Donkey Kong — stories left

As for the development period, in a 2016 interview Shigeru Miyamoto said that while Nintendo games of the time took about 3 months to make, Donkey Kong took somewhere between 4 and 5 months.

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.

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".

The ape that had originally replaced Bluto would evolve into the titular Donkey Kong, which Miyamoto said was "nothing too evil or repulsive".

Miyamoto decided to name the game for the ape, who he said was the strongest character.

A rival claim is that he worked with Nintendo's export manager to come up with the title, and that "Donkey" was meant to represent "stupid and goofy".

In 2001, Miyamoto stated that he thought the name would convey the thought of a "stupid ape".

Arakawa suggested that the name of "Jumpman", a name originally chosen for its similarity to the popular brands Walkman and Pac-Man, be changed to "Mario" after Mario Segale, the landlord of the original office space of Nintendo of America.

In a 2023 interview, former Coleco vice president of product development Bert Reiner said that every ColecoVision was sold with a Donkey Kong cartridge.

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.

Nintendo thanked John Kirby with the gift of a $30,000 sailboat named Donkey Kong and "exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats".

In 1996 Next Generation listed the arcade, Atari 7800, and cancelled Coleco Adam versions as number 50 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", commenting that even ignoring its massive historical significance, Donkey Kong stands as a great game due to its demanding challenges and graphics which manage to elegantly delineate an entire scenario on a single screen.

Computer and Video Games called Donkey Kong "the most momentous" release of 1981, as it "introduced three important names" to the global video game industry: Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Mario.

There were so many games with multiple ladder and platforms stages by 1983 that Electronic Games described Nintendo's own Popeye game as "yet another variation of a theme that's become all too familiar since the success of Donkey Kong".

In 1982, the songs "Do the Donkey Kong" by Buckner & Garcia and "Donkey Kong" by R.

Cade and the Video Victims were released, while the Miami based song "Donkey Kong (Catch You In The Break)" by The Invisibles was released in 1984.

The phrase "It's on like Donkey Kong" was coined by American rapper Ice Cube in 1992, and has been used in various works of popular culture.

Ikegami Tsushinki, which had been commissioned to program the arcade version of Donkey Kong, filed a claim for damages against Nintendo at the Tokyo District Court on 1983-7-20, on the grounds of copyright infringement.

Ahead of that suit, on 6-27 of the same year, Nintendo had itself filed at the Tokyo District Court, on the grounds that the game design itself was the work of Nintendo employees and that Ikegami Tsushinki had no right of claim once the contract had been performed.

In 1982, the major American film company Universal Pictures, then part of MCA, sued for damages, claiming that Donkey Kong infringed the character copyright of the film King Kong (1976), which the company was said to hold at the time.

In response, Nintendo of America (NOA) filed a counterclaim, arguing instead that "Universal's bringing of the suit defamed Donkey Kong", and met it head on.

In this case the NOA legal department led by Howard Lincoln stood out, and this went on to strengthen the voice of Nintendo and NOA in the American games industry.

Nintendo and Nintendo Leisure System then applied to the Kyoto District Court on 1982-6-1 for a provisional injunction against Falcon as well, under the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, to stop the manufacture and sale of Crazy Kong, and obtained the injunction on 7-5 of the same year.

This was settled in court in 1985-3, with Falcon acknowledging that it had caused Nintendo loss.

Universal City Studios unsuccessfully sued Nintendo, alleging that Donkey Kong violated its trademark of the King Kong franchise.

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.

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.

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.

Universal sued Nintendo on June 29 and announced its license with Coleco.

After the release of Donkey Kong Jr., the arcade successor to Donkey Kong, Ikegami sued Nintendo for the unauthorized duplication of the Donkey Kong program code.

By 1990, Nintendo had successfully won over thirty lawsuits related to Donkey Kong.

For example, Nintendo won a 1990 Japanese lawsuit against Falcon Company, which had sold 12,000 counterfeit arcade cabinets in the United States during the 1980s.

It was the first game in which Mario, Nintendo's flagship character, appeared, and the debut work as a video game designer of Shigeru Miyamoto, the company's leading game creator.

It was the first time that either Miyamoto or the 4 staff from Ikegami Tsushinki had worked on a video game.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president at the time, assigned the project to first-time video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto.

This yielded Shigeru Miyamoto's debut as lead game designer of his Donkey Kong concept, and Yamauchi appointed head engineer Gunpei Yokoi as project supervisor with a budget of according to Miyamoto.

Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards.

Kitchen received no assistance from Nintendo and minimal aid from Coleco, who only provided him with an arcade machine for temporary use.

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.

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 NES version was re-released as an unlockable game in the first Animal Crossing, both through its Nintendo Space World 2000 demo as well as the final game.

The Wii U version is also the last game that was released to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the Japanese version of the NES, the Famicom.

Donkey Kong: Original Edition is an update of the NES version that reinstates the cement factory stage and includes some animations absent from the original NES version, and has only ever been released on the Virtual Console.

It was preinstalled on 25th Anniversary PAL region red Wii systems, which were first released in Europe on October 29, 2010.

One of the first releases from Electronic Arts was Hard Hat Mack (Apple II, 1983), a three-stage game without an ape, but using the construction site setting from Donkey Kong.

In 2004, Nintendo released the first of the Donkey Konga games, a rhythm-based game series that uses a special bongo controller.

Outside Japan the game was released on the NES as Donkey Kong Classics, which pairs it with Donkey Kong Jr. on 1 cartridge.

It was the first time that either Miyamoto or the 4 staff from Ikegami Tsushinki had worked on a video game.

Falcon paid Nintendo a licence fee of 10,000 yen for every 1 boards.

Donkey Kongs various ports sold more than 15 million units worldwide.

By October, Donkey Kong was selling 4,000 units a month, and by June 1982, Nintendo had sold 60,000 Donkey Kong machines in the United States, earning $180 million.

Donkey Kong appealed to both sexes; How to Win Video Games (1982) estimated that half of its players were women, while 95% of Defender players were men.

Nintendo earned another $100 million on the game in its second year of release in America, totaling $280 million in US cabinet sales by 1982 ().

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 and earning Nintendo more than in royalties; the bundled ColecoVision version sold 2 million units, while the Atari 2600 version sold 4 million units in 1982 for , making it one of the best-selling Atari 2600 games.

In Japan, 840,000 units of the Famicom version were sold; the Famicom Mini version for the Game Boy Advance later had a further 160,000 units sold, for a total of 1 million units sold in Japan.

On May 20, 1985, Judge Sweet awarded Nintendo $1.8 million for legal fees, lost revenues, and other expenses, but denied Nintendo's claim of damages from those licensees who had paid royalties to both Nintendo and Universal.

Outside Japan the game was released on the NES as Donkey Kong Classics, which pairs it with Donkey Kong Jr. on 1 cartridge.

Donkey Kong Original Edition is a special Virtual Console version preinstalled on the Super Mario 25th Anniversary Wii released in Europe in 2010. The Japanese version has Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary Version preinstalled instead.

Yamauchi wanted primarily to target the North American market, so he mandated that the game be given an English title, as with many previous Nintendo games.

The Wii U version is also the last game that was released to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the Japanese version of the NES, the Famicom.

The ape that had originally replaced Bluto would evolve into the titular Donkey Kong, which Miyamoto said was "nothing too evil or repulsive".

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.

Arakawa suggested that the name of "Jumpman", a name originally chosen for its similarity to the popular brands Walkman and Pac-Man, be changed to "Mario" after Mario Segale, the landlord of the original office space of Nintendo of America.

It was originally developed as a GameCube game and would have used the bongo controller, but was delayed and released exclusively as a Wii game with no support for the bongo accessory.

It was a major hit, shipping about 85,000 units, and it laid the foundation for Nintendo's success in the video game market.

The special supplement "Famicom ROM Cartridge All Catalog" in the 1991-5-10 issue of the magazine Family Computer Magazine called it "an early Nintendo classic" and "the origin of character-based action games", and wrote: "This game is made up of 3 stages in all.

Coleco had sold 6 million Donkey Kong cartridges for home consoles, grossing more than and earning Nintendo more than in royalties; the bundled ColecoVision version sold 2 million units, while the Atari 2600 version sold 4 million units in 1982 for , making it one of the best-selling Atari 2600 games.

The Japanese arcade boards fall broadly into an early version from the start of sales (known as the "TRY version") and a later version with bugs fixed (known as the "GET version").

He writes that the work went on until 1981-7, just before shipping, and that the program bugs caused by the repeated specification changes gave him a great deal of trouble.

In January 2025, a glitch was discovered via a tool-assisted superplay which sometimes allows climbing straight to the top of the kill screen from the starting point.

The name was given by Yoshio Hongo, who worked in Nintendo's public relations department at the time.

The name Mario comes from Mario Segale, the owner of the warehouse rented by Nintendo of America, whose face closely resembled the protagonist of Donkey Kong.

After experiencing difficulty portraying the Popeye characters within the limits of the game hardware, Nintendo elected to replace Bluto with a newly created gorilla character before ultimately deciding to make the rest of the game's cast original, reserving the Popeye IP for future use.

In 1996 Next Generation listed the arcade, Atari 7800, and cancelled Coleco Adam versions as number 50 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", commenting that even ignoring its massive historical significance, Donkey Kong stands as a great game due to its demanding challenges and graphics which manage to elegantly delineate an entire scenario on a single screen.