Donkey Kong

Overview

Donkey Kong was born from failure. Nintendo’s American division was stuck with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope cabinets. A young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with creating a game to repurpose them. What emerged defined platform gaming, launched the world’s most famous video game character, and established Nintendo as a creative powerhouse.

Fast facts

Developer: Nintendo R&D1.
Designer: Shigeru Miyamoto.
Release: July 1981 (arcade).
Characters: Jumpman (the plumber) rescues Pauline (the lady) from Donkey Kong (the ape).
Innovation: first game where jumping over obstacles was the core mechanic.
Legal drama: Universal sued Nintendo claiming King Kong copyright; Nintendo won, establishing their legal department’s reputation.

The birth of Mario

Jumpman needed a look that worked in low resolution:

Cap: hid hair (hard to animate)
Moustache: made the face readable
Overalls: showed arm movement clearly
Red and blue: contrasted against backgrounds

Later renamed Mario (after Nintendo of America’s landlord), the character became gaming’s most recognisable icon.

The levels

Four stages, each introducing new challenges:

Girders: climb ladders, jump barrels, reach the top.
Cement factory: conveyors and fireballs.
Elevators: moving platforms and springs.
Rivets: remove rivets to collapse Kong’s platform.

Each stage taught a lesson—timing, positioning, pattern recognition—then moved on before it could grow stale.

Home conversions

Donkey Kong appeared everywhere:

ColecoVision: bundled with the console; closest to arcade.
Atari 2600: limited but recognisable.
NES: missing the cement factory level (memory constraints), but definitive home version.
C64, Spectrum, Amstrad: various quality ports and clones.

The differences between versions became talking points—which platform got you closest to the arcade?

Design lessons

Miyamoto’s first game established principles he’d use throughout his career:

Visual storytelling: the intro “cut-scene” showed Kong kidnapping Pauline, no text needed.
Emergent gameplay: barrels roll unpredictably; players react rather than memorise.
Character through animation: Kong’s chest-beating taunt, Mario’s death animation—personality in pixels.
Escalating challenge: each level adds complexity without tutorials.

Legacy

Without Donkey Kong, there is no Mario. No Nintendo dominance. No modern platformer genre. The game that started as a warehouse-clearing desperation move became the foundation of video gaming’s most successful company.

The game that made Nintendo