Donkey Kong (electronic game)
Donkey Kong is a pioneering arcade video game released by Nintendo in 1981, which features a narrative-driven gameplay experience. Players assume the role of Jumpman, a carpenter tasked with rescuing his girlfriend, Pauline, from the clutches of a giant ape known as Donkey Kong. This game is significant for introducing the platform genre, where players navigate jumping and climbing challenges while avoiding obstacles. Donkey Kong's innovative structure and characters helped revive Nintendo's financial situation, leading to its immense success and the establishment of Mario, who would become a central figure in gaming history.
Initially, the game was a response to Nintendo's earlier failures in the U.S. market, where it replaced the unsold Radar Scope cabinets with Donkey Kong units. The game quickly garnered popularity, selling approximately 132,000 arcade cabinets and generating over $100 million in profit within a year. Following its success, Donkey Kong inspired sequels and led to a legal dispute with Universal Studios over copyright issues, which Nintendo ultimately won. Today, the game holds a place of honor in the World Video Game Hall of Fame, recognized for its lasting impact on the video game industry and the introduction of beloved characters.
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Donkey Kong (electronic game)
Donkey Kong is a groundbreaking video arcade game released in 1981 by the Nintendo Co., Ltd. of Japan. The game's premise featured a mustache-sporting carpenter who must jump over obstacles to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend from the clutches of a giant ape, the titular Donkey Kong. The game was innovative on several levels. It was the first video game to feature an element of narrative in its plot, and it introduced a new type of game play known as the platform genre. Highly successful upon its release, Donkey Kong is credited with reversing the sagging financial fortunes of Nintendo and helping propel it to become a primary force in the video game industry for decades to come. The game also launched the career of its creator, gaming legend Shigeru Miyamoto, and gave birth to Mario, one of the most iconic characters in video game history.
Background
Nintendo was launched in Kyoto, Japan, in 1889 as a company that made hand-painted playing cards known as hanafuda, or "flower cards." While Nintendo's business flourished into the mid-twentieth century, the card market began to falter by the 1960s, prompting the company to move its focus to games and toys. In the early 1970s, company officials started to notice the growing popularity of video games in the United States. Atari had released the first financially successful arcade game, Pong, in 1972, the same year Magnavox unveiled the first home video game console, the Odyssey. Nintendo acquired the Japanese distribution rights to the Odyssey and began to develop its own games for both the home and arcade markets.
By the late 1970s, Nintendo had produced its first home video consoles and several coin-operated arcade games. Nintendo titles such as Radar Scope and Sheriff were popular in Japan, but its business rivals Taito and Namco were making huge profits in the United States with games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. In an effort to enter the lucrative US market, Nintendo ordered three thousand Radar Scope arcade consoles and shipped them to the United States. The game was a commercial disaster, selling one thousand units and leaving Nintendo sitting on two thousand unsold consoles. The company had taken a large financial gamble to gain a foothold in the United States, and the failure of Radar Scope was potentially a crippling financial blow for its American operations.
Overview
In an effort to salvage some of their investment, Nintendo officials decided to replace the internal components of the unsold Radar Scope cabinets with a new game. With the company's best designers busy on other projects, Nintendo gave the job to Shigeru Miyamoto, a staff artist who had previously designed the artwork for Radar Scope and several other game cabinets. Miyamoto had never developed a game before, so the company paired him with Gunpei Yokoi, a seasoned game designer and long-time Nintendo employee. Miyamoto's task was to conceive of the game and design its elements while Yokoi would handle the technical aspects.
The company initially wanted a game based on the cartoon character Popeye, so Miyamoto began to think about a story involving Popeye; his girlfriend, Olive Oyl; and his archnemesis, Bluto. The idea had to be scrapped, however, when Nintendo could not secure the licensing rights to the characters. Miyamoto decided to keep the same general plot outline, but replace the characters with original creations. Instead of Popeye, he conceived of a middle-aged carpenter trying to rescue his girlfriend, who had been carried off by a giant ape. Miyamoto called his overalls-wearing protagonist Jumpman—a nod to the popular video game Pac-Man—and named his villain Donkey Kong, a name he believed conveyed the idea of a "stubborn ape."
Most video games of the early 1980s featured space battles, auto racing, or navigating mazes. Donkey Kong was unique for the era in that Miyamoto designed it to have distinctive characters and a story line similar to a comic strip. In the game, Donkey Kong falls in love with the beautiful heroine, Pauline, and takes her away to the top of a tall structure. Pauline's boyfriend, Jumpman, sets off to rescue her, climbing platforms of scaffolding and girders while jumping over barrels, fireballs, and other objects lobbed at him by the giant ape. When Jumpman reaches his goal at the top of the building, Donkey Kong escapes, carrying off Pauline to another more difficult level. Jumpman's running and jumping from scaffold to scaffold inspired a new type of video game—the platformer—a genre that would go on to become a staple in gaming.
Donkey Kong debuted in the summer of 1981 and went on to become a financial success in Japan and the United States. The two thousand revamped Radar Scope cabinets sold quickly, and Nintendo ordered thousands of additional units to be produced. Within a year of its release, Nintendo sold about sixty thousand Donkey Kong arcade games and made a profit of more than $100 million. The game's success gave Nintendo a needed financial boost and helped save the company's American operations. After its release, the game spawned a lawsuit from Universal Studios, which claimed the name Donkey Kong infringed upon its copyright of King Kong, the giant ape from the 1933 film and its 1976 remake. The judge sided with Nintendo in the lawsuit, ruling that the name Kong was in the public domain.
Overall, Donkey Kong sold about 132,000 game cabinets, and it was Nintendo's first big video game success. Two arcade sequels followed, but they did not match the success of the original. In 2017, the Donkey Kong arcade game was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. While the character of Donkey Kong eventually found his own success on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1994, the arcade game's biggest star turned out to be Jumpman. He was reimagined as a plumber and rechristened Mario because the staff at Nintendo's American offices thought he looked like their Italian landlord, whose named happened to be Mario. In 1985, Nintendo introduced Mario in North America in one of the first titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Bros. became one of the best-selling video games in history and led to several successful spinoffs and sequels. In addition to the Super Mario franchise, Miyamoto also created the popular Legend of Zelda series.
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