Handcrafted Donkey Kong Barrel Game Is Perfect For A Retro Happy Hour

I don’t know what it is about the ’80s retro video games, but people are still so inspired by them even today. Yesterday I wrote about a custom Miniature TRON Arcade Game that is an incredible little build created with very little RAM and memory. Today I’d like to share with you another ’80s video game inspired custom build. This one is a game called ‘Barrel of Kong,’ which is a barrel game built into a real barrel.

It was turned into a cocktail table for the inside of a bar, and it’s a beauty full of nostalgia. Donkey Kong is up there on the list of classic games from the ’80s, and it’s still popular today. According to Google, there are 1,220,000 searches for the words ‘Donkey Kong’ every month. If that’s not a testament to how much fun that game is, I don’t know what is.

Joel Griffin Dodd, who is the creator of this ‘Barrel of Kong’ barrel game took an ordinary barrel (see the pictures below) and turned it into a badass glass-topped table so he could enjoy a beer and game at the same time. If you click over to Arcade Controls, you can see all the details about the build itself. It cost him $415 in supplies, and he is willing to sell it for $1,500. That seems reasonable since it took him 20 hours to build it.

If you are interested in one of these barrel games, you could probably even make this yourself. Joel did an outstanding job though, and if I were to attempt this, something tells me it wouldn’t take me only 20 hours. What a perfect barrel game for happy hour. This is one of those things I wish I could try firsthand!