Naturally, since this was created over a decade before Donkey Kong Country changed the course of ape video game history, you know that it’s not a massive platformer with engaging mechanics and a vast number of collectibles, and that this game will not, in fact, contain Funky Mode. If you’ve never played it, you’ve probably got some suppositions about how the game is supposed to be played. This, dear reader, is the intro to the Arcade Archives version of Donkey Kong 3. The point in all of this is that we get a chance to remember the mistakes of the past, no matter how painful they might be, in an effort to preserve the future. Thankfully, in the last century or so, there’s a much bigger push to collect information from both sides of the world, so that, when we hear about the victory over the Nazis in World War II, we also acknowledge that the United States was doing some awful internment camps of their own, and that Japan had some choices that ruined their relationship with the rest of Asia, oh, let’s say until the sun burns out. That’s all fine and dandy in the grand scope of things, but there’s something unsettling about knowing that certain events and actions might be shown in this magnificent and righteous light because the only ones left to convey the message were the ones who won. There are thousands upon thousands of years wherein the course of what happened was written almost entirely by the victors of wars and conquests, and the other side of the tale was erased, effectively, locking down history into a one-sided narrative.
DONKEY KONG 3 RELEASE DATE ARCHIVE
Part of being able to digitally archive the past is allowing history, for the most part, to be neutral.