Nintendo releases arcade Donkey Kong for Switch, slates Sky Skipper for July

It’s official: Nintendo’s arcade-exclusive version of Donkey Kong is now available on a console for the first time. Hamster’s Arcade Archives port of the 1981 quarter-muncher has just hit the Switch eShop for $8, with the more obscure 1981 arcade title Sky Skipper confirmed to follow in July.

As one of the earliest successes in the platform game genre, Donkey Kong saw a human hero — originally named Jumpman — attempting to get from the screen’s bottom to its top, where the titular gorilla held a distressed damsel hostage. Because of its vertical screen orientation, Donkey Kong was basically impossible to port perfectly to consoles for years, generally requiring developers to reformat the graphics for horizontal screens, but it still proved popular across multiple early platforms.