Shigeru Miyamoto is ‘very happy’ with LEGO’s Donkey Kong set – but Nintendo had one request

The designer behind 72051 Donkey Kong Arcade says the game’s creator was ‘very happy’ with the finished product – but Nintendo did have one request.

Speaking to The Verge, designer Carl Merriam – who’s worked on sets including 71411 The Mighty Bowser, 21309 NASA Apollo Saturn V and 10497 Galaxy Explorer – revealed that while he hasn’t personally met Mario and Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto, he ‘did hear that he is very happy with the execution of this set’.

72051 Donkey Kong Arcade recreates the original arcade cabinet from 1981, albeit with the mass-produced blue shell rather than the rare red housing of the initial run. And it manages to pack in enough functionality to make it worth tinkering with at home: Jumpman (who you may know as Mario) can move left and right and leap over barrels that roll down the pink scaffolding, but he stops short at climbing to other levels.

Tempering the velocity of those barrels as they roll down the screen without grinding them to a halt altogether proved to be the set’s great sticking point for Carl. “I rolled thousands of barrels down those tracks to figure it out,” he said. “Those barrels drove me bananas!

“The second biggest hurdle was finding a way to get the barrel from the bottom to the top again. We built all kinds of stuff; things to shoot one barrel from the bottom to the top, worm gears, force multiplication levers, and more. But it turned out the right answer was simply a lot more barrels.”

The chute up the side of the arcade cabinet can hold 14 individual barrels, and every time one reaches the bottom (and the barrel lever is activated) it pushes the next one up the stack and out the top. According to Carl – who calls this an ‘infinite barrel loop’ – the system has room for 20 barrels total, so you can have six rolling down the scaffolding at once.

Nintendo’s only request had nothing to do with the functionality, though – that was entirely Carl’s department. Instead, the famously protective company had one note related to the barrels themselves.

“One small request was to make the poison barrels heavier than the regular ones, so we added minifigure heads inside them,” Carl added. Poison barrels were no faster than regular barrels in the original arcade game, so it doesn't seem to have much to do with classic Donkey Kong lore, but who knows? Maybe Miyamoto wishes he'd differentiated them back in the day.

You’ll be able to try out the mechanism for yourself from August 1, when 72051 Donkey Kong Arcade arrives in stores for £149.99 / $199.99 / €169.99. It’s available to pre-order now. Look out for our review very soon.

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