Clones
Other companies bypassed Nintendo completely. In 1981, O.R. Rissman, president of Tiger Electronics, obtained a license to use the name King Kong from Universal City Studios. Under this title, Tiger created a handheld game with a scenario and gameplay based directly on Nintendo's creation. Crazy Kong is another example, a clone manufactured by Falcon and licensed for some non-American markets. Nevertheless, Crazy Kong machines found their way into some American arcades during the early 1980s, often installed in cabinets marked as Congorilla. Nintendo was quick to take legal action against those distributing the game in the US. Bootleg copies of Donkey Kong also appeared in both North America and France under the Crazy Kong, Konkey Kong or Donkey King names. In 1983, Sega created a Donkey Kong clone called Congo Bongo. Despite being in isometric perspective, the gameplay is very similar.
As with other popular arcade games at the time, there were also unofficial clones for home systems. Clones on the TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) include Donkey King and Monkey Kong. A Color Computer 3 version was created in a 2007 event by programmer John Kowalski, who translated the original Z80 code to the CoCo's 6809 code. This resulted in the actual Donkey Kong game running on a 512K Color Computer 3. Other clones include Cannonball Blitz by Olaf Lubeck and Killer Gorilla (Micro Power), one of the best selling games on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron.
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