Donkey Kong (Game Boy) Playthrough

A playthrough of Nintendo's 1994 Game Boy puzzle-platformer, Donkey Kong.

In this video, I play through every stage (all items collected) on the Super Game Boy. I also compiled a montage of Mario's death animations - you can see that following the ending at 2:04:57.

Donkey Kong, often referred to as Donkey Kong '94 to differentiate it from the arcade game, was released alongside the Super Game Boy. The Super Game Boy was a peripheral that allowed Game Boy cartridges to play on the Super Nintendo "in color." To get the most from the it, a game had to be designed to explicitly support the SGB's new features, and Donkey Kong's custom screen border, sprite and background layer-specific color palettes, and enhanced audio made for an excellent demonstration of the add-ons capabilities.

The game starts out with the same four stages that were featured in the original arcade game, but this time, Mario doesn't save Pauline at the construction site. Instead, Donkey Kong grabs Pauline and flees with Mario in hot pursuit, kicking off a brand new adventure that spans a mammoth one hundred stages.

Donkey Kong is a top-notch effort with exceptional production values, especially for an 8-bit handheld game. It looks great on the monochrome GB screen, but the SGB enhancements add a ton to the experience. Pauline's screams of "Help!" and the ending's credit roll music are particularly cool. Mario's parkour master moveset does an excellent job fleshing out the arcade game's mechanics, and the game deserves special credit for the seamless way it introduces new techniques to the player. The fun little cutscenes that play every four stages teach you everything you need to know without pulling you out of the game for an instant.

And some fun trivia: this was the first time that Donkey Kong wore his iconic red tie, and it is still the only game that poses Donkey Kong Junior as Mario's enemy.

This was one of my favorite games when it was released. My parents thought that the Super Game Boy looked like a great idea since we already had a good twenty or so Game Boy games, and since we were in the process of moving, they grabbed a SGB, Tiny Toons 2, and Donkey Kong for my sister and I at Toys 'R Us. We had such a blast going through them, and it was REALLY cool that we could just yank the cart out of the SNES and put it in the Game Boy and continue on - they didn't have to try to convince me to turn off my game if we were going out because I could just switch systems and keep playing in the car.

Donkey Kong was one of the best games ever made for the original Game Boy, and between it and Donkey Kong Country, I think it is safe to say that Nintendo's original mascot served the company extremely well in 1994.

It's also wild to think that DK94 remains a Game Boy exclusive to this very day. I can't imagine why Nintendo chose to skip over it when they decided to remake its GBA sequel, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, for the Switch. In my opinion, this one still holds up as the better game.

If you'd like to see the sequel, you can find my video of it here:    • Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Game Boy Advan...  
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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