Action/Platformer and Shooter
June 1986 (Nintend0)
Donkey Kong 3 is just full of problems. Not ones that make it unplayable by any means, but that doesn’t make them any better.
It starts with the character. You’re Stanley. Not Mario, or Luigi, or anyone else we’ve seen before in a Donkey Kong game. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with introducing new characters. But this comes out of nowhere.
It also looks like the game can’t decide what it is. I’ve marked it as an Action/Platformer because that’s what Nintendo says it is. But it acts a lot like a shooter. And a bad shooter at that.
Finally, the premise is just weird. Donkey Kong wants to eat whatever you’re growing in your greenhouse and hits bee’s nests to get you to go away? What’s up with that? And how is bug spray supposed to get rid of an 800 pound gorilla?
All of that aside, play the game and don’t think about it. It’s actually pretty fun. Maybe it’s in the same vein as how a movie can be so bad that it’s good again, but whatever works.
Wow! The rare positive assessment of Donkey Kong 3! It seems that game went over with fans about as well as Star Wars Episodes 1-3. I can’t help but wonder if this was even originally intended to be a DK game, or if he got added in during development.
What’s weird is that in their own special way, I like Episodes 1-3 too.
I’ve been trying to see if I can find anything about DK3 besides that it exists. So far, nothing. Well, nothing beyond that the arcade and Famicom versions came out about the same time. It makes me want to come up with my own story.
Reading these posts was like a walk down memory lane. Donkey Kong, there was a Kong machine at the local Sammy Quik Stop. (A 7-11 Clone) Kids would be lined up waiting their turn to climb the ladder. I was never good at Kong, but played nonetheless. I can still hear the goofy music of the game.
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It was fun, but basic. I heard somewhere that Stanley was Mario’s cousin, but that’s just a rumor.
It seems that nobody really knows for sure why this game was so different from the first two Donkey Kong games, but the most believable theory is that it wasn’t originally intended to be a Donkey Kong game and the character got added relatively late in development.
This makes sense, because while it bears no resemblance to the series it’s named after, it’s really obviously designed as a direct sequel to a 1982 Game & Watch game called Greenhouse. Greenhouse starred a character named Stanley the Bugman and featured gameplay where he sprays bugs with puffs of bug spray that go up into the air. As far as I know this is the only handheld LCD game to get a “big screen” coin-op arcade sequel, but it’s more or less impossible to argue that the two titles are unrelated despite their different titles.
Why, then, would Nintendo rename this Greenhouse sequel and insert the Donkey Kong character into it for no apparent reason other than to confuse players? This is also unknown, but my best guess is that some Nintendo execs discovered late in the game that Miyamoto had abandoned the Donkey Kong character while developing the real third game in the series (titled Mario Bros) and they were worried that the success of the first two DK games wouldn’t carry over to the new game because of the new name and the missing titular character.
Since there was no possible way to insert a large boss character into Mario Bros without reworking the game from scratch, they took a look around at other projects they had in development and discovered Greenhouse, which involved a large enemy that had to be defeated by shooting it to the top of the screen. Who knows what that enemy originally was (my bets are on a giant spider), but the execs insisted that it be changed to DK and the game be renamed to Donkey Kong 3 as a backup in case the public didn’t take to Mario Bros.
Luckily, the public enjoyed Mario Bros just fine because it was still loaded with Miyamoto magic. It went on to spawn an NES sequel that more or less reinvented what people expected a video game to be.
Unluckily, the move has forever doomed DK3 to obscurity because people had a really hard time getting past the title. It’s a great game, really, but it’s such a dramatic departure from the first two DK games that people couldn’t enjoy it for what it was and Stanley’s unprecedented shot at coin-op fame fizzled out without really being given a fair chance.
Thank you, Chefgon, for that well-written summary of the sordid history behind the mystery of Donkey Kong 3.