Universal vs Nintendo

Universal vs Nintendo was the 1982-1984 trademark lawsuit that could have ended Donkey Kong. Universal Studios claimed Nintendo’s arcade game infringed their King Kong property. Nintendo’s lawyers proved Universal had previously argued King Kong was in the public domain, securing a landmark victory.

Fast facts

Filed: 1982
Resolved: 1984
Claim: Donkey Kong infringed King Kong
Outcome: Nintendo won decisively
Damages: $1.8 million to Nintendo; MCA lost every appeal to the Supreme Court

In court

The case was tried before US District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet in New York. Nintendo’s counsel, John Kirby, had Howard Phillips called to court “to play Donkey Kong… because John Kirby wanted to demonstrate that the game had nothing to do with King Kong”. Shigeru Miyamoto was deposed in Kyoto, where he explained that he had “called the character King Kong before naming him Donkey Kong because ‘King Kong’ in Japanese was a generic term for any menacing ape.”

Sweet granted summary dismissal, and his written opinion is worth quoting for its own sake:

“Donkey Kong” was demonstrated by a game master and pertinent parts of the 1933 movie and the 1976 remake were reviewed, an altogether satisfying court day enhanced by the argument of highly skilled and forceful counsel and marred only by the submission of affidavits, depositions, and briefs.

The ruling rested on two independent grounds. Sweet “concluded that Nintendo had not infringed on MCA Universal’s rights because the company didn’t own them. He also ruled that there was no infringement even if MCA had owned King Kong, since the game was completely different from the movie.” He then criticised MCA for suing “in spite of full recognition that it didn’t own the rights”, which “paved the way for Nintendo to be awarded damages”.

$1.8 million, and MCA “appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and lost in each round.”

Why MCA sued at all

Sid Sheinberg, MCA’s president, “said that he viewed litigation ‘as a profit center’” — a phrase recalled in testimony and one Sheff reports was how MCA’s pattern of suits and threatened suits was understood. What finished the case was that MCA had won the opposite argument before: “Sheinberg had already instigated and won a lawsuit proving that King Kong was in the public domain.”

Other defendants got their money back. Coleco, “which had sold Nintendo out in its settlement with MCA, filed against MCA Universal to get back the royalties they had paid. Universal settled. Atari and the other companies MCA had shaken down were also paid back.”

The Case

Aspect	Detail
Universal’s claim	Donkey Kong copied King Kong
Initial target	Nintendo, Coleco, others
Key evidence	Universal’s own legal filings

Nintendo’s Defence

Argument	Impact
Public domain	Universal had argued Kong was public domain in 1975
Trademark estoppel	Can’t claim rights you denied having
Distinctiveness	The game “was completely different from the movie” — Sweet’s second ground

John Kirby

Nintendo’s lawyer, John Kirby, masterminded the defence. The thank-you is documented, and it was a boat. After a dinner in a private Manhattan dining room, Arakawa and Lincoln “presented Kirby with a framed photograph of a thirty-thousand-dollar, twenty-seven-foot sailboat. The boat, Nintendo’s way of saying thank you, had been christened Donkey Kong and included, they explained, ‘exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats.’”

⚠ The widely-repeated claim that the 1992 character Kirby was also named after him does not appear in Sheff’s account, which is otherwise detailed about the gratitude. It is left here as unverified rather than repeated as fact.

Legacy

Effect	Result
Nintendo’s confidence	Proved they could fight in US courts
Howard Lincoln	Rose to prominence as NOA chairman
IP strategy	Nintendo became aggressive defender

Howard Lincoln put the lesson in two sentences: “We learned that we could handle ourselves in the big leagues. And we learned that the kind of arrogance we saw at MCA is lethal.”

Donkey Kong survives