The 1986 Commodore 64 port of Nintendo‘s famous Donkey Kong was developed by Arcana Software Design and published by Ocean Software. And it is a decent port of the arcade game.

Arcana also made the superb Amstrad CPC Donkey Kong port for Ocean, so it’s no surprise that this one is good too.

It’s a very authentic conversion, with graphics that are close to the original (including the font), and jingles that sound exactly like those in the arcade game.

There’s little wrong with Donkey Kong on the C64, although Zzap!64, when they reviewed it in issue 21 (Christmas 1986), I think made a mistake because they couldn’t see the value of retro gaming back then, so they criticised it for being “old” and “overpriced”. Which – with hindsight – is both right and wrong. I think it’s wrong to criticise a game for being “old” or not having new ideas, unless there’s something bad or cynical about the game itself. Which there isn’t with this. Priced at £8.95, though, the game was expensive for what it was, so they were right about that. I wouldn’t pay £8.95 for it now, but over thirty years ago that was a lot of money for a four-screen C64 game.

More: Donkey Kong on Wikipedia