Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 60, Donkey Kong '94

The Game Boy iteration of the classic arcade series was a massive leap forward for franchise that Nintendo has yet to surpass.

I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.

Donkey Kong is a classic arcade game, one that will celebrate its 40th birthday this year. It didn’t make it onto this list — sorry, Kings of Kong — because, as you can imagine, Nintendo (and the industry at large) has managed to make a few improvements to game development in that lengthy stretch of time, and I’m not handing out bonus points for historical relevance. Nintendo also vastly improved on, specifically, its Donkey Kong development during this stretch, and I’m not talking about either Rareware’s or Retro’s contributions in the form of the Donkey Kong Country games, either.

Donkey Kong ‘94 isn’t the actual name of the Game Boy iteration of Donkey Kong — that was just its working title during development, to distinguish it from the original on which it was based. “On which it was based” is actually doing a lot of work there at hiding what exactly Donkey Kong ‘94 is, though. It’s not a remake of the original Donkey Kong arcade game or its NES port. It’s Nintendo’s return to the franchise that helped launch their empire, but the return comes with all of the knowledge they had gained developing both other Donkey Kong titles and myriad others for nearly a decade-and-a-half. It’s a masterpiece of arcade-based 2D platforming, one that manages to use the classic Donkey Kong games as a foundation upon which to build a far superior product.

Donkey Kong ‘94 begins like the arcade Donkey Kong: Pauline is being held captive by Donkey Kong atop a series of platforms, and Mario has come to the rescue. There are rolling barrels to avoid, the power-up hammer whose music you know so well to collect, and when Mario has climbed and jumped his way to the same platform as DK and Pauline, the next level begins. There are just four of these stages, which are all from the original arcade game, and upon their completion, you get the same victory scene and music as usual. In ‘94, though, Kong returns to take Pauline away once more during this scene, and that’s where the real game begins.

What follows is 97 puzzle-platform levels, each far more expansive than anything found in the Donkey Kong series before this. They not only blew away what had previously been found in this series, but also gave Mario some new jumps that he had yet to utilize even in his own series. These jumps and Mario’s various maneuvers aren’t explained to you in a tutorial, or slowly unveiled to you during the game. You have them all from the start, to be utilized immediately, and it’s up to you to figure out where it makes the most sense to deploy, say, Mario’s handstand, or his back flip, or the high jump performed by coming out of a handstand. Like in Super Mario Bros. 2 — the North American version, not the Japanese original — Mario can pick up and throw items and some enemies, and he can even grab barrels thrown at him from above while doing a handstand, then throw them back at Kong.

The game doesn’t leave you completely in the dark in this regard — every time you reach a new area, a short scene plays that will show you what maneuver or trick you’ll find yourself needing to utilize often to progress — but you’ll want to take a look through the instruction booklet beforehand to figure out what it is Mario is capable of. Gaming in 1994 sure was different than today’s tutorial-based play, huh? You can certainly figure it all out easily enough, anyway, manual or no, since the Game Boy has just two buttons and a D-Pad. You know which button is jump, the rest is just figuring out directions.

Most stages have a key you must find and bring to a locked door in order to progress. Mario cannot take damage, or you’ll have to use an extra life and restart the stage. There is an exception to this — when Mario is carrying an item, he drops the item instead of taking damage — but otherwise, it’s one hit and you’re done. So you’ll need to avoid enemies and obstacles and projectiles, like in the original Donkey Kong titles, but you’ll be doing so in far more advanced levels, with more advanced techniques at your disposal. Even falling is a science, as a fall of a certain distance will kill Mario, but sometimes, it’s the most practical way to avoid an enemy or bring a carried item to a floor below you. So if you can figure out how to fall with some level of grace, avoiding death or even being stunned by your fall, then you can more easily traverse the world of Donkey Kong.

There are also items of Pauline’s to pick up in each stage: her hat, her bag, and her parasol. These are optional collectibles, in the sense you do not need them to finish a stage like you do the key, but you’re going to want to collect all three as often as possible, as doing so unlocks a post-level game of chance where you can acquire additional extra lives. If you run out of lives, the game is over, and your progress within a given game world is reset to the last place checkpoint you saved at. If you want to avoid replaying stages you’ve already completed, well, collect those accessories and earn some extra lives.

Image credit: Moby Games

These checkpoints are reached every four stages, where you’ll either play a stage based on the classic DK titles where the goal is to reach Pauline while avoiding the traps and obstacles Kong has put in front of Mario, or have a battle against Kong where that ability to catch and throw barrels is likely to come in handy. They’re well done, with the game building on not just the series’ past but also its own as it goes, in a way that makes this the definitive Donkey Kong game even all this time later.

The game is wonderful on the Game Boy, but it was more than “just” a Game Boy title. This was the game Nintendo used to launch the Super Game Boy, which allowed those with a Super Nintendo to play Game Boy games through their SNES and television. I didn’t actually have my own Game Boy as a kid — my sister had a Game Boy and a Playstation, I had an SNES and an N64. I did end up with my own Game Boy games, though, because I ended up getting a Super Game Boy. While many of those Game Boy titles weren’t developed with the Super Game Boy in mind (or had been released years earlier), and therefore the primary attraction was mostly being able to play on a larger screen and add some element of color, Donkey Kong ‘94 was meant to show off some of the features of the add-on. The sound is superior, thanks to the ability for the SGB to utilize the SNES’ sound chip, there is a special border designed to look like the Donkey Kong arcade cabinet rather than a Game Boy or one of the other random border options available, and the colorization, tailored for use on the SGB, is a lot more than what pre-Super Game Boy games were able to display.

It’s also a big game, big enough that it felt at home on your television and SNES, rather than relegated to the handheld world of the time, which was almost exclusively comprised of smaller titles. 101 total levels is a whole lot of levels, especially when you consider the variety Nintendo managed to sprinkle throughout.

And it is no exaggeration to say that Nintendo never again reached this level of quality within the Donkey Kong franchise. The Mario vs. Donkey Kong games are good, don’t get me wrong, but none of them match what ‘94 brought to the table, and it isn’t close. It was beloved at the time — Electronic Gaming Monthly named it their Game of the Year for 1994 — and is still beloved now: Polygon rated it as the best Donkey Kong game ever back in 2018, ahead of literally every other iteration of Kong. Now, I’m not quite that enamored with it, but I’m not going to heartily argue against it, either. There are all of three DK games I prefer to this one, which is pretty damn good for a series that has been pumping out games in various iterations for 40 years now.

If you have a Nintendo 3DS, Donkey Kong (‘94) is $3.99. You should absolutely get it and play it, even if you’re a little jaded about the idea of a 26-year-old puzzle platformer based on an even older arcade series. You will be shocked at how forward-thinking and flat-out fun this title is, and that you were allowed to pick it up for all of $4. And if you don’t have a 3DS, well, I’m sorry to say that Super Game Boy emulation is extremely difficult on, say, the SNES Mini, for reasons I won’t get into because uh, I know nothing about any of that stuff. But I’m sure someone out there has a Donkey Kong ‘94 rom out there that you could play on the appropriate emulator, if only to experience the peak of the Donkey Kong series for yourself.

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