Write you fool: Congo Bongo

The same kid who talked me into trading him my Death Star for a landspeeder and five bucks also had ColecoVision. And not just ColecoVision, but ColecoVision with every game, and all the accessories. He had his own little TV, set up on a coffee table, just for his ColecoVision. It was on top of two phone books, so he could see it over the steering wheel for Turbo.

Weird sidebar real quick: holy shit this kid’s parents must have been fucking LOADED for him to have had all that stuff in 1980. I’ve told the trade story a million times, but I never remembered or realized that this kid was spoiled to death. His parents’ wealth also explains why my parents wanted to be friends with them, and probably why they disappeared from our lives around 1984.

But I do remember how envious I was of his personal ColecoVision setup. I could tell a great story about him being a dick about it, making me sing Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight or My Dingaling before he let me play, but I remember that he was actually really chill about it. He shared way better than Henry up the block who would make you watch him play all 20 minutes of Pitfall before you got one turn in Cosmic Ark.

Fucking Henry I swear to god. This is why we never want to come play games at your house, dude.

ANYWAY.

I can close my eyes and see my little hands at the end of my skinny arms, holding that steering wheel while I played Turbo. I can feel the little plastic accelerator beneath my bare foot, because we’ve just gotten out of the pool and are playing video games while his mom makes us grilled cheese for lunch. I remember this kid being legitimately impressed by how good I was at that game.

I was really good at Turbo, because I had been in a movie we shot in 1982 called The Buddy System, part of which was filmed in an arcade (Castle Fun Park on Sepulveda, shoutout to all my fellow 818ers!), the art department had two actual arcade machines on the stage: Kangaroo, and Turbo. I loved Turbo. It was Varsity to Monaco GP’s JV squad, a marathon to Pole Position’s 100 meter dash.. I got to play it for free, until I was bored, because that was the summer Dreyfuss flipped his car while blasted out of his mind on cocaine, right before he got sober; there were entire days I went to 20th Century Fox, got into makeup and wardrobe, and never worked, because he didn’t show up. I remember this scary tension everywhere that nobody would talk to me about (it was very familiar to what I experienced at home), and trying to get out of it by playing these two games as much as they’d let me (childhood by disassociation for the sad win). Kangaroo was inscrutable to me, but Turbo was familiar, so I basically mastered it as well as a little kid can.

But I am not here to write about Turbo or Kangaroo (though ColecoVision will come back later).

No, today I am here to write about Congo Bongo, a game I don’t remember playing, but remember watching the Landspeeder Hustler play an awful lot.

Congo Bongo answers a question that not a lot of people were asking in 1983: what happens when Doctor Moreau splices Donkey Kong with Zaxxon?

No, literally, that’s what it is. Ikegami is the company that released Zaxxon, it was a huge hit, and as a follow-up, they made Congo Bongo as a fuck you to Nintendo, for reasons you can discover in this video.

I played it once or twice in the arcade, and I hated it. I couldn’t wrap my head around the isometric playing field the way I could with Q*Bert, and as a kid who was a hardcore Donkey Kong STAN, I was deeply and personally offended by its blatantly derivative, gimmicky efforts to steal Donkey Kong’s spotlight.

But I remember watching Landspeeder Hustler – you know what? I can’t keep calling him that. It’s hilarious to me, but we’re all going to get tired of it. Let’s call him … Kyle. I watched Kyle play it on that little TV, and he was a goddamn virtuoso. Like I did with Turbo, he basically played it until he was bored. He had solved the game and achieved nirvana, all before the age of 12.

Real quick: I need to put ColecoVision into context. I need you to see it the way I saw it, as an 11 year-old, in 1983, and why it changed everything for me and so many of my peers.

This is Donkey Kong in an arcade:

This is Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600:

This is Donkey Kong on ColecoVision: 

I, uh … I have to admit something to you all now that kind of undercuts my premise a little bit and makes me wish I’d done more homework before I started writing this.

The 2600 screen looks a lot better – and a lot more like the ColecoVision screen – than I remember. I mean, on the 2600, Donkey Kong looks like a rejected gingerbread man who prays daily for the merciful release of death, and the barrels are obviously the cookies from Megamania, but looking at the two screens side by side, they are not nearly as different as I remembered … except in the key ways they were, which I’ll get to. The way I remember it, Donkey Kong on the 2600 was terrible. The sound was terrible, it had two screens only, and the animation was flat and boring, compared to other 2600 titles.

52 year-old Wil respects the fuck out of the programmers on both, for the record. I understand what they did and how challenging it was. But for 11 year-old Wil, and his Landspeeder hustling friend, Kyle, the ColecoVision was basically the arcade version, at home. It had more screens than the Atari version, looked so much better, had fantastic sound, included both hammers (even the one you never used) and was vastly superior in every way. It was an arcade on a card table hooked up to a 13” TV in his house. Versailles had nothing on this. I bet that lame “palace” didn’t even have an arcade.

More context: When my family finally got Atari in 1980, all of the original titles were a miracle. Air Sea Battle! Circus! Combat! I was a kid who played Adventure and saw a goddamn WARRIOR where a lesser imagination saw a stupid block. Every single Activision title was a revelation of sound, graphics,, and gameplay. With rare exception — Space Invaders and Breakout were simple enough to work at home — there was an understood and expected difference between arcade games and home console games. None of us ever thought we’d get something like, to pick a random example, Donkey Kong.

That all changed for me and my friends when ColecoVision came out, and basically put real arcade games into your house. Almost overnight, Atari … kinda sucked. I held the line as long as I could. Atari still had Yar’s Revenge, Pitfall, and Kaboom. Combat with maximum walls, invisible tanks, and bouncing shots was still as much fun as it had ever been … but the knowledge that ColecoVision was out there doing what it was doing was always just sitting there in my peripheral vision. I hoped so hard that the 2600 Donkey Kong would be as good, but when I bought it at Kmart after an eternity of saving and extra chores, I excitedly settled into the couch to play it, and was greeted by a disappointment that can only be expressed in Tamarian: Ralphie, the message decoded.

Oh, I tried my best to pretend it wasn’t as terrible as it was. I tried to enjoy the … sounds? Or maybe … the … um. Oh there’s not even an animation when you clear the second level. Oh. There’s no third level. It’s just the first level again. And there’s no music. Oh. Um. Yeah. Shit.

Yeah. It sucked. Not quite Pac-Man levels of suck, but the distance between them was only measurable by a laser.

So I started saving for a ColecoVision of my own. It feels like it took about a year to even get close. My allowance was still two dollars a week, and even though I was doing commercials and TV movies then, my parents didn’t let me spend that money on toys. They were keeping it safe for me, they said (by spending it before I could, which they did not say). 

So by the time I could actually afford a ColecoVision, I had kind of grown out of wanting one. I was now 12, and I wanted OmniBot almost as much as  I desperately wanted one of these home computers I was starting to see on TV. (I did get OmniBot, which was fantastic, but this post isn’t about OmniBot; I’ll do that another time.)

The closest I ever came to having a ColecoVision console of my own – and it’s just fine by me, I prefer the memory to what I’m positive is a flimsy plastic reality – is one of those Flashback emulators from a few years ago. It looks like the console, with reproduced controllers and everything. It doesn’t have Turbo, but I think it has Congo Bongo, which I promise is what this post is really about.

I’ve had Congo Bongo on the mind lately, because one of my arcade machines includes it, and I have always skipped right over the same way I skip right past Donkey Kong 3. (Seriously, Donkey Kong 3. What the fuck are you even doing? How dare you call yourself a Donkey Kong game. Good DAY sir.)  But I have been playing Fallout 4, and there’s a song in it called Civilization – as catchy as it is problematic –  and when you hear “Bongo Bongo Bongo” as much as I have lately, it really makes you want to go to Krusty’s Clown College. 

So I relented about a month ago, if only to sate my curiosity and get the damn song out of my head, and I played Congo Bongo on purpose. The first game was surprisingly fun, way more fun than I remembered. But I just could not get past the third screen, no matter how many times I played it. I kept trying for a few days, 90 frustrating seconds at a time, before I went back to Dig Dug, where I am currently leveling up my game. But I kept going back, “just to try one more time, because I’m sure there’s something I’m missing” and goddammit I was going to solve this fucker and have fun playing it if it killed me. 

I am a mature adult. I mention this because you may currently be thinking otherwise.

Okay, now that all of that is settled, I am finally going to talk about Congo Bongo.

In Congo Bongo, the story begins with your Explorer guy sleeping in a tent.The game’s titular villain creeps in with a torch and sets Explorer guy’s foot on fire. Hilarity ensues, and the game is afoot. A-hot-foot, if you will. (Check out my white New Balance sneakers. I can wear them all day when I’m hard at work, and I feel like I’m hardly workin’!)

Your revenge saga begins at the bottom of an exotic jungle scene with waterfalls and bridges and monkeys. At the top of the screen is Congo Bongo, who hurls coconuts down at the player, in a manner that is suspiciously similar to throwing barrels that roll down girders. You aren’t fooling me, Congo Bongo! Explorer guy has to avoid them, and the monkeys, to climb all the way to the top of the screen. When you get there, Congo Bongo slinks away like the coward he is. Come on, you didn’t think you were going to win on the first screen, did you? What is this? Atari 2600?

The second screen offers a whiff of the Frogger that is to come. Explorer guy (whose name is Guy, which is pronounced Guy, but looks just like Guy in print and serves only to confuse the reader while I am mildly amused at leading you through that whole dumb thing) has to jump over snakes and avoid scorpions before he finally times a leap off a swimming hippo that once again lands him within striking distance of Congo Bongo, who once again slinks away like a little piss baby.

An animation moves us up to the next level. We see Chekov’s vulture for the first and last time. Don’t tease me with a vulture and not deliver, Congo Bongo. You’re on thin ice as it is, pal.

On this screen, Congo Bongo is letting these blue rhinos do all the work for him, and the only way to avoid them is to hide in holes, leap over them, and evade them when they charge.

I have no personal experience getting through this level, because I … just can’t. I haven’t been able to find the timing, or the pattern. I got really close, once; close enough that if I’d been a kid, my entire neighborhood would have heard for days about how the fucking game cheated. 

That’s a thing we all believed was possible, even those of us who had been to enough computer classes to know better. 

Like, you totally know what I’m talking about: that time you absolutely definitely jumped and the fucking game said you didn’t? Or the time you totally shot that ship? You know that time. It happened to all of us. It’s fucking bullshit, man.

The day I learned about collision detection and sprite animation, I did take a moment to send apologies to arcade cabinets all over the greater Los Angeles area that had, in retrospect, been subjected to some language and accusations they did not deserve. My bad.

This is where, if I were writing a typical review, I would say that it is trying to be too many games at once, and where Gorf successfully set a standard, Congo Bongo catapults you into the bottom of an inverted pyramid of an uncanny valley formed by Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Zaxxon. Ten year-old me didn’t know what “derivative” was, but this is Stranger Things Season Two levels of derivative.

That said, lots of people love it, so clearly there’s something there I just don’t get. I can clear the first two screens, but then I get stuck, and Congo Bongo never delivers any of the fun necessary to slog through the lever the way a game like Bubbles, or Mr. Do!, or Dig-Dug does.

But, hold on a second, Wil. You’re not writing a review. You’re telling a story about this game and what it means to you. Maybe you’re being too harsh. Maybe you’re not letting it be its own game. Maybe you need to choose to experience it differently.

Maybe… huh. Okay, maybe the way I should play it is on ColecoVision. That’s the way I see this game in my memories. So. Huh … well, the only way to find out is to pull the Flashback out of storage.

Approximately all of the spiders in the universe and a substantial donation to the swear jar later, I plugged the little white and yellow cables into their ports on my TV, and turned it on. The nostalgia of the welcome screen! There’s Venture! There’s Miner 2049er! There’s Zaxxon! And Jungle Hunt! Oh fuck the nostalgia is so hard I’m turning into the Riley Reid meme. There’s … something I’ve never heard of. But there’s Space Panic, and where is … where is … where …

Oh my god it isn’t included. Neither is Donkey Kong or Mr. Do! But … Alphabet Zoo … is? Look, I know it’s because of licensing, but …

Bumpus Hounds, the turkey devoured.

Okay, look. I can’t play it on that emulator, but I can easily find a way to load it up in an emulator online, and play it in my browser. I know how simple that would be. So why am I not doing that? How can I go all this way and not play the game?

Wrong question. The right question is why would I do that? The network executives are sending me clear notes about how this story needs to end, and it ends with me not playing the game, sending the console back to Lolth, and probably not going out of my way to play it ever again. It ends with me taking something unexpected away from the experience.

Okay, here are the Goldenrod revisions. I hope they get to the office early enough for run through today: 

As I carefully put the console back into the box, I noticed that if I moved a couple books, a space opens up under my TV that is the perfect size to hold not only the ColecoVision Flashback, but the Intellivision and Sega Flashbacks. I can move some RPG box sets, and fit in the Lego Atari 2600 on a different shelf next to them. I’ll have a little nostalgia nook for me to enjoy when I sit here and write about what old games mean to me. That’s not the destination I was going for, but it’s where the journey took me. And when I pay attention to the journey, I see that it’s the memories that matter, the fun I had revisiting them, the freedom I gave myself to write this in a style I never use without fear or judgement. All of this was fun. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point. It’s not about the high score. It’s about playing – or, in this case, not playing – the game.

A meaningful part of my personal journey to recover and heal from my childhood involves time spent with these old games and their associated memories. It is in these moments that I find metaphors and wisdom that inspire growth and lead to healing. When I play games in my arcade, the veil between myself today, and the little boy I was Before, is at its thinnest. I can almost see through it, I can almost put my arms around him and hold him until he feels safe. I can feel echoes of memories that live deep, deep, inside me, where they are protected from the people who would try to steal them from me, the way they stole so much else.

Ah, now I know how this ends. This ends with me returning to that journey, seeking the next place where that veil will be thin again.

I have a pocket full of quarters, and I’ve got next.