Yesterday, we published our interview with Bruce Lowry, the former vice president of sales at Nintendo of America from 1981 to 1986.
In the interview, Lowry shared his insights into what it was like launching the NES in North America, told us of his regret of leaving Nintendo to form Sega of America in '86, and also spoke about his return to Nintendo in 1988 to try and help the company get a foothold in Europe (where Sega was then outperforming Nintendo with the Sega Master System).
Needless to say, it was fascinating to hear Lowry's memories of such an influential and important time in video game history, but there was one part of the interview, in particular, that stood out to us as particularly interesting; that is, his thoughts on Donkey Kong Jr. Math — a game he told us Nintendo "couldn't give away".
Donkey Kong Jr. Math was among the first set of Nintendo games released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and was also featured as one of the games shown at the NES's unveiling at Summer CES 1985, according to the Computer Entertainer's July 1985 newsletter.
Based on the 1983 Famicom game, created by Nintendo R&D2, it saw players take control of Donkey Kong Jr., with the goal being to climb vines to grab numbers to solve math problems posed by Donkey Kong, and was intended to be the first of several edutainment titles from the company. However, when it was released, sales of the game were notably sluggish, undermining the company's plans.
According to the Computer Entertainer's newsletter, the game was discontinued in May 1988, alongside a bunch of other launch titles.
In our interview, Lowry recalled, "Our first year, the worst game we released was Donkey Kong Jr. Math; it was the worst game we ever sold. I think that was one game that slipped through. It was essentially Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong, but you had to swing across and get a number, bring it back, get another number, bring it back. We thought it'd be great for kids' education, but we couldn't give it away."
This isn't the first time someone at Nintendo has let on about the game being a bit of a sales disaster, with Nintendo's PR spokesperson, Tom Sarris, telling the LA Times, in a 1990 story entitled, "Nintendo: Kids Just Want to Have Fun," that Nintendo's lack of focus on edutainment software was "a matter of business; you market what the people want", while laying blame on the poor sales of Donkey Kong Jr. Math.
“It wasn’t a big hit," Sarries told the LA Times at the time. "There wasn’t much enthusiasm about it. Nintendo would have probably developed more software like that if that one had been received better.”
Since then, retrospective reviews of Donkey Jr. Math haven't exactly been glowing, with the editor of this site, Damien McFerran, giving the game a fairly harsh score of 1/10 on Nintendo Life back when it was reissued on the Nintendo Wii eShop in 2007, while Morgan Sleeper gave the 2014 Wii U reissue a 4/10.