is a 1981 platform game developed and published by Nintendo for arcades. As Mario (occasionally referred to as "Jumpman" at the time), the player runs and jumps on platforms and climbs ladders to ascend a construction site in New York City and rescue Pauline (occasionally referred to as "The Lady" at the time) from the giant gorilla Donkey Kong. It is the first game in the Donkey Kong series and Mario's first appearance in a video game.
Donkey Kong was created to salvage unsold arcade cabinets following the failure of Nintendo's Radar Scope (1980), and was designed for Nintendo of America's audience. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president at the time, assigned the project to first-time video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Drawing inspiration from "Beauty and the Beast" and American media such as Popeye and King Kong, Miyamoto developed the characters and scenario and designed the game alongside chief engineer Gunpei Yokoi. Donkey Kong was the most complex arcade game released at that point, using graphics for characterization, including cutscenes to illustrate a plot, and integrating multiple unique stages into the gameplay. The game pioneered the platform genre before the term existed, is the first to feature jumping, and is one of the first video games with a damsel in distress narrative, after Sheriff. It had a limited release in Japan on July 9, 1981, before receiving a wide release in the region some weeks later.
Although Nintendo of America's staff was initially apprehensive, Donkey Kong was a critical and commercial success, becoming the highest-grossing game of 1981 in Japan and the highest-grossing game of 1982 in the United States. It was ported to the Game & Watch, selling eight million units, while Nintendo licensed the game to Coleco, a developer of arcade conversions for home consoles, selling six million cartridges. It was later ported to the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which was designed to replicate the arcade unit's technological capabilities; both the game and NES were integral in introducing Japanese video games to Western audiences. Donkey Kong<nowiki/>'s various ports sold more than 15 million units worldwide. Other companies cloned the game and avoided royalties altogether. Universal City Studios unsuccessfully sued Nintendo, alleging that Donkey Kong violated its trademark of the King Kong franchise.
Donkey Kong is regarded as one of the most important games of the golden age of arcade video games and one of the greatest video games of all time. Its success positioned Nintendo for market dominance during the 1980s and 1990s. The game debuted Mario, who became Nintendo's mascot and one of the world's most recognizable characters. It was mass-marketed through a wide range of products, including breakfast cereal, toys, and television cartoons. The game has been frequently referenced in popular culture and subsequent video games, and maintains an active high score competition.
Gameplay
thumb|left|The first stage, with [[Mario holding a hammer power-up which he uses to smash barrels]]
Following 1980's Space Panic, Donkey Kong is one of the earliest examples of the platform game genre, even prior to the term being coined; the U.S. gaming press used "climbing game" for games with platforms and ladders. As the first platformer game to feature jumping, Donkey Kong requires the player to jump between gaps and over obstacles or approaching enemies whilst Donkey Kong throws barrels at the player, setting the template for the future of the genre. With four unique stages, Donkey Kong was the most complex arcade game of the time, and one of the first arcade games with multiple stages, following games such as 1980's Phoenix and 1981's Gorf and Scramble. the eponymous Donkey Kong character is the de facto villain. The hero is a carpenter originally unnamed in the Japanese arcade release, later called Jumpman, then Mario. Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario's girlfriend, originally known as Lady and later renamed Pauline. The player takes the role of Mario to rescue her. This is the first occurrence of the damsel in distress scenario used in countless video games released after. The game opens with the gorilla climbing a pair of ladders to the top of a construction site, accompanied by a variation on the musical theme from Dragnet. He drops Pauline and stomps his feet, warping the steel beams. He moves to his final perch and sneers. A melody plays, and the level starts. This sequence sets the scene and adds background to the gameplay—a first for video games. At the end of the stage, a heart appears between Mario and Pauline, but Donkey Kong grabs her and climbs higher, causing the heart to break. The narrative concludes when Mario reaches the end of the rivet stage, when he and Pauline are reunited.
The conception of Donkey Kong can be traced back to early 1980, when Miyamoto made three A4-size sheets briefly explaining the game's content and characters, about five game screen sketches, and a one-sheet diagram of the final animation. Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for most of the development, heavily involved in the game's creation and concept, and to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo". Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards. This later led to mutual lawsuits in 1983, as Ikegami asserted ownership over Donkey Kong which Nintendo denied as Ikegami was a subcontractor who had already been paid. Game Machine called it "simply a nuisance tactic" on the part of Ikegami. Production on Donkey Kong began in January 1981 and lasted between 4–5 months, as Miyamoto was focused on developing it for a global market rather than just for Japan. The four screens were also supposed to make up a single long stage, but this idea was scrapped due to the inability to implement vertical scrolling. By late March 1981, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the Popeye comic strip, Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter with a large hammer, and a girlfriend, mirroring the original rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl.
Miyamoto had high hopes for his new project. He was not a programmer, so he consulted technicians for feasibility. He wanted to make the characters different sizes, and have different movements and reactions. Yokoi thought Miyamoto's original design was too complex,
The circuit board of Radar Scope was restructured for Donkey Kong. The Radar Scope hardware, originally inspired by the Namco Galaxian hardware, was designed for a large number of enemies moving around at high speeds, which Donkey Kong does not require, so the development team removed unnecessary functions and reduced the scale of the circuit board. The gameplay and graphics were reworked for updated ROM chips; the existing CPU, sound hardware, and monitor were left intact. The character set, scoreboard, upper HUD display, and font are almost identical to Radar Scope, with palette differences. The Donkey Kong hardware has the memory capacity for displaying 128 foreground sprites at 16x16 pixels each and 256 background tiles at 8x8 pixels each. Mario and all moving objects use single sprites, the taller Pauline uses two sprites, and the larger Donkey Kong uses six sprites.
Hiroshi Yamauchi thought the game was going to sell well and phoned to inform Arakawa. Nintendo of America's distributors, Ron Judy and Al Stone, brought Arakawa to the lawyer Howard Lincoln to secure a trademark. Donkey Kong was ready for release.]]
Coleco
Makers of video game consoles were interested. Taito offered a considerable fee for all rights to Donkey Kong, but Nintendo declined after three days of internal discussion.
Coleco offered Atari 2600 and Intellivision versions as well. Coleco's Atari 2600 port was programmed by Garry Kitchen. Coleco also bundled a copy of Donkey Kong with its Atari VCS clone, the Coleco Gemini, in 1983.
Atari
Atari, Inc. obtained the license for home computer versions of Donkey Kong and released it for the Atari 8-bit computers. When Coleco unveiled the Adam Computer, running a port of Donkey Kong at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Illinois, Atari protested that it was in violation of the licensing agreement. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi demanded that Coleco president Arnold Greenberg withdraw his Adam port. Greenberg complied, and the port was not published. Programmer Landon Dyer's initials appear if the player dies under certain conditions and returns to the title screen. This remained undiscovered for 26 years until Dyer revealed it on his blog, stating that "there's an Easter egg, but it's totally not worth it, and I don't remember how to bring it up anyway". The steps required to trigger it were later discovered by Don Hodges, who used an emulator and a debugger to trace through the game's code.
Famicom/NES
The game was ported by Nintendo Research & Development 2 to Nintendo's Family Computer (Famicom) console and released in Japan on July 15, 1983, as one of the system's three launch games. Masayuki Uemura, the Famicom's lead architect, designed the console specifically to faithfully recreate Donkey Kong. After the console was released in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985, Donkey Kong became one of the first titles in the console's Arcade Classics Series, released in June 1986 in North America and on October 15 in Europe. <br /> 4.5/5 (ColecoVision)
| CVG = Positive (Arcade) <br /> 32% (VCS) <br /> Classic (computers)
| rev2 = Electronic Fun with Computers & Games
| rev2Score = A (ColecoVision)
| rev3 = Electronic Games
| rev3Score = 9/10 (ColecoVision)
| rev4 = Joystik
| rev4Score = 5/5 (ColecoVision) <br /> 1/5 () <br /> 1/5 (Intellivision)
| rev5 = Video Games Player
| rev5Score = A (ColecoVision)
Upon release in arcades, Computer and Video Games compared it favorably with King Kong and predicted that it would likely become a success. In his 1982 book Video Invaders, Steve Bloom described Donkey Kong as "another bizarre cartoon game, courtesy of Japan" In January 1983, the 1982 Arcade Awards gave it the award for the best single-player video game and the Certificate of Merit as runner-up for Coin-Op Game of the Year.
In September 1982, Arcade Express reviewed the ColecoVision port and scored it 9 out of 10. Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games in 1983 stated that "Coleco did a fabulous job" with Donkey Kong, the best of the console's first five games and "the most faithful adaptation of the original video game I have seen". The magazine's Danny Goodman stated that of Coleco's three console versions, the one for the ColecoVision was the best, followed by Atari and Intellivision. Computer and Video Games reviewed the ColecoVision port in its September 1984 issue and scored it 4 out of 4 in all four categories of Action, Graphics, Addiction and Theme. Ed Driscoll reviewed the Atari VCS version of Donkey Kong in The Space Gamer No. 59. Edwards commented that the game is near perfect and that anyone can be caught in Donkey Kong "fever". Arakawa used Nintendo's profits to buy of land in Redmond in July 1982. ().
In Japan, the annual Game Machine charts listed Donkey Kong as the highest-grossing arcade game of 1981, then the sixth highest-grossing arcade game of 1982. Game Machine later listed the game as the 20th most successful table arcade cabinet of September 1983. In the United States, Donkey Kong topped the Play Meter arcade charts in October 1981, setting a weekly earnings record, and it was later listed by RePlay as the highest-grossing arcade game of 1982. It was also among the thirteen highest-grossing arcade games of 1983 in the United States. According to Electronic Games in June 1983, the home versions contributed to the arcade version's extended popularity, compared to the four to six months that the average game lasted. It remained Nintendo's top seller into mid-1983, and 67,000 arcade units in the United States, for a total of arcade units sold in Japan and the United States.
Nintendo's Game & Watch handheld version of Donkey Kong released in 1982 sold 8 million units. Coleco had sold 6 million Donkey Kong cartridges for home consoles, grossing more than