Thanks to Hamada for helping with edits.
Donkey Kong is a genre-defining classic that introduced two of Nintendo’s most iconic characters, Mario and the titular gorilla. Although its sequel, Donkey Kong Jr., never quite matched its level of cultural ubiquity, it still holds a firm place within the Nintendo canon. Mario Bros., an offshoot that promoted the everyman to the headlining role, led into his next big gig, Super Mario Bros. Those arcade games—Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros.—are important, the foundation on which Mario and Donkey Kong are built. And though they’re older than me, I was lucky enough to crank through them as a kid, the latter two at an arcade and Donkey Kong via Donkey Kong 64. Even today I can casually boot them up and have fun.
Donkey Kong Jr.’s my favorite of the bunch, though. Yes, that’s partially because of my well-documented Donkey Kong bias, but Jr. established much of what I love about the franchise! (Image: Nintendo)
Where Donkey Kong, the oft-forgotten Donkey Kong 3, and Mario Bros. broke new ground for Nintendo’s budding mascots, Donkey Kong Jr. instead evolves its forebear’s ideas while flipping the script. In Donkey Kong, you play as the unremarkable Mario (née Jumpman), whose girlfriend was abducted by the giant gorilla. The game has four stages, each a climb across a dark construction site. Donkey Kong sits atop each level, doing whatever he can to make Mario miserable. Clearing all four stages rewards players with an ending cutscene, a revolutionary feat in a market that was rife with endless maze-crawlers and space shooters.
Since making the colossal Donkey Kong playable wasn’t feasible, the follow-up instead introduces his smaller, more manageable son, Donkey Kong Jr. Narratively, Donkey Kong Jr. mirrors the original: a vengeful Mario imprisons his defeated rival, forcing Junior to rescue him. Unsurprisingly, Donkey Kong remains the most expressive character—he’s rooting for you!
Oddly, the international versions of the arcade cabinet alter Jr.‘s level progression: you only see the first and final stages on your first loop. The middle two start appearing during subsequent cycles. (Image: Nintendo)
Today, Donkey Kong Jr. feels as clunky as the original. The gorilla only has one slow walking speed. Although he can jump straight up, left, or right, vertical height is fixed, adjusting your trajectory while midair is impossible, and falling from too great a height instantly kills you. Donkey Kong Jr. falls short mechanically in comparison to the first Super Mario Bros., let alone the gravity-defying feats the plumber and primates are capable of now. To be clear, that isn’t a knock against it; the platforming genre was very much in its infancy, after all. Younger players I know today struggle to acclimate to Jr.‘s stiff controls, though.
Nevertheless, Junior’s as physically capable as Jumpman, if not more so. One of Mario’s abilities—climbing up and down ladders—is expanded upon: Donkey Kong Jr. can climb one or two vines, which affects his climbing speed. Climbing up one at a time is slow; two is fast. Inversely, sliding down one vine is quick while two is glacial. Grabbing a vine is accomplished by jumping into it, and pressing left or right will then make Jr. try to grab another in the corresponding direction. Oh, and the first three stages are completed by acquiring a key, which rests atop a small vine near Donkey Kong’s cage. Grab it and you’re off to the next level.
You start with three lives and gain another upon reaching 10,000 points. Leaping over or killing enemies rewards you with points, and the more enemies you kill in one go, the greater the bonus. You get a lot of points after clearing a stage, too. (Image: Nintendo)
The climbing mechanic also ties into the small simian’s signature weapon: fruit. See, fruits dangle along select vines, and if Donkey Kong Jr. touches one, they drop down and nuke any baddies they cross paths with. It’s an interesting contrast to Mario’s hammer, which makes the soon-to-be plumber nigh invulnerable—but at the cost of mobility, as Mario cannot perform his namesake jump until the weapon disappears. Aiming Jr.’s produce is difficult, it’s less helpful (picking off baddies who climb vines is valuable, but most enemies spawn and then descend from the top of the screen), and lacks the viscerally empowering gratification that comes from simply whacking something with a large mallet. Still, successfully hitting a foe with a banana is always a thrill and suits this scrappy, underdog hero.
Vine Scene, the opening stage, is an effective tutorial. A vine dangles just to the headliner’s left upon starting, and after grabbing it you’ll be able to reach the one to your right. Trying to grab that one leads to the discovery that Jr. can hold two vines, encouraging you to experiment with the mechanic. Invariably, you’ll climb up and then drop down onto one of the two platforms on your right, granting access to another vine. It offers a clean route to the upper platform, where Mario and your papa are—and the urbanite flees when you reach them. On this stage, you’ll also grapple with the robotic, crocodile-like Snapjaws, which come in two varieties: red ones lurk solid ground while blue ones dash down vines and into the ocean.
Fruits in the first two stages subtly guide you. Like the last game, the screen momentarily pauses and a satisfying audio cue plays when a baddie gets bashed. (Image: Nintendo)
The second stage ramps things up. To your right upon starting is a trampoline, which you need to carefully jump atop to safely reach the nearby platform. Then you’re a short trek away from a conveyor belt, whose chains Junior can grab. After moving across, the level settles down: much like Vine Scene, it’s a mostly straightforward, horizontal climb. However, Mario’s mooks here are birds that dash towards Junior at different heights: they’ll blindside you if you aren’t diligently monitoring their patterns. They also occasionally drop projectiles during their initial dive, adding another wrinkle to the first half of the stage. On the plus side, you can skip that initial stretch if you meticulously time your jump on the trampoline—you’ll land on that floating platform just under the conveyor belt. Handy!
Stage 3, Mario’s Hideout, marks the dreaded return to the city and fittingly places a greater emphasis on walking and jumping. And since the carpenter now has the home-field advantage, the difficulty escalates considerably. Yellow Sparks, sentient balls of electricity, swiftly roam each of the four main platforms. When running across them, however, you also need to be mindful of the next platform’s Spark: it’s a fatal mistake to leap into one that’s dashing along the ceiling. Like the Snapjaws, Mario also has a blue variety that dash straight down along predetermined paths. Surprisingly, this level’s layout is the simplest one in the game, but the speedy Sparks effectively compensate. And the bright visuals are striking and urge you to remain on high alert.
Every stage but the second features enemies who permanently roam around unless you kill them. Stage 4’s birds are dangerous: they dive down, then fly horizontally; rinse and repeat. (Image: Nintendo)
The finale, Chain Scene, is basically all climbing: there are six keys you need to push up to the top. In theory, you only need to climb up four times total, as four keys are on neighboring chains; you can push two up at a time if you’re careful. However, Mario’s new flock of birds are plentiful and ferocious and augmented with red Snapjaws; the jerk’s doing everything within his power to keep Junior from his senior. Chain Scene, particularly the version in the arcade release, is easily the toughest level between the original Donkey Kong and Jr. Clearing it as a tyke was perhaps my biggest gaming accomplishment by that point.
Donkey Kong Jr. graced the Nintendo Entertainment System a year after it hit arcades; that’s the version Nintendo usually re-releases (approximations of Jr. hit a handful of other vintage systems, too). It’s a respectable conversion; whereas the first and third Donkey Kong lost a considerable amount of content, Jr. suffers no such concessions. That’s not to say it’s flawless, however: the visuals and audio are weaker, most cutscenes are cut, and the ending is shortened. Plus, the arcade cabinet’s display is longer diagonally, so the NES version had to crunch the levels to fit on a television screen. This renders the latter altogether easier: levels are a bit shorter, Chain Scene is considerably less frantic, and you don’t need to time your fruit droppings as carefully. Note: this review is based on the game’s arcade and NES versions.
Donkey Kong Jr.’s audio is nice, even if its jingles aren’t as powerful as the original’s. (Image: Nintendo)
Today, Donkey Kong Jr.’s age shows, and not solely due to its rudimentary gameplay and graphics. A game where the perennially cheery Mario is the villain? One where he’s antagonizing a child, no less? That’d never fly today! Mario even whips his minions, a startling sight that took little Cart Boy aback (notably, Game Freak considered incorporating whips in Pokémon Red & Green before scrapping it for being “too cruel”). Assuming you subscribe to Donkey Kong Land’s take on the broader canon, the original Donkey Kong took place on the Kongs’ island, meaning Mario was invading their turf! Whenever he duels Donkey Kong today, it’s always the gorilla cast in an antagonistic, albeit not malicious, light. But Donkey Kong Jr. is a strange, fascinating relic of the blue-collar guy’s crude roots before Super Mario Bros. cemented his heroism.
Nevertheless, one area where Donkey Kong Jr. holds up well is its stark divide between the industrial and natural. Junior fights with fruits, stages are evenly split between forest and urban backdrops, and Mario’s lackeys are mostly inorganic (the birds break this dichotomy, though given the limited graphical capabilities of the era, rendering any alternatives probably wasn’t feasible). This all planted the seeds for the Kongs’ nature-loving lifestyles, something Rare capitalized on a decade later: Donkey Kong Country and its sequels treat factories as sinister, grimey dumps incongruous with their otherwise scenic home.
Donkey Kong Jr. starts in a jungle, the second stage weens in mechanical elements, and that cumulates in Mario’s factories. Donkey Kong Country follows a similar escalation, building up to its polluting penultimate factory world. (Image: Nintendo)
And Donkey Kong Jr.’s reach extends far beyond that! It has an active competitive scene like its predecessor. More important to the franchise, Jr.’s the first time Kongs were framed as heroic, sympathetic figures. It added jungles to the series’ stage archetype repertoire, something later entries eagerly embraced. The 1994 Donkey Kong, Mario vs. Donkey Kong and its Nintendo Switch remake, and some Country and Land titles retain its climbing mechanics; the former also recreates Vine Scene. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest parallels Jr.: its star, the young Diddy Kong, saves his kidnapped mentor and along the way surpasses Mario—albeit indirectly, by finding hidden medallions. A number of subsequent Nintendo games remix Donkey Kong Jr.’s music or use its imagery. Even the Snapjaws carry a legacy: they reemerge in contemporary arcade-style Donkey Kongs, and the Klaptraps, Klampons, and Krimps of Country uphold their spirit. Oh, and Junior even helped refine Mario’s now-iconic jumping pose!
Donkey Kong Jr. is rough today. While, say, Ms. Pac-Man remains easy to appreciate, it’s harder to recommend Jr. to anyone who isn’t approaching it from a curious historical perspective. Still, it is important to Nintendo, the genre, and laid a rich foundation for later developers to draw from. Diddy’s Kong Quest, my second favorite game of all time, wouldn’t exist without it! And though I’m not a fan of the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series, I am glad it iterates on some of Jr.’s ideas. Assuming the MvDK remake leads to a resurgence of arcade-style Donkey Kong romps, I hope that continues.
Donkey Kong Jr. saving the day proves he’s a venerable hero! And between him and Mario, he’s the one I grew to prefer. (Image: Nintendo)
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