The music of Donkey Kong

This column is “The music of,” in which I’ll go into detail on the soundtrack or a piece of music from a video game. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

“‘HELP! HELP!’ cries the beautiful maiden as she is dragged up a labyrinth of structural beams by the ominous Donkey Kong. ‘SNORT. SNORT.” Foreboding music warns of the eventual doom that awaits the poor girl, lest she somehow be miraculously rescued.” That’s how the arcade flyer for Nintendo’s Donkey Kong begins: it sets the scene, and in these few sentences makes a point of emphasizing sound effects and music. Both were vital to the experience of the original 1981 release of Donkey Kong, and this despite technology that, to modern ears, sounds far more primitive than the gameplay itself feels.

Donkey Kong arrived in arcades during a time of transition in the industry. Continuous music was still a relatively new concept for arcade games in 1981: in 1978, Taito’s Space Invaders was the first title to feature continuous music, which was an exceptionally short loop of four descending bass notes that sped up as you eliminated more of the titular invaders. The first video game with continuous melodic music, however, was Namco’s Rally-X, which would release in October of 1980 in Japan and February of 1981 in North America. Donkey Kong would arrive on the scene shortly after Rally-X, in July of ‘81 in both regions, and in Europe later that same year.

Donkey Kong still used a short loop for its music like Rally-X had, which was the style at the time. As Karen Collins put it in Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, music was “slow to develop” as it was “difficult and time-consuming to program on the early machine… A combination of the arcade’s environment and the difficulty in producing sound led to the primacy of sound effects over music in this early stage of game audio’s history.” You can still hear quite a bit of that in Donkey Kong itself, as well: the music is there, as there’s a melodic five-note bar playing again and again, but what stands out the most — in terms of both volume and pitch — are the sound effects. Jump over a barrel, and a sharp tone meant to signify success blares. The same goes when you hit something with a hammer. These are your traditional beeps and boops that you’d associate with the video games of the time, and they stand out over the music.

One thing Donkey Kong did help push forward, though, is having a number of different songs — again, the first game with continuous melodic music of any kind released months before Donkey Kong did, and, like with Nintendo’s decision to have multiple, distinct stages in the first place, and to use cutscenes to progress the plot of the game, going with all of these songs was a newer initiative, as well. If distinct stages were a new concept popularized by Donkey Kong — one of the first of many innovations pushed by Shigeru Miyamoto both here and in his career — then it follows that distinct stage themes were a new idea, too.

There’s the basic repeating melodic loop of the stages themselves, but there’s also a different theme for when Mario picks up a hammer, the “foreboding” music played when Donkey Kong is climbing whatever structure he’s in with the captive Pauline in tow, the little ditty that plays right before the stage begins, the death sound and tune, a different theme for the second stage, one that plays specifically when you’re taking too long and the game wants you to hurry, a theme for Level 4, and the music that plays when you clear that stage and have completed a single loop of Donkey Kong.

All of those tracks can be heard in the above video, and it will take you less than two minutes to get through the lot. And you should, too, even if you think you know how it sounds, because we’re going to get into some comparisons of sound here. In 1981, when Donkey Kong released, there was no standardized method for creating music in video games just yet. Per Collins, by 1980, “most game systems” had a co-processor of some kind in their arcade board dedicated to sound, but they were split between sound chips known as programmable sound generators, or PSGs, and digital-to-analog converters, or DACs. Donkey Kong used a DAC. These took binary code and converted it into an “analog current,” or sound, in a process known as pulse code modulation. As Collins explained, “The data is stored in binary, which is then decoded and played back as it was originally recorded. The downside of this method is the amount of space required to store the samples: as a result, most PCM samples in early games were limited to those sounds with a short envelope, such as percussion.”

Which is why something like Donkey Kong has a bunch of different songs, but they’re simplistic in terms of instrumentation and feature short, looping bars. As Hirokazu “Chip” Tanaka, the composer of Donkey Kong’s sound effects (and later the music and sound effects composer for Metroid, EarthBound, Dr. Mario, and many others), explained it to Alexander Brandon of Game Developer back in 2002:

The sound effects of Donkey Kong are short but come through loudly and sharply, yet the looping music tends to be far more muted, due to the nature of just what the DAC was capable of doing while working in conjunction with the limited ROM capacities that Tanaka cited. Samples could only be so large, so shorter samples that could be strung together and reused as continuous percussion made far more sense. This sort of thing was an issue well beyond the golden age of arcades, too: even in the era of the SNES, special tools had to be created by Yuzo Koshiro for the (Super Famicom) launch window title, ActRaiser, in order to allow for richer, fuller sound samples than should have been possible on a system restricted to 64K samples. So you can imagine the kinds of problem that existed a decade earlier when the size of the entire game ROM was 1K.

Donkey Kong did not just exist in the arcade, however. That’s where it began, but, thanks to Space Invaders just over a year before, a new era had dawned not just in the arcade space, but in the home console one, as well. The March 1980 port of Space Invaders to the Atari VCS — what would later be known as the Atari 2600 when later models of the VCS released — was the first licensed port of an arcade title to a home console, which signaled the beginning of the end for console clones of arcade games. Nintendo agreed to a deal with Coleco that would see the console manufacturer and software developer given exclusive, licensed rights to home versions of Donkey Kong, which meant Coleco was also in charge of sublicensing for Atari platforms and the Intellivision.

The ColecoVision did not use a DAC for sound, but instead, a programmable sound chip: specifically, Texas Instruments’ SN76489 chip. Per Collins, this had been a popular choice in arcade games, but a later model — the SN76489AN — found its way into home consoles for years, in its original form in systems like the ColecoVision, and later on in cloned variants in a few different Sega platforms. The difference in sound is immediately noticeable, as the background theme now comes through far less muted than in the arcade edition of the game:

However, there is less music overall: that Level 1 theme is now the only stage theme, instead of there being various ones. Remember that, at this point in video game history and for years afterward, home consoles were behind the technology of the arcades, so they couldn’t easily replicate things 1:1. The ColecoVision edition itself was light years ahead of what was produced for the Intellivision — that game barely featured music at all, and instead returned to the “primacy” of sound effects, as if it were a video game from before the days of continuous, looping music. You probably could have guessed as much based on the graphical differences between the two, as well.

The Atari VCS edition of Donkey Kong was in much the same state, with sound effects the focus once more, and a lack of theme music in the stages — again, just by looking at things, you probably could have guessed as much, with Donkey Kong going from a character with animated facial expressions and distinct body features to… not that.

It wasn’t just the Intellivision and Atari versions of the game that had to cut back, either: Nintendo’s own handheld Game & Watch release of Donkey Kong might have been innovative for being the first-ever game to use the cross-shaped D-pad that’s still in use today, but it also had minimal sound effects and music to go with its minimalistic graphics. Think of what the later Tiger Electronics handheld games looked and sounded like, and you’ll get the idea.

Given the ColecoVision edition is the only one that even featured music heavily — and again, Donkey Kong was designed with its music at the forefront — it’s pretty easy to say that it’s the most faithful of the bunch, while simultaneously managing to move its overall audio quality forward through the use of its PSG. It should not be a surprise that what ended up being the best of the home versions in this regard, though, was Nintendo’s own.

While Nintendo licensed Donkey Kong to Coleco for its home releases, they did this because they did not have a console of their own. In 1983, they did: the Famicom. This allowed them to cut out the middleman and produce home versions of their own games, which ended up being such a successful endeavor for them that they shifted almost entirely away from arcades in favor of consoles before the decade was out. They still have a presence there in the present, but it’s very limited, and often centered around their relationship with Bandai Namco and Mario Kart.

According to Collins, the NES used a custom sound chip created by composer Yukio Kaneoka — who just so happened to be the composer for the original Donkey Kong, as well. It was a five-channel PSG sound chip with three tone channels, two of which were pulse-wave channels capable of eight octaves and could set timbre, and the third a “frequency sweep” pulse channel for portamento-like effects, for lasers or alien-related sliding pitch sound effects. This was just a little bit more advanced than the DAC originally used for Donkey Kong, which is how the Famicom port ended up in a somewhat comical situation where the graphics looked inferior to a 1981 arcade game due to the color palette and dimmer overall look to everything, but the audio was noticeably ahead of the arcade’s, and, thanks to the difference in programming audio for a DAC compared to a PSG, even included additional music like the title theme that would be rearranged a decade later by Rare for Donkey Kong Country.

By the time of Donkey Kong’s Famicom port, Nintendo was incorporating longer song loops into their games, since the technology allowed for it and the industry as a whole had moved in that direction. As a launch title for the Famicom, however, Donkey Kong didn’t release within that time frame, but it at least did receive some new tracks.

The difference in arcade vs. Famicom sound quality didn’t stop with the original Donkey Kong and its home port, either, but extended to Donkey Kong Jr., as well. In Donkey Kong Jr., you’re attempting to liberate the villain of the original game from Mario, who has placed him into a cage and tied him down, to boot, and you’re so as the eponymous Donkey Kong Jr. himself. Once again composed by Kaneoka and released in ‘82, Donkey Kong Jr., like its predecessor, had sound effects that would cut through the din of the arcade you found the cabinet in, but more muted, continuous looping level themes.

That more muted sound was taken care of by Yaneoka’s custom sound chip on the Famicom, and came through with a bit more punch at the forefront in that iteration of the game.

It would take until 1983’s Donkey Kong 3 for the arcade versions of Donkey Kong to be on the same level, audio-wise, with their eventual Famicom ports. Donkey Kong 3 features Donkey Kong in the villain role once more, messing around inside the greenhouses of Stanley — there’s not a Mario to be seen here — with the gameplay focused more on a shoot ‘em up variant with some platforming elements than with the previous titles platforming-specific style. As you’d expect from something in the shoot ‘em up realm, the music is real busy, with lots going on, and, two years removed from the hardware constraints of the original Donkey Kong and its era, also more vibrant and capable of punching through the noise in the way the series’ sound effects always had.

The Famicom version of the game was more than capable of keeping up, as evidenced by the theme of stage 2:

Donkey Kong has continued on as a series throughout the years — multiple series, really — and they’re varied to the point that Donkey Kong’s role within Nintendo’s halls is to be whatever they need him to be in that moment. The music, too, is varied, but it’s almost always exceptional. Even limited by the hardware of its day, the themes of the original Donkey Kong were as captivating as the gameplay, and played a significant role in making it stand out in the ways it did, while also keeping players hooked. Donkey Kong Country is a masterclass in game audio and sound design, the moment that Rare was able to truly show off what they were capable of. And music remained so integral to the series that rhythm is as important to the central gameplay of the platformer Donkey Kong Jungle Beat as it is to the drumming spin-off Donkey Konga titles — you even use bongos to control the action in both!

And now, in the present, Donkey Kong Bananza will arrive on the Switch 2, with Pauline’s singing voice a central component of the gameplay. This focus on music as a central piece of the games all began back in 1981 when Donkey Kong itself did, when including music at all was a herculean task. It was hyped in the opening paragraph of the arcade flyer, the sheer amount of it in Donkey Kong as vital to the direction of the industry as any other innovation within that you can point to, and it stands as a lesson to how, in just a few short years, the point of audio in video games changed, with more and more attention and resources put toward ensuring that music wasn’t getting the short shrift in comparison to sound effects.

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