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Back in the '80s and the '90s, Nintendo worked with third-party developer Hudson Soft to bring many of its NES and arcade titles to Japanese personal computers. Most of these ROMS have made their way to the West over the years, but one has remained locked away. That game is Donkey Kong 3: The Great Counterattack and it's now available for anyone to play.

Donkey Kong 3: Daigyakushuu was originally released in 1984, but wasn't until an intrepid group of gamers recently pooled their money and bought a rare copy from a Yahoo Auction for $415 that the retro dream became a reality. Bound to a magnetic disk, this Sharp X1 version was carefully extracted and the result is an incarnation of the game with some rather strange changes to the original Donkey Kong 3.

The original version of DK3 saw hero Stanley climbing tiers in a series of greenhouses while DK leered from above on some vines. In the Japanese PC version, the giant ape floats down with some balloons while Stanley toddles about on a single platform. Not as exciting as the original, but a piece of Nintendo history nonetheless. You can download a copy here.

Let us know what you make of this curio finally surfacing in the West. You can check out a full playthrough of it above.

[source kotaku.com]