How I spent my summer of 1982: the Making of Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 | Hacker News Reader

How I spent my summer of 1982: the Making of Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600

garrykitchen.medium.com

26 pointspvg8 comments

>>>"In 1982, Donkey Kong was one of the biggest things in the arcade, sucking down quarters at a record pace."

Just to put some context on this very true statement, the factory coinbox in these games held around 3200 quarters or 800 dollars. When this game came out operators were cutting the bottoms out of the coin boxes because they were overflowing and jamming the coin mechs faster than they could be emptied.

These must have been standalone machines of some sort, right? At a minute a quarter nonstop, 3200 quarters is about two days.

Yes these were 19" upright coin-op arcade machines, located mostly in bars and pubs.

It cost more than a quarter a game when it first came out, pretty sure it was at least a dollar. Even at that it would still take 13+ Hours which you're right that seems like plenty of time, it's possible the two player games earned faster or the cost per game was higher.

This was also long before cell phones or even pagers were common, so if a machine went down on a weekend it represented a pretty big loss.

The cash that these machines earned was crazy and the distributor conventions (and after parties) held in the 80s were legendary!

EDIT: Actually the conventions and parties up until the mid 90s were pretty wild too! Street Fighter 3 earned 5K a week for the 1st month it came out, I remember converting Asia market games from 220V to 110V just so we could get a jump on the North American cabinets. Cherry Master "Grey" machines were pulling in even more.

Donkey Kong was just a quarter when it came out. I distinctly remember playing it at roller rinks and arcades and as a poor teenager I wouldn't have been playing it if it was more than that. The first "big" game that was more than that (or maybe the first that was a dollar) was Dragon's Lair. Perhaps this was a local thing, but in my area (suburban Minneapolis, MN, USA) it was a quarter.

The points about communications are huge though. If you didn't grow up during that time you don't understand how different it was just to try to get ahold of somebody at any random time.

Dragon's Lair was a big earner too, it used some different technology in the form of a laser disc player which made for stunning graphics at the time. What made it especially good at earning was it cost money to continue playing even if you didn't die.

I did some looking into DK and it was capable of charging 5 coins per play. It definitely was a different time.

Here is a link to an operating manual, which includes schematics and parts list.

https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-videogames/D/dk-tkg4u....

When you died, you had a 10 second phase in which you could enter coins to CONTINUE at the current level of the game, or you would have to start from the beginning again.

Similar post from the person who ported the game to the Atari 400/800 computer:

https://dadhacker-125488.ingress-alpha.easywp.com/donkey-kon...

Is it true that the 2600 game wasn't supposed to look as good as the Colecovision game? That is why they limited it to 4096 bytes. Activision used 8K and 16K ROMs to make their games look better. Considering he had three months to write it, that is the real reason why it doesn't look that good.

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