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Donkey Kong was first ported to the Famicom (NES) in 1983, at the console's launch in Japan.

In 1986, the Arcade Classics Series, a set of arcade games ported to the NES, was released in the United States, with Donkey Kong being included.

In 1988, Donkey Kong Classics was released for the NES. It consisted of a compilation of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.

Are all three of these Donkey Kong releases identical? Or are there any differences between them?

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According to Strategy Wiki:

Developed by Nintendo for the Famicom in 1983 and published for the NES in 1986. It was also made available for the Famicom Disk System as one of the first games purchasable through the Disk Writer system, where players could pay to write games to blank disks. In North America, Donkey Kong was later released on a compilation cart with Donkey Kong Jr., titled Donkey Kong Classics.
None of these original versions contain the Conveyor Belt Stage.

So they look the same game, as it's written.

The only known difference is between the arcade version and NES version, according to Gamespot:

The Famicom (Japan's NES) version of Donkey Kong was actually not a bad game, all things considered. Only one level was missing (in arcades, the third level), but almost everything else was present.
The music was an exact copy of the music from the arcade game. Somewhat strange though were the bizarre sounds Mario made when walking around the levels.

and to Videogameden:

This port of Donkey Kong has a few differences with the original arcade game. First of all, the short introduction sequence was completely removed - in the original game, Donkey Kong climbs the construction site with Pauline under his arm and heavily stromps his feet as he reaches the top, causing the metallic girders to collapse and form the first screen. The 25-meter scale displayed between screens was also omitted - in the arcade game, each screen represents 25m of the construction site, from 25m to 100m.

EDIT:

No, apparently the Japanese Famicom version (ファミコン ドンキーコング) seems to have an English localization:

enter image description here

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  • Thank you! Do you know if the version released in 1983 was written in Japanese? Or any other kind of localization difference?
    – AAM111
    Apr 17 at 16:12
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    @AAM111 I made an edit
    – pinckerman
    Apr 17 at 17:20
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    the Japanese Famicom version (ファミコン ドンキーコング) seems to have an English localization Part of that is true. Truth is that there is no Japanese language version. Even the famous Super Mario Brothers doesn't have Japanese language due to NES' capacity issue. This kind of thing tend to happen in NES era: Even if the game has a Japanese language version, some of the fonts are shared with some other characters (for example, hiragana り is so similar to katakana version of it: リ, and some game even shared it with: ソ. So they used same font to save up some spaces, even though it's only just 2 bytes).
    – Skye-AT
    Apr 18 at 0:16
  • @Skye-AT this is really interesting! Can you write an answer with this information, and maybe a source for further reading?
    – AAM111
    Apr 18 at 2:02
  • @AAM111 If this question were about NES era's Japanese ROM yes I would, but I know almost nothing about donkey kong, so... I have some source for sure, but it's only in Japanese language, so it might be a bit hard to read (assuming you're English language user).
    – Skye-AT
    Apr 18 at 2:30

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