This homebrew version of Donkey Kong was created by “Oxyron” for the Commodore 64 and was released at the “X2016 C64 Party” in The Netherlands in 2016, and it’s really rather excellent. Arguably even better than the officially-licensed C64 conversion by Ocean that was released in 1986.

Playing it for the first time you could be forgiven for thinking that this is an unfinished two-level demo, because after completing the first stage you’re then taken to the last stage (where you make Kong fall to the ground), then after that you’re returned to the first stage again. But it ISN’T a two-level game – it does have all four levels, but it dares to do something different with them…

Instead of just following the set Donkey Kong pattern of having you complete stage one, then stage two, then stage three, and finally stage four, it adds a new level every time you ‘loop’ the game. So what it’s doing, essentially, is making you complete the game to see a new level. So you begin with levels one and four. Then you do level one, two, and four. Then levels one, two, three and four. After that it loops again, but adds the first level in again to make five levels. And after that… I don’t know because I didn’t get that far.

I had hoped that the developer had maybe added a fifth, different level that they’d made themselves – as a surprise, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Oh well – you can’t have everything! This is still a marvellous version of Donkey Kong, though, with excellent graphics and superb playability. It even has the addition of being able to jump backwards, which I believe you can do in the arcade version, but I don’t think is possible in the Ocean version. I’m not 100% sure, but I’ve just played both versions back-to-back and didn’t notice any backwards jumping in the Ocean port, but I did notice it in this.

Donkey Kong X2016 has a nice loading screen, a decent title tune, and a demo mode. Plus: it saves high scores to disk, and extends the play area into the C64‘s border, so it’s well-featured, technically impressive, and beautifully polished. This is an excellent effort by Oxyron and deserves downloading and playing if you’ve never seen it before.

I love it when modern homebrew coders come up with something like this, that eclipses an officially-licensed release from the past. It shows you how talented and proficient programmers are in the 21st Century.

More: Donkey Kong on Wikipedia
More: Donkey Kong [X2016] on CSDb