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Lego’s Donkey Kong arcade machine is packed with barrels
Lego’s Donkey Kong arcade cabinet includes working movement, jumping, and an infinite barrel loop, launching August 1 for £149.99 or €169.99.
Image: The Verge
Carl Merriam, the designer behind the Lego Nintendo Game Boy, Piranha Plant, and other nostalgia-focused sets, has helped build a new Donkey Kong arcade machine. The set reportedly won the approval of Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Donkey Kong and Mario, although Merriam has not met him personally.
The cabinet does not recreate Donkey Kong perfectly: Jumpman—the character later renamed Mario—cannot climb to the top under his own power. But, like Lego’s $230 pinball machine, it includes a basic, fully functional game. A working joystick moves Mario left and right, while a button makes him jump. Pulling a lever releases a seemingly endless stream of barrels.
Those barrels are the same pieces Lego introduced in 1989 for its first pirate sets. Merriam says they are his favorite detail—and that making them roll slowly without stopping was the set’s biggest challenge.
“I rolled thousands of barrels down those tracks to figure it out.”
How the barrel mechanism works
The barrel system is essentially a pump. It uses a stack of 14 barrels running up the side of the model. Each pull of the lever adds one barrel to the bottom of the stack and releases one from the top. The mechanism can hold 20 barrels, allowing six to roll down the course at once.
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The barrels travel to the bottom, where a hopper collects them and feeds them back into the pump. That creates an “infinite barrel loop,” as Merriam puts it.
Getting the barrels to move at the right speed required tracks made from steps, Lego studs, slopes, bows, and Lego Technic beams, which are slightly thinner than standard Lego bricks. Merriam said the team also tried systems including launchers, worm gears, and force-multiplication levers to return barrels from the bottom to the top. The solution was simply to use more barrels.
Nintendo also requested that the poison barrels be heavier than the regular ones. Lego achieved that by placing Minifigure heads inside them.
The new Jumpman element is detachable, so players can manually reunite him with Pauline. The joystick moves him using a long rear lever connected to a “dingler.” The jump button works like a piano key: pressing it pushes a rod upward via a seesaw lever, while releasing it lets gravity return Jumpman to the bottom.
The Lego Donkey Kong arcade cabinet will be released on August 1 for £149.99 or €169.99. US and Canadian pricing was not available when the article was written.
Culture Editor
Maya explores gaming, streaming, and the internet as a place where people actually live. From deep-dives into creator economies to the anthropology of digital communities, she tracks platform drama and cultural shifts so you don't have to. She believes the best tech stories are fundamentally about human behavior.
via The Verge
