Do you think Donkey Kong Jr. on the 2600 is a terrible game or a decent port?

[TrekMD]

Oh, you couldn't stop me from playing the 2600 versions of either game back in the day.  That only changed when I got the 7800 versions.  🙂  I didn't care that the sound wasn't that good.  Heck, they tons better than what the 2600 had.  The games looked and sounded far better than on the 2600.  Little did I know then that the 7800 was using the same TIA chip and I had no clue what a POKEY chip was at the time. 

[Scott Stilphen]

Here's the source of that old rumor:

The article doesn't mention its sources, and nobody has ever come forward to claim credit.  Personally, I think the rumor is nonsense.  For one thing, every other system on the market at the time was inferior to the Colecovision.  Coleco could have given Garry Kitchen 16K to port Donkey Kong, and it still would have been vastly inferior to the Colecovision version, so there was no need to 'sabotage' their versions for other systems.  Think about the logic behind such a plan.  Coleco didn't have any in-house programmers, and they sub-contracted out to other companies to do games for other systems.  Now, imagine Coleco offering a job to a company with the explicit demand to do the worst job programming it as possible.  No company would have accepted a job with that requirement if they wanted to be in business for long.  Well, the better the game turns out, the more copies they sell ,right?  If they wanted to sell the least amount of copies as possible, they could have chosen to .... not release it :)  Also keep in mind Coleco debuted the Colecovision at the 1982 Summer CES show, along with carts for both the Atari VCS and Intellivision.  So the first 4 VCS games Coleco released were either already done or in the process of being:

Donkey Kong - July 1982
Venture - September 1982
Mouse Trap - October 1982
Carnival - November 1982

Now, could Coleco have allocated 8K for VCS Donkey Kong and other titles?  Absolutely (and of the 13 titles they released, only the first 4 were 4K; everything else was 8K).  And considering Coleco sold more copies of VCS Donkey Kong than anything else they released (approximately 4 million VCS DK carts were sold), they could have easily afforded to, and Donkey Kong's success in the market likely convinced Coleco to step up to using 8K.  Donkey Kong was the hottest arcade license after Pac-Man.  To Garry Kitchen's credit, he tried to convince Coleco to use an 8K ROM since they were available by that time, but they refused due to the added cost.  Had they offered him 8K and a few more months development time, he's sure he could have included the other 2 screens.

As for the author's comments about DK Jr being "absolutely swill", that's a bit harsh.  No, it doesn't have the gameplay that DK has, even with the addition of a 3rd screen (thanks to being 8K).  But it doesn't play the same for the reason someone else here mentioned - there's no fruit to drop!  That's a gameplay element that's on every screen in the arcade version.  That would be like omitting the hammer in Donkey Kong or the energizers in Pac-Man.  It's a crucial element of the game for dealing with enemies, and without it, you're just running for your life with no way of going on the 'offense'.  Garry knew that and made sure the hammer was included in his DK.  He's mentioned he set out to make the best version he could, and the public drubbing Atari got for their VCS Pac-Man was even more of a reason he wanted to do his best.  For only being 4K and spending all of 3 months programming it, it's really an impressive effort.  Garry mentioned including the slanted ramps on the barrel screen was a real challenge, and he said he spent a lot of time on the game so that it looked and played as close to the arcade version as possible.  The game had to be finished by a specific date w/o question and he spent the last 72 hours straight (no sleep, no breaks) sitting in a cubicle in Hartford, Connecticut with the owners of Coleco standing over his shoulder waiting for the finished game. 

Edited April 28 by Scott Stilphen