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Donkey Kong is one of the first examples of the popular platform game genre, and its just as playable now as it was when it first appeared in the arcades back in 1981. It is also a bit of a landmark in videogame history because it was also the first of many adventures for Nintendo mascot Mario, although in typical Japanese style he was originally called Jumpman! His name may have been different, but the player character certainly looked like Mario, and given that Donkey Kong was created by Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, its pretty safe to say that it was Mario to all intents and purposes.
The aim of the game is to rescue damsel in distress Pauline (nope, it wasn’t Princess Peach, Mario had yet to become an inhabitant of the Mushroom Kingdom at this point) who had been kidnapped by Donkey Kong, a giant ape in the style of King Kong. Donkey Kong got his name thanks to a Japanese to English dictionary. A word meaning stubborn was required, and donkey was the suggestion, presumably in relation to the phrase “stubborn as a mule”. Mario’s, sorry, Jumpman’s task was to try and rescue Pauline by getting from the bottom of the screen to the top, running along girders, jumping and climbing ladders.
The game was split into four distinct levels, the first of which involved running up a set of girders joined by ladders. To try and stop you Donkey Kong was hurling barrels down the screen, which could either be jumped over or smashed with a hammer. The problem with the hammer was you couldn’t climb ladders whilst holding it, so I always used to ignore it. Reaching the top before the timer ran out completed the level, but Kong would grab Pauline and head up higher.
Personally I didn’t have nor even knew anyone who owned an Amstrad CPC home computer, but they were very popular and were one of the “main three” home computers of the mid 1980’s along with the 
There can’t be many people who haven’t played or at least heard of Tetris. The game is such a simple idea that anybody can play it, even if they might not be very good at it.
If you went to school during the 1980’s the chances are your school computers would have been the big beige slab that was the BBC Micro. This home computer was incredibly popular with schools due to it’s incredibly sturdy construction, and the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation put their name to it which led to it being adopted as the default computer on any BBC produced show about computers. This then meant that all the posh kids at school got a BBC Micro instead of a 
The Commodore Vic-20 was the precursor to the massively popular 
Every man and his dog must have played Pacman at some point in their life, and if not, then they surely must know who Pacman is. I consider him to be the first real videogame “celebrity”, if I can call a collection of yellow pixels a celebrity. His arcade game debut was in 1980 in the classic game created by Japanese company Namco, and since then he has been the star of countless other games and even a cartoon series.
The games may look laughable by todays standards, but when the Atari 2600 launched in 1977 it was state of the art. Before then, games consoles had often been monochrome with a limited number of games, normally all of which were just slight variations on Pong. The Atari 2600 blew those machines out of the water with its colour graphics and, most importantly, wide range of varied games. It also reinvented the method of control by coming with a 8 directional, single buttoned joystick. Prior to this most machines used a twisty dial thing to control the game, which is why Pong was so prevalent - it was about the only game you could do on such a system.
As already mentioned in an earlier post on this site, the late 1980’s home computer war was thought between the