text by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh

★☆☆☆

“AS MUCH FUN AND ABOUT AS WHOLESOME AS LIGHTING A BIRTHDAY CANDLE ON YOUR CHEST AND COVERING IT WITH A JAM JAR.”

It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.



Miyamoto sure must love his spray gun, since there’s little else to do in the game. The first level consists of three horizontal platforms, arranged in a trapezoid formation. Pressing up or down causes Stanley, gawk-jawed cousin to Mario, never seen again outside the trophy case to Super Smash Bros. Melee, to hop up or down a level to avoid the raging insects. All the while, his nozzle is aimed skyward, at the looming gorilla sphincter above.

Let Donkey Kong slide all the way down, and you lose. If he climbs high enough, he’ll knock down a super spray can that, if fired up his ass, causes him to climb even higher. The occasional worm may crawl off a leaf, to slide across one of the three floor levels. You can’t kill the worm; only stun him, and that only lasts a second. Along the bottom are flowers, that you’re meant to guard against bees. The only penalty to losing flowers is that your score bonus will be lower at the end of the level.

The second and third levels are exactly the same, except the floor is arranged in slightly different patterns, a new insect or two is eventually added, and the super spray can is absent. The actual play mechanics and goal remain the same: avoid getting stung, maybe guard the flowers if you feel like it, and pump the gorilla’s ass as hard and as fast as you can.

Donkey Kong 3 is, like its contemporaries, a game of attrition. As you play, the game is meant to get harder and harder, until you can no longer keep up with the demands put before you. The problem is that the game starts off more confusing than difficult and never really gets harder. When you die, it will either be because you have yet to figure out that there is no point to doing anything other than shoot the gorilla in the ass or because, once you have mastered this trick, there is nothing further to keep you alert.

There is no strategy to play, except perhaps when you realize that jumping toward Donkey Kong can increase your rate of spray. As in Space Invaders — from which this game borrows more than it does Donkey Kong 1 or 2 — only one “shot” can persist on the screen at any moment, so the sooner a shot is absorbed the sooner you can fire again.

Donkey Kong 3 is the “lost” Donkey Kong game — the game that Nintendo and everyone else keeps forgetting. You never see it re-released, you never see it referenced, you never hear anyone talk about it. The reason is that it’s as much fun and about as wholesome as lighting a birthday candle on your chest and covering it with a jam jar.



The Donkey Kong series of videogames has played out kind of like the Jaws film series. The first game, with its high concept and story-based design, inspired twenty-five years of game development — much as Jaws did to Hollywood. The second game involves the revenge of the first game’s villain, by way of a relative; it wasn’t as good, yet it introduced a few new ideas. The third game is a flimsy B-level production, later written out of continuity, in which the villain now takes revenge on a distant relative of the original hero.

When I read that that Jaws 4 (The Re-Re-Revenge?) is supposed to be the worst action movie ever made, I’m a little disappointed that Miyamoto dropped the monkey at this point. The worst action game ever has to be a hell of a lot more entertaining than this. Donkey Kong 3 is just tedious. Tedious and weird. It’s not even worth the curiosity. Go play Donkey Kong 64, and consider yourself lucky.

Pros: Really fun action of dodging projectiles and shooting incoming bugs and critters, as well as DK's rump! It's a decent mix of vertical shooter and platformer, and in the arcade especially, it can be pretty exciting! Great presentation in the arcade version too, much higher quality than the NES counterpart.

Cons: A far more limiting experience than either previous DK arcade games. It's just not as fun as pure platforming. DK himself feels kind of like an afterthought in this compared to the prior two games.

What it means to me: Took me a long time to even find out this game existed at all, and when I did, I was perplexed by it! Didn't properly play it until adulthood, where I enjoyed it at a great arcade spot, and now I really do appreciate it.

Donkey Kong 3… what the meh?

First of the title, where the hell is Donkey Kong 2??? Donkey Kong 3 feels unnatural, like I feel violated just reading the title of Donkey Kong 3, it feels weird.

That’s how I can describe this game, it’s just weird man. New Protagonist named Stanley, he’s fucking boring glad he’s never seen the light of day again, so Donkey Kong has broken into a Greenhouse and it’s our job to stop him, It’s so weird, at this point Mario was stopping Koopas in the sewers but like, could they not have used Mario? What was the constraints here.

Anyway, uh this game is fucking boring, despite the decent graphics and Music. You spray Donkey Kong in the ass and a few insects with an power up and Bonus Flowers that give you extra points, I will admit, there’s a bigger arsenal of enemies than ever before in these games but the gameplay itself is monotonous, at the very least the other 2 Arcade games had some variety but you’ll experience the entire game in 5 Minutes.

Well, that’s all the Arcade games done, finally we can get to the good stuff, now we wonder where did the Mario Bros go after they stomped the hell out of the Koopas?

Some arcade games make it past location testing without issue; occasionally they need some tuning, or a redesign, but nothing prohibitive. Others fail to meet expectations and get canned. A select few survive this stage despite not passing muster, and that's possibly what happened with Donkey Kong 3. It's a sad yet mundane story of a product unable to meet (let alone surpass) its precursors, all the while eclipsed by the genre competitors it was aping.

Our tale begins further back than the original Donkey Kong, however, as this sequel owes much more to Nintendo's ill-fated vertical shooters of the time, particularly Radar Scope and Space Firebird. Both ancestors offered technically competent but uninteresting variations on the ubiquitous Space Invaders formula. To the latter's credit, the developers had a solid grasp on sound and graphical feedback by this point, with players feeling that crunchy impact while mowing down alien hordes. But the lack of risk-reward features like the degrading shields in Taito's game, or the cleverly evolving raid and bullet patterns of Galaga a bit later, meant that these post-Sheriff shooters were just too spare and derivative to stand out. I can definitely see why Nintendo's last attempt to break into the shooter market went for a mix of platforming, puzzling, and blaster action. And they would have had a winner if not for some critical problems in the pernicious primate's latest title.

The dastardly donk's back at it again…in a greenhouse? I suppose it's better than Congo Bongo's colonialist chase through the jungles. Genyo Takeda and Shigeru Miyamoto help provide the customary trappings of an early-'80s Nintendo arcade release, with fairly responsive controls accompanied by a very readable set of graphics. I rarely struggle to figure out what's happening on-screen even way late into a playthrough, and the SFX ring clearly in my ears. Nothing here feels like an evolution beyond Donkey Kong Jr., though. The likes of SEGA and Namco were already starting to produce more audiovisually stimulating stuff like the former's DK clone and the latter's Mappy. Also lacking here is much of the series' humor—the most I can recall is my amusement whenever DK gets his head stuck in the beehive. It's a rather sober outing for not-Mario vs. not-Kong, contrary to expectations that these developers had previously set. I'd be fine with all this if the game design itself was strong, but, well…

Simply put, the game's a bit too easy, with its difficulty level evolving mainly from faster attacks and a few additional enemy types. Our protagonist Stanley may have a measly little pesticide pump to work with, but the admittedly clever goal of scaring DK to the top means it's possible to ignore the bugs and just go for broke. Arguably the most fun I can have with Donkey Kong 3 is exactly that: speedrunning each board to get as high a time bonus as possible, ensuring I can regularly extend my lives. That sounds fun on paper; now imagine this game throwing you a frequent gun power-up which trivializes combat entirely. Sure, you have to actually lose a life for the upgrade to reappear, and there's still some hits on DK to go before it tumbles. But the relative ease of getting 1-ups via fast stage clears means it's often too easy to get this item. One has to play several stages before there's much threat of bees successfully stealing away with your flowers…which means perfect bonuses become a formality rather than a reward. Combine all these flaws and we've got a game loop which struggles to encourage more skillful play and leads to unsatisfying high-score runs.

The echoes of mediocre starfighting action from Nintendo's pre-Donkey Kong bombs reverberate throughout this final numbered entry, contrary to the heights their R&D teams would reach via many Family Computer releases to come. I feel bad for Genyo Takeda especially since he's so often singled out as the one responsible for playable yet dismal software such as this. To me, it doesn't seem as though releases like this suffered from a lack of foresight, ambition, or no-nonsense design. He later directed the StarTropics games, simultaneously within Nintendo's house style and quite distinct from anything Miyamoto's crew were involved with. (Let's also remember that Miyamoto was involved with Donkey Kong 3, yet the besmirchment's sent elsewhere.) Something managed to go wrong with each and every one of the company's arcade shooters, regardless of circumstances, and it's no surprise that they later played it safe with Solar Striker. If there's anything I'll give Donkey Kong 3 credit for, it's that shooting-heavy action platformers were a rarity in 1983. Add this distinction to the game's brand power and I'm unsurprised that it still sold reasonably well to arcade operators in Japan, no matter the lack of staying power. Still, I'd rather play Moon Patrol; even the best PCBs of '83 struggled to match that one in quality and replayability.

Save for its quick appearance on the Famicom, Donkey Kong 3 fell into footnote status much quicker than the average Nintendo hit of the time, and I attribute that to its shortcomings more than just its small delights. There's still a competent action game in here whenever you're unable to immediately trivialize a stage. I had fun timing my shots to avoid blocking myself with stunned snakes. The way Stanley gets wiped out by an ambush of insects is morbidly amusing. And while it becomes too damn straightforward after 15 minutes, I hardly mind this kind of accessible arcade experience after playing some of the period's more punishing stuff. But in exchange for that ease of completion, I expect way more variation in levels, enemy characteristics, and types of traps to deal with. It's because the game settles for so much less than it promises that I can't help but rate it so low. And as 1984's catalog would show, Nintendo themselves knew that the future belonged to increasingly complex and extensible game loops, even for cartridges as constrained as Excitebike. (Hell, it's a wonder that Takeda's own Sky Skipper gets more retrospective praise than anyone ever expected.) In the end, this gassed-up-the-ass gorilla had reached the end of his usefulness; it would take something altogether new and wild to bring back the beast.

Who the fuck is Stanley

Another new Donkey Jong game, another new type of gameplay, at least Nintendo never stopped innovating things even in their toughest eras.
This game plays like a Shmup for some reason, it’s actually pretty fun but tough as well, plenty of enemies on the screen and very little wiggle room to fight in.

Overall a decent Arcade game as always for 1983, but nowadays it’s quite boring!

Man I love early arcade games; I love how they just spam a non-stop barrage of seemingly randomly generated enemies in a game that has you die if you touch a fucking worm. I love games that are more focused on draining money out of you in order to finish it, as a way to compensate for the lack of content, rather than actually being a fun, if short experience.

Sound familiar? This has little to do with the game itself I'm aware (there's not much to say really), but I just want to say that you can forgive this stuff back then, given that this was a young industry we didn't quite have a grasp of yet (and it was only a couple of pennies per turn), but monetizing games nowadays is absurd with the set price tags games go for now (DLC's fine tho, when it isn't just the rest of the game that clearly got cut out to make more money).

It really is a Donkey Kong game in name only. No idea why they decided to remove the platforming elements and turn it into a side-scrolling shooter.

The game becomes laughably easy once you get the power up. You can pretty much beat stage in 3 seconds flat with it. Was this an oversight or intentional?

Oddly enough I found it more enjoyable than Donkey Kong Jr., but DK Jr. at least followed the same gameplay formula as Donkey Kong, so I can't really compare the two.