Hoping that lightning would strike three times, Nintendo expanded their popular Donkey Kong franchise with a third game in the same vein, Donkey Kong 3. After the successes of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., the company rightly expected a trifecta of ape-themed video games to sweep all others before it. But as with many trilogies, the third installment proved to be the weak link.

Donkey Kong was the villain in DK 3 but Mario had gone on to his own franchise with the Mario Bros. games. Stanley the Bugman took Mario's place and had to chase Donkey Kong out of his greenhouse. Stanley had his work cut out for him because the ape took up residence on two vines inside the greenhouse and wouldn't budge. When Stanley came at him, Donkey would swat at nests of bees and other nasty bugs that would then divebomb Stanley. The Bugman was armed with a tube of bug spray and used it to defend five flower pots arrayed along the bottom of the screen from the marauding insects, while at the same time dodging coconuts thrown by DK. If the bugs carried off all five of the flowers, Stanley lost a life.

The player advanced to the next level by spraying Donkey Kong with the bug spray, forcing him high enough on the vine to activate a super bug sprayer that took care of the bugs. The second level look very much like the first, except it had stronger bugs. The third level is where things got trickier and Donkey Kong was defended by resilient worms who couldn't be killed by bug spray. Still, if you could get past the worms and force DK to climb high enough, the big ape would get tangled up in a hornets' nest and crash to the ground. The game then reset at Level 1.

Was it the absence of Mario or the lack of steel girders that prevented Donkey Kong 3 from joining its predecessors in the pantheon of video games? Players found little to interest them in the bugs vs. bugspray adventure and stayed away.