Developing Donkey Kong
- Scribbled on March 13th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Features, Platformer, Platforms, Retro
For those of you who haven’t checked it out, the Dad Hacker is a must-read blog by Landon Dyer, who in the mid-1980’s was a young feller who hooked onto Atari just as the Great Video Game Crash of 1983 was occurring, and told how he made Donkey Kong for the Atari 400/800. After a while, he began to notice things weren’t quite right at Atari:
My office-mate had finally finished Robotron. By request, she made three versions of the ROM image, located at different ROM addresses. Unfortunately, the Q/A staff was only able to test two of the images. Guess which image Atari sent to be manufactured? Guess which image had a fatal bug? I saw a hardware engineer struggle to come up with a cheap gate-or-two fix that would make the game work; only a few bytes of it were wrong. In the end, Atari threw $200,000 worth of ROMs away.
I have the impression that mistakes like that were being made all over. This was compounded by the fact that games were just not selling; fueled by time-to-market, Atari marketing had forced its engineers to write games that lacked polish and fun, and that practice had come back around. People were bored with playing the same old junk.
He then states, “Eventually Jack Tramiel bought the parts of Atari that he wanted, and I would up working on the Atari ST, but that’s another story.” You can read about that here.
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