Nintendo had tried unsuccessfully
to expand into the North American market with their arcade games; never landing
what would be considered a surefire hit. Their third attempt, Radar Scope, had
exhibited a brief period of popularity in Japan and received a large order by
the newly-founded Nintendo of
America’s president, Minoru
Arakawa, to be placed into American arcades. Unfortunately for Arakawa, by
the time the machines were delivered the hype surrounding the game had died
down and American audiences found its sound effects annoying. The game was a
complete failure. Facing a financial disaster, Arakawa pleaded with his
father-in-law, Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi, to
give him a new game he could use in refurbished leftover Radar Scope cabinets.
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| Ad for the Radar Scope tabletop machine. |
Yamauchi had asked all of his employees to come up with a new game that
could be made with Radar Scope’s
hardware, and ultimately selected the idea proposed by designer Shigeru Miyamoto that
made use of Nintendo’s current access to the Popeye comic strip license. Unfortunately, Nintendo soon lost that
license, leaving Miyamoto without a cast for his game. It was decided to
continue on by creating original characters that fulfilled the same roles as
the Popeye ones would have. He eventually devised a love triangle
between a carpenter, a girl and an ape, mimicking the love triangle in Popeye between the titular character,
his gal Olive Oyl and the
burly bully Bluto. The fact
they were all-new characters meant that they could be marketed and reused later
on (and boy were they ever). King Kong and Beauty and the Beast also
served as influences for the basic storyline. The ape was named Donkey Kong
(based on American slang for “stubborn” or “dopey” and Japanese slang for
“gorilla”), the hero was Jumpman (after his ability to jump over obstacles and
for its similarity to popular brands like Walkman and Pac-Man), and the damsel in distress
simply called Lady. Jumpman’s red overalls and blue shirt, hat and mustache
came about due to graphical limitations; allowing his clothing to contrast
against each other and the background and prevent them from needing to animate
a mouth, hair and eyebrows. His big nose was meant to emphasize that he was
human in comparison to his foe. The game was developed under the supervision of
head engineer Gunpei Yokoi.
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| Mario closes in on rescuing Pauline from Donkey Kong...or so he thinks. |
Speaking of the storyline, the game became one of the first to feature
one that played out visually on screen; both in gameplay and through the use of
cutscenes (the second to do so after Pac-Man).
Donkey Kong kidnapped Jumpman’s girlfriend and took her to a construction site
to fend off the hero, stomping to cause the girders to go on a slant and
breaking some of the shortcut ladders. One of the earliest examples of the
platforming genre, Jumpman would have to traverse several levels while jumping
over barrels thrown by Kong, two
types of sentient fireballs,
cement tubs on conveyor
belts, and jacks leaping from
higher levels, or smashing them with a hammer power-up in order to reach
the top. Once the player reached Kong, Kong would snatch Lady away and climb
further up the site. The game became the first with multiple levels, with four
unique ones designed in total and each representing 25 meters of the
construction site. The game had no true ending as after completing the 4th
original level, the levels would reset at a greater difficulty. The game either
ended when the player stopped putting in more quarters after dying, or encountering
a programming glitch on level 22 that caused Jumpman to die after a few
seconds. Miryamoto named the game after who he felt was the strongest
character, and it officially became Donkey
Kong.
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| Original Japanese Donkey Kong cabinet art. |
Believing in the game, Yamauchi told Arakawa to secure the trademark and
the game was sent to Nintendo of America for testing. Despite some reservations
over the game’s differences from the popular genres at the time and the strange
name, the American staff began translating the storyline into cabinet art done
by Zavier Leslie Cabarga. They changed
Jumpman’s name to “Mario” after Mario Segale, the generously
lenient landlord of Nintendo of America’s original office space, and Lady
became “Pauline” after Polly James, wife of Nintendo’s Redmond, Washington warehouse manager Don James.
Distributors Ron
Judy and Al Stone tested the game out in two bars in Seattle, and the bars ended up ordering
more units after they became a hit. A skeleton crew proceeded to convert 2,000
more Radar Scope machines into Donkey Kong and the game made its official
debut on July 9, 1981.
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| Coleco's mini-arcade version of Donkey Kong. |
Donkey Kong became extremely
popular in North America, with Nintendo selling through the initial 2,000 units
with more orders in the pipeline. Orders increased to 4,000 machines per month
until Nintendo had sold over 60,000 machines by June of 1982. The game was also
doing well in Japan, and would become one of the top-grossing arcade games of
all time. Coleco won the rights to
produce the game for home consoles, as well as make a tabletop version. Within
the first year of the game’s release, clones began to emerge; including Tiger Electronics’
licensed King Kong game which copied Nintendo’s gameplay while using Universal City Studios’ name. When
Universal attempted to sue Nintendo for copyright infringement, Nintendo won
the case and the profits from Tiger’s game, and revealed itself able to stand
up to other industry giants.
Donkey Kong’s popularity held
strong through 1983, with some speculating that the home console versions
contributed to its extended popularity. The game also became the subject of a merchandising frenzy,
yielding board games, figurines, candy, cereal, clothing, stickers and more. It
also spawned two arcade sequels: Donkey Kong Jr. in
1982, in which Kong’s son had to
rescue his father from Mario (the only time he was portrayed as a villain in
gaming history), and Donkey Kong 3 in 1983, which had new
hero Stanley try to remove Kong from his greenhouse as he caused bugs to attack
Stanley’s flowers. Five Donkey
Kong games were released for the
LCD-screened Game
& Watch handheld games series. Along with adapting the arcade games
(with Jr. split between Donkey Kong
Jr. and Donkey
Kong II), it also featured the original entries Donkey Kong Circus,
a reskin of a Mickey
Mouse game that had Donkey Kong balancing on a barrel while catching pineapples,
and Donkey Kong Hockey,
where Donkey Kong played against Mario in hockey either against the computer or
a second player.
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| 1983 CBS ad. |
CBS was looking to get in on the video
game craze and to combat ABC’s Pac-Man produced by Hanna-Barbera.
Figuring to hedge their bets, they licensed several gaming properties and
commissioned former Hanna-Barbera
employees Joe Ruby and Ken Spears to
handle it through their company Ruby-Spears Productions. The
resulting series was Saturday Supercade. Making up the Supercade every week were segments based
on Frogger, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., while Q*bert and Pitfall!
rotated weekly.
 |
| The animated Donkey Kong. |
Donkey Kong saw the giant ape
(Soupy Sales, who received top-billing of the Supercade) as a circus performer who finally escaped his captivity
and went on the run. Charged with bringing him back was Mario (Peter Cullen)
and Kong’s trainer, Pauline (Judy Strangis), who was changed from Mario’s
girlfriend to his niece. Ken
Boyer and Patrick A. Ventura
created the character models that adapted the American cabinet artwork into
easily animated television stars.
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| Mario and Pauline on the endless quest. |
Kong was portrayed as both being intelligent enough to avoid Mario’s
traps, causing them to backfire on him constantly, but yet also dumb enough to display
limited speech (typically his name) and constantly fall into the schemes of
criminals who wanted to use him. Often, Mario and Pauline would find themselves
having to simultaneously rescue Kong and thwart the criminals while preventing
the big ape from escaping their grasp. Likewise, despite their always trying to
capture him, Kong never hesitated to stop and rescue the pair from any danger
they end up in. In keeping with the game, Pauline would be most often the one
in need of saving (although Mario got the occasional rescue as well). In the
second season, Stanley made an appearance in the episode “Greenhouse Gorilla.”
 |
| Stanley the exterminator with Pauline. |
Saturday Supercade debuted on
CBS on September 17, 1983. Donkey Kong ran
as a feature during both seasons; however, the second season only featured 6
new episodes intermixed with reruns from the previous. The first season’s
introduction featured a visual telling of the backstory; from Kong’s escape to
his constant eluding of Mario and Pauline in various places and situations. The
second season was more generic and featured clips from that season’s episodes. Donkey
Kong was written by Duane Poole, Tom Swale, Gary Greenfield,
Michael Maurer,
Mark Jones,
Richard Merwin, Cliff Ruby, Elana Lesser, Gordon Kent, Jack Enyart, Michael Ray Brown, Matt Uitz, Janis Diamond and Sheryl Scarborough. The theme music
was composed by Shuki Levy and Haim Saban.
 |
| Nintendo's warranty logo featuring Mario. |
Probably the game franchise’s lasting contribution was giving the world
Mario. After his appearance in Jr., Mario
was changed to a plumber, given a brother named Luigi, and spun off into his own
video game series starting with 1983’s Mario Bros. created
by Miyamoto and Yokoi. Mario’s popularity would lead to him becoming Nintendo’s
mascot, appearing on various merchandise and in games outside of his own
series. Donkey Kong, however, was
relegated to continued ports of the original onto new home systems as they came
out, with one more game, Donkey Kong Circus, made for the Game & Watch Panorama series in 1984.
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| Super Game Boy title screen for Donkey Kong '94. |
A decade later, a new Donkey Kong (also
known as Donkey Kong ’94) was
released for Game Boy.
It started off like the original arcade featuring the same four levels, but
then continued on into additional levels that combined elements of Jr. and Super Mario Bros. 2. That
was also the year that Kong received a revival in the form of the Donkey Kong Country franchise,
later adapted into its own animated
series. The original Donkey Kong made a return to games beginning in 2004
with the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series and has an appearance in the
2015 movie Pixels as a form alien invaders took on to attack the Earth.
Originally posted in 2015. Updated in 2022.
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