It’s pretty bad when a game is a blatant ripoff of a game. It’s another when you make a ripoff of a ripoff. Way back in 1982 a company in the U.K. called C-Tech made a game “heavily inspired” by the game Crazy Kong, which in itself was a ripoff of Nintendo’s wildly popular arcade hit Donkey Kong. Krazy Kong was released on both the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum.
C-Tech wanted to make sure they could get their game out on the computer systems before any official release of Donkey Kong. So much so they contacted several news outlets to promote the game. The ads would promise a “Hi-Res Gorilla” and “a running and jumping man” for the low price of £5.00. With those kind of promises and a budget friendly price, many ZX owners purchased the game only to be met with a very negative response.
People today make complains about all the things they were promised when No Man’s Sky was released, but Krazy Kong might have been even more of a let down. Not only was Krazy Kong full of bugs, it didn’t even feature a running and jumping man at all. This is what the final version of the game looked like…
Yeah, you see that A? That was suppose to be the copy of Mario. That was what the actual 16K version of the game looked like. You see the 16K version was actually at the very end of the cassette tape, the other parts of the tape was the 48K version. This was more than likely done to avoid fraudulent advertising laws. One of the biggest magazines who helped promote the game, Computer & Video Games, even reached out to C-Tech to explain the situation only to receive a ridiculous answer. The C-Tech rep said “It’s our very best seller. I think it’s a case of ‘you can’t always please all the people all the time’.” Up to this point CVG had already received lots of complaints from their readers about the game, which is what ultimately led to them trying out the game and asking for C-Tech to comment. C-Tech even went as far as to promise to never advertise with CVG again if they posted any of the letters of complaint.
Of course the company never advertised with CVG after the incident now known as Kong Gate and filed for bankruptcy in 1983. Hence why the game and the company belong here in the Gaming Graveyard.
