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New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade

Posted by timothy on from the now-there's-dedication dept.

First time accepted submitter furrykef . writes Over 33 years have passed since Donkey Kong first hit arcades, but it still has new surprises. I was poking through the game in a debugger when I discovered that the game contains unused music and voice clips. One of the tunes would have been played when you rescued Pauline, and two others are suggestive of deleted cutscenes. In addition, Pauline was originally meant to speak. In one clip she says something unintelligible, but it may be "Hey!", "Nice!", or "Thanks!". The other is clearly a cry for help.

2 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. This was discovered a few years ago by Mr+Z · · Score: 5, Informative

    Carl Mueller, Jr. discovered these when he reverse engineered Donkey Kong a few years ago. He implemented them in his clone for the Intellivision, also. I believe he had had blog posts about these, but I can't find them.

    --
    Program Intellivision!
    1. Re:This was discovered a few years ago by furrykef · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, it's true. I found that out shortly after I submitted the story; my discovery of the existence of these assets was entirely independent. Somebody told me that he heard about unused music before and dug up the links, and indeed there are YouTube clips of a homebrew Intellivision port that uses the assets. I was a little depressed because I'd thought I found something special that nobody outside Nintendo or Ikegami had ever heard of before. But hey, at least l've brought the knowledge to the public.