It’s almost five years to the day since I started writing here on midlifegamergeek.com.

If you’d told me back then, or even five months ago, that I’d be reviewing Atari 2600 games, I would have thought you were talking utter nonsense.

And yet, here we are.

For years, Atari have been coasting on easy nostalgia, sinking funds and publicity into weird projects that didn’t seem to be aimed at anyone except their own ideas-starved executives.

And yet, over the past year or so, something seems to have changed.

They finally seem to be getting the idea of what people want, or more specifically, what old school Atari fans and retro gamers want.

There was the absolutely phenomenal Atari 50 compilation, which was stuffed to the gills with games and background material, including not just viewable concept art, flyers and the like, but new video interviews with people who were involved in making Atari games in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

And now there’s the Atari 2600+, a console so old school, that to start most games once it’s turned on and the game is ready to go, you have to physically flick a switch on the machine itself.

It’s a weird beast, being able to output via HDMI, yet shorn of anything else that you’d think of as modern conveniences.

Yet for whatever reason, it feels right as it is. Proper, old school gaming is back.

Compatible with original cartridges, both for 2600 and 7800 consoles, if you can find an old game, say on eBay, the chances are it’ll work (a few aren’t yet compatible, but the developers are working on patches to fix this).

There’s something utterly magical about getting your hands on a cartridge from the 70s or early 80s, thunking it into the console (there’s no other way to describe it) and just seeing it work.

It feels like going back in time; it’s incredibly potent and, dare I say it, almost magical.

I promise you, we are getting to Donkey Kong.

One of the things you’ll notice with modern compilations, whether digital or on devices such as the Evercade, is that they’re always missing licensed titles, for obvious reasons.

So you go without great swathes of some of the most popular titles in any given console’s library, because the licensing is just too difficult or costly to secure.

Which means that naturally, one of the first things I did when getting my hands on an Atari 2600+ was to find some of the licensed games from back in the day, when companies such as Nintendo had yet to enter the US market and publish games exclusively themselves.

That is how Donkey Kong came to be on the Atari 2600; licensed to Coleco, who produced a version for the Colecovision as well as for Atari’s console (which Atari reprinted and rereleased themselves in 1987), it did of course pre-date the NES version by a few years.

If, in 1982, you wanted to play Donkey Kong at home, one of the best options was on the widely available and very popular Atari 2600.

Though it looks simplistic in comparison to the arcade version, and is missing a few levels (there’s just two here, in comparison to the arcade’s four stages), it actually plays an awful lot better than you may imagine.

It’s surprisingly addictive too, despite (or, as is often the case with Atari games, perhaps because of) its simplicity.

Stripped down to the bare essentials, lacking in much visual detail, it’s remarkable just how well Donkey Kong works.

Sure, enemy and even barrel movement is drastically simplified along with the visuals, and there’s a distinct lack of sound effects, but it has its own wonky, distinctively Atari charm.

And it is still genuinely compelling as a high score chase. That image above? That’s my current highest score; in keeping with just how old school the entire Atari experience is, I had to take a photo of my TV to get that screenshot!

I’ve quite often thought to check out Atari Donkey Kong on emulators, but never given it a chance. After all, why bother when the NES or even the arcade original are just a few menus and button presses away.

Yet, again, when playing it on as close an approximation of original hardware as is possible these days, its charm, simplicity and enforced minimalism definitely works well.

Donkey Kong was the third best selling Atari cartridge in history, after fellow iconic arcade titles Pac-Man and Space Invaders.

Though none of the top three are perfect versions of their arcade counterparts, they all do the job nicely of recreating the arcade experience at home, despite hardware limitations.

It’s an amazing thing, to be playing Atari Donkey Kong for the very first time over 40 years after it originally launched.

And it definitely makes me want to check out even more licensed titles, arcade ports or otherwise, that would have otherwise been lost in the mists of time.

Perhaps next I’ll check out another game that seems odd being on a non-Nintendo platform, such as Mario Bros.

One thing’s for sure, the Atari 2600+ and games such as Donkey Kong have brought me back to a period of gaming that I never thought I would enjoy again.