Donkey Kong Junior

Donkey Kong Junior for the Atari 2600 is Coleco’s 1983 home-console version of Nintendo’s arcade platform game. It turns the premise of the first Donkey Kong on its head: Mario has imprisoned Donkey Kong, and his son, Donkey Kong Junior, must race through the jungle and Mario’s defenses to rescue him. Published by Coleco under Nintendo’s license, this Atari 2600 adaptation reshapes the arcade hit for the VCS hardware while retaining the reversal that makes Junior—not Mario—the hero of the chase.

The rescue begins on a jungle screen with Donkey Kong in a cage and a flashing key above. Using an Atari joystick, the player directs Junior along platforms and up or down vines. Junior cannot climb through a platform, so reaching the top calls for deliberate routes around the screen rather than simply heading straight upward. The fire button handles jumps: it can send him up from the ground, forward while running, or from a vine or chain onto an adjacent platform when he is correctly positioned.

Vines and chains give the game its central movement trade-offs. Junior climbs faster while holding two at once, though sliding down a single vine or chain is quicker. Moving sideways lets him change from one climbing route to the next, making timing and positioning as important as the route itself. The first mission asks him to reach the key while avoiding Snapjaws; falls, contact with Mario, or a collision with a Snapjaw cost one of his three starting Juniors. A bonus timer also counts down, adding its remaining value to the score when a mission is completed but ending the current attempt if it reaches zero.

Reaching the first key leads to the chain mission, where Junior must push three heavy keys to the tops of three pairs of chains. Snapjaws continue to pursue him, while Nitpickers cross the ground to make the route less predictable. The final mission takes place in Mario’s hideout. Junior dashes across coils and climbs more vines toward the hanging vine at the top of the screen, again working against the timer and the moving hazards to reach his father.

This Atari 2600 version presents three redesigned missions rather than reproducing every arcade stage, and its final chain objective uses three keys. It supports one or two players, with players taking turns in the two-player game. Before starting, the console’s Select switch chooses the player count and one of eight difficulty settings; the manual identifies levels four and five as matching the arcade game’s difficulty. The action returns to the jungle after a successful rescue, with Snapjaws and Nitpickers becoming tougher, so the goal is to keep extending the score until the last Junior is lost.

Donkey Kong Junior belongs to the early Donkey Kong series, following the 1981 arcade game and arriving at a moment when arcade games were being adapted for home consoles with very different technical limits. Its Atari 2600 release keeps the series’ recognizable characters and vertical climbing focus but builds a compact, joystick-driven rescue game around three escalating screens. The 2600 edition was later reissued by Atari Corporation in 1988, while Donkey Kong Junior also appeared in separate forms on several other contemporary systems.