Thus we can return out, give me, give me, give me the Donkey Kong Blues.

One of the great and enduring mysteries of video games is, Why on Earth has Nintendo never

republished one of the most important creations of its entire existence.

I'm referring, of course, to Donkey Kong.

Sure, Nintendo sells Donkey Kong in many formats and with great enthusiasm, but here's

a thing, those are always the NES version of the game, the compromised NES version, which

skips an entire level, presents a compressed rendition of stage layouts that originally

were designed along a vertical axis, and omits the eye-catching opening animation that sets

the stage for the action by depicting Kong's destruction of the stage one girder assembly.

Over the past 15 years or so, Nintendo has made the NES version of Donkey Kong available

through Animal Crossing, on an e-reader card, as a standalone Game Boy release, on every

version of Virtual Console, as a fragmented component of NES Remix, and on the NES Classic

Edition.

Sorry about predicting those would be widely available at launch, by the way.

I'm probably forgetting a few versions of Donkey Kong, too.

There was one distributed a few years back, and the UK is a built-in ROM for the Wii

console, which Nintendo hacked, to restore the missing stage and some animations.

But aside from a limited time promotional download for 3DS owners, that revision has

never been available widely.

However, a proper conversion of the actual original Donkey Kong arcade game itself has only

ever been available to purchase and own once, and never on its own.

Rare slipped it into Donkey Kong 64, as a hidden unlockable back in 1999, which honestly

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