Today's featured article on Wikipedia is Donkey Kong, a classic of the coin-op era. The game was released in 1981 at the height of teletext's popularity. In fact, it was the same year that level two text was released and implemented across Europe and America.The arcade game was so popular it brought threats of a lawsuit from the creators of King Kong, the lizard of film fame. Any publicity is good publicity and certainly arcade games were far more popular and indeed mentioned than teletext. Essentially, though, the two mediums are meant for different purposes despite the similarly pixellated graphics.
Donkey Kong was actually the first video game to feature Super Mario, who has since starred in an extremely popular series of games.
The game has since become cross-format, with versions released on many subsequent consoles and arcade machines. Also notable is the game and watch version (shown right) which is something of a cut down version on a hand held games console. This proves that, with effort, it would in fact be possible to transfer a teletext system to a hand held system for people on the move and also, if people cared, to continue the service to more up to date mediums. Maybe an advanced version of the existing one for mobile phones? I'll explore Teletext mobile in a future post.
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