Not Kong, not great.
By all reasonable standards, Sega’s home adaptation of minor arcade hit Congo Bongo should have been the breakout title for SG-1000’s launch—the game that sold the world on the console. Congo Bongo should have been SG-1000’s Donkey Kong killer, the game to humble Nintendo’s console ambitions, especially in light of the two games’ shared legacy and similar themes. And yet—not to put too fine a point on it, this release turned out to be an absolute disaster. Of all the launch titles for Sega to fumble, this was the one they really couldn’t afford to mishandle. But they did. If Nintendo stumbled a bit in the process of bringing Donkey Kong to Famicom by dropping one of the game’s four stages [see NES Works 1985], Sega fell off a cliff and died halfway down with this cartridge. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
Maybe it’s not a fair comparison; after all, according to Nathan Altice’s book I Am Error, Nintendo specifically designed the Famicom hardware to recreate Donkey Kong as accurately as possible on a home console. Aside from the lost cement factory stage, the expurgated cinematic transitions, and the slight vertical compression of the visuals resulting from the move to a horizontal aspect ratio from the arcade’s tate-mode layout, Donkey Kong on Famicom and NES was an impressive feat. It looked, played, and sounded more like the arcade version than any other home release to that point.
Congo Bongo, Sega’s own home conversion of its Kong-like platform action game, does not fare so well. It omits not one but two stages from the arcade release, effectively losing half of its content in the move to SG-1000. On top of that, the stages that do make it onto this cartridge are—shall we say—troubled.
A bit of history here: The arcade version of Congo Bongo was produced by an electronics firm called Ikegami Tsushinki. Ikegami, which still exists and primarily deals in high-end broadcast equipment, had previously been Nintendo’s go-to for arcade board development until around 1982. While Nintendo’s staff handled the creative development work on games like RadarScope, Popeye, and, yes, Donkey Kong, Ikegami handled the actual engineering that make the boards work. In the age of custom-built arcade boards, connecting with Ikegami gave Nintendo a real technical edge. Their team-up meant that Nintendo’s early ’80s arcade releases didn’t simply feature some of the most creative concepts on the market, but they also boasted specs to match. Ikegami’s boards guaranteed that games like Donkey Kong offered excellent graphics capabilities and powerful sound generation features.
This one-two punch of vision and execution helped make Donkey Kong a massive hit, a success on a far greater scale than anything Nintendo had seen in nearly a century of doing business. According to several different accounts, Nintendo responded to its popularity by quickly producing more arcade boards in order to keep up with demand. In the process, they cut Ikegami out of the loop, retaining all subsequent profits from these newly manufactured boards for themselves. On top of that, Nintendo supposedly followed up by reverse-engineering Ikegami’s work to create a sequel, Donkey Kong Jr., further profiting off the contractor’s labor without additional compensation. Ikegami took their former partner to court, claiming that they owned the copyright to their game code, not Nintendo—a copyright dispute for which little prior law existed at the time. Does code count as a creative work, in which case it automatically qualifies for copyright protection, or does it count as an invention, requiring formal patent filings? The two companies spent years in court before finally settling privately. In the meantime, their relationship soured sufficiently to put an end to their collaborative ventures. Ikegami and Nintendo went their separate ways.
Curiously, a year later, Sega published a suspiciously Donkey Kong-like arcade title called Congo Bongo. Dissect the game ROM and you’ll find Ikegami’s logo in the code. By all appearances, Congo Bongo was Ikegami’s “take that” to Nintendo: A work creatively derivative of Donkey Kong yet technically superior. Congo Bongo may not have played as well as Nintendo’s masterpiece, but it looked far more impressive. It left behind Donkey Kong’s simple 2D platforming in favor of a faux-3D perspective using isometric graphics: A platform action game running on the next-generation tech Ikegami and Sega had developed for landmark 3D shooter Zaxxon.
The shift to an isometric perspective made for more convoluted gameplay than you’d find in a simple 2D construct. The controls proved more difficult to master due to the visual ambiguity introduced by the need to maneuver on three axes, but it made a dazzling impression on arcade-goers. As with Donkey Kong, Congo Bongo took place across four distinct stages that introduced new challenges and objectives over the previous stage. It may not have been as big a hit as its predecessor, but it nevertheless showed up on many computer and console platforms in the early ’80s, in varying degrees of fidelity. Bizarrely, the SG-1000 release—Sega’s own console!—stands as the least faithful-looking of them all. It’s the sole home adaptation of Congo Bongo to abandon any real sense of the third dimension; rather than attempting to emulate the arcade’s isometric visuals, this Congo Bongo takes the form of a mostly 2D game seen from a sort of straight-ahead top-down perspective. This has nothing to do with the limitations of the hardware. After all, the MSX and ColecoVision versions of the game, which run on hardware nearly identical to that of the SG-1000, manage a fairly convincing isometric viewpoint. Sega’s own SG-1000 port of Congo Bongo’s sibling release Zaxxon would emulate the proper arcade perspective when it arrived two years later, too. So who knows what happened here—were Sega’s programmers simply not confident in their handling of the console yet, even though it was basically identical to the VIC Dual arcade hardware they’d been using for half a decade? Did they feel the game would be more streamlined and accessible without its most appealing feature? Was it simply a compromise due to storage limitations?
Whatever the case, this effort falls flat on its face. Congo Bongo drops two of the arcade’s four stages, resulting in a home conversion that’s simply half the game. You get the iconic first stage (or an approximation thereof, anyway): A rocky cliffside in which you climb a series of ridges and bridges in order to ascend to where your nemesis, the diabolical gorilla Congo Bongo, awaits. Then you get the snakes-and-hippos level, in which you need to dodge serpents and cross logs in order to reach the far shore where Congo Bongo has escaped to. But that’s it; once you complete those two stages, the game simply takes you back to the cliffs level and repeats, getting a little faster each time but otherwise unchanging. This was not the Congo Bongo sensation fans craved. You have to imagine how much of a letdown it would have been for anyone who bought this in 1983 expecting a faithful port of a hot new arcade game only to receive this faint echo. Granted, Congo Bongo may have been no Donkey Kong, but the big dumb ape still deserved better.
CONGO CAPERS
In arcades, Congo Bongo stood apart. In an ocean of flat, simple-looking games, Sega’s answer to Donkey Kong practically burst forth from the screen—an early example of the company’s fixation with creating the impression of 3D space long before the industry moved to proper polygonal tech. Although this isometric viewpoint would find itself deprecated in favor of scaling sprites via the VCO Object and Super Scaler hardware, it nevertheless looked astounding amidst countless other machines that settled for mundane sprites on solid-colored backgrounds.
Sadly, the SG-1000 version rather lacked its coin-op counterpart’s visual punch. Somehow, Sega managed to put together the most meager-looking rendition of its own game on the market at the time. Meanwhile, even the Atari 2600 at least managed to create isometric rather than planar graphics, even if its mountainside looked horribly distorted and its sputtering sprites proved almost impossible to steer clear of enemies and hazards. That version also featured a unique single-point perspective take on the water stage; lacking the ability to present that scene isometrically, the programmers instead went for a different kind of viewpoint.
Congo Bongo for Arcades
However, most computers and consoles of the day fell into a tolerable middle ground between the SG-1000 rendition and the arcade original. The Intellivision and Atari 5200 and 8-bit computers all presented a recognizable take on Congo Bongo, even if the viewing angle appeared off and the character sprites looked tragically puny. The MSX version also fell into this general bucket, ably shaming the SG-1000 port on similar hardware.
By far the most impressive version appeared on the Apple II and Commodore 64 home computers. Despite the Apple system’s lack of color palette options, the uncredited graphics artists at developer Beck-Tech managed to capture the precise structure and visual of the cliffs, an all-important factor not only to preserving the look of Congo Bongo but also to adapting its gameplay. To compensate for the meager color palette, the Apple II interpretation draws everything with a heavy black outline that strikingly defines the 3D space of the game world and Congo Bongo himself. The Commodore version builds on this approach with slightly less detailed graphics but improved color fidelity, which proves a tremendous advantage beyond the first stage; the large expanses of flat ground all appear in searing lime green on Apple, while the C64 offers more subtle color choices that go easy on the eye.
Congo Bongo for Atari 5200