the game, of which the PC-8801 and PC-6601 versions remain lost. They have been known to show up in the occasional sale or two. Perhaps another group of dedicated fans will restore these lost versions and make them playable again.
Via Kotaku
