Crazy Kong

Crazy Kong is a period curiosity from the earliest years of the arcade platformer, an early-80s conversion of Nintendo's Donkey Kong produced for markets outside Nintendo's direct reach and distributed in Europe by Zaccaria. It follows the same instantly familiar template: a giant ape at the top of the screen, a hero clambering up girders and ladders, and a steady rain of rolling barrels to leap over as you climb toward the captured damsel. For players of the era it was, for all practical purposes, Donkey Kong on hardware where the official version wasn't available.

This Commodore 64 incarnation carries that arcade lineage onto the home computer, delivering the same simple, addictive climb-and-dodge loop that defined the genre's birth. Judged today it's a straightforward slice of gaming history rather than a hidden gem, its appeal resting almost entirely on nostalgia and on the fascinating tangle of licensing and cloning that surrounded Donkey Kong in the early 1980s. As a bite-sized high-score chaser it still works, but it's the story behind it that makes it worth a look.