Donkey Kong Classics (1988) bundles two pieces of living history on one cartridge: the original Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.

The first is the 1981 arcade game that introduced the world to a carpenter named Jumpman, soon renamed Mario, climbing girders to rescue a captive while a big ape hurls barrels. It matters for reasons beyond nostalgia. Shigeru Miyamoto was a young artist at Nintendo with no track record when he was handed the job of salvaging a failed Radar Scope cabinet run, and Donkey Kong is what he made: the first arcade game built around a jump, and one of the first with a story told in cutscenes between stages. It also produced a lawsuit from Universal over the name King Kong, which Nintendo won, and that win is a large part of why the company had the confidence and the legal department it did for the next decade.

Donkey Kong Jr. flips the script. You play DK's son trying to rescue his dad from Mario, who is briefly the villain, standing at the top of the screen releasing snapjaws down the vines. Climbing is the whole verb here rather than jumping, and gripping two vines at once to climb faster is the skill the game is built on.

Worth noting what the bundle fixes. Both games had been sold separately on the NES years earlier with stages missing, because the early cartridges were tiny. Classics restores the full arcade layouts, which makes this the version to own.

Together they're the foundation the entire Nintendo empire was built on. Having the arcade origins on a home cartridge felt like owning a piece of the museum. It still does.