Back in the 1980’s, Atarisoft were doing official conversions for the Commodore 64. Donkey Kong Jr was oddly one of them! We learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press.
We were not sure at present how far the game got, or why it was cancelled, but we are guessing it was due to Atarisoft breaking up at some point.
However, Phobos/Ready64 found a snippet in Video Game Update (August 1984 – see scans) which suggests that Jack Tramiel got Atarisoft to stop all C64 developments and focus just on Atari. It wasn’t the video game crash that caused the cancellation of titles. Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti and Phobos for the heads up.
According to an internal Atari document that Bertrand from Atarimania has:
A “test report” was initiated on May 18th, 1984. It is not clear whether the game had reached “REV. 1” status or whether the test was performed at this specific date between “REV. 0” and “REV. 1”. Whether any more work was done on this title before Tramiel took over in early July is anybody’s guess.
It means that something was in the works, so did it get much further and does anything still exist?
Well, thanks to Zdrmonster, we learn that it was K-Byte who were behind the conversion, and excitingly there is video of the game running on YouTube, which we have extracted here. This was posted about thanks to GDRI. This shows a game in a very advanced and perhaps even complete state:
Unfortunately K-Byte would go bankrupt in 1986, though that means Donkey Kong JR was canned due to the Atarisoft pullout.
Regarding credits, the programmer is in the video and we can just about hear their name: Greg Broniak. We think they may have worked on Summer Games as well – but its a great lead and hopefully we can track down Greg to find out more.
In the meantime, thankfully a brilliant conversion was done in 2014, so you can play a very decent conversion of the game.
Contributions: Mat Allen, Bertrand / Atari Frog, Phobos/Ready64, Roberto Nicoletti, Jim Hock, Zdrmonster, GDRI, LiqMatrix
At least we have the 2014 version for the C64 which is excellent.
That’s a very good point LiqMatrix! I had completely forgotten about it! Just added a link now!
I think I found a screenshot of this: https://gdri.blogspot.com/2024/06/developers-on-tv-k-byte.html
That’s fantastic, thank you Zdrmonster! I’ll update the page on Tuesday when doing the site updates.
Actually, I found even more footage from the news report the blog post looked at! Not sure if the sound effects are correct, though. https://youtu.be/8NL_iM3Cscg?feature=shared&t=62
That is amazing – I hadn’t checked the video yet, but i’ve grabbed some frames from it to include on the page. Also the programmer is mentioned too! Just updating the page now.
According to an internal Atari document I have, a “test report” was initiated on May 18th, 1984. It is not clear whether the game had reached “REV. 1” status or whether the test was performed at this specific date between “REV. 0” and “REV. 1”. Whether any more work was done on this title before Tramiel took over in early July is anybody’s guess.
Thanks Betrand! I’ve updated the page with those details confirming the game was actually started!