Donkey Kong

Consoles don't sell themselves — games sell them. And for the ColecoVision, the decisive draw was the bundled Donkey Kong, the killer app that gave people a reason to reach for this console in particular.

Donkey Kong is an arcade classic from 1982 in which, as Mario (then still called Jumpman), you climb up a girder structure, dodge tumbling barrels and try to rescue a kidnapped girl from the clutches of a giant gorilla. A simple idea with brilliant execution — the interplay of jumping, timing and rising difficulty makes Donkey Kong one of the cornerstones of the entire platformer genre.

On the ColecoVision, it was staggering for 1982 just how faithful the port was to the arcade original. The fidelity of both graphics and gameplay far exceeded the capabilities of the then-dominant Atari 2600, and this very difference was the key selling point for Coleco. Players saw that on this console they could have the arcade at home in a quality they couldn't get anywhere else.

Donkey Kong is also a symbol of why the ColecoVision succeeded — albeit only briefly, before the great video game crash of the mid-1980s swept the market away. For Nintendo it was the game that kicked off the era of characters like Mario, and thereby indirectly one of the most influential careers in the history of the medium.

If you want to understand why the fight over home ports of arcade games was so crucial in the 1980s, and play a timeless platforming classic while you're at it, the ColecoVision version is the ideal entry point.

Why play: For a timeless arcade classic and a killer app that, through its faithfulness to the original, sold the entire ColecoVision.