Donkey Kong | Code Like It's 198x

Donkey Kong began as a salvage job. Around 1980 Nintendo of America had ordered three thousand cabinets of Radar Scope, a shooting game, and was left with more than two thousand that nobody wanted. It could strip out the circuit boards and repaint the cabinets, but it needed a new game to put inside them. The job went to an apprentice artist who had never made a video game, Shigeru Miyamoto. When the first board arrived in Seattle and the staff switched it on, one of the salesmen swore and walked out. Within two years Nintendo had sold tens of thousands of machines, a Hollywood studio had tried to take the profits, and the little carpenter on the screen had a name: Mario.

Fast facts

Maker: Nintendo. Miyamoto designed it; Gunpei Yokoi supervised.
Released: arcades, July 1981, according to Retro Gamer.
Characters: Jumpman (named Mario in America), the Lady (named Pauline) and the ape Donkey Kong.
Sales: about 60,000 more machines after the first two thousand, according to David Sheff’s Game Over; N64 Magazine also gave more than 60,000 in the United States.
Lawsuit: Universal City Studios v. Nintendo. Universal said the game infringed King Kong; the court found for Nintendo in December 1983 and the appeal failed in 1984.

A game to fill the cabinets

David Sheff’s account in Game Over starts with Radar Scope. Nintendo of America’s president, Minoru Arakawa, had tested it around Seattle with good results and ordered three thousand units, committing almost all of the young company’s money. The ship took nearly four months to arrive from Japan, and by then the excitement had gone. Operators who had talked about buying dozens took two or three. Arakawa asked his father-in-law, Nintendo’s president Hiroshi Yamauchi, for a replacement game. Yamauchi said all his engineers were busy, and gave the job to Miyamoto with Yokoi overseeing him. “But he knows nothing about video games,” Yokoi said.

Miyamoto did not update Radar Scope. Retro Gamer says he designed a completely new game around the machine’s hardware, with three characters he thought players would recognise: a hero, a damsel and a bully. The ape has escaped from its owner, a carpenter, and carried off his girlfriend. Miyamoto told Retro Gamer where the name came from: “I heard that ‘donkey’ meant ‘stupid’.” He wanted an ape that sounded stubborn and foolish. When Nintendo later went to court, he explained in a deposition that “King Kong” was a general Japanese term for any menacing ape.

The hardware shaped the hero. Miyamoto wanted an ordinary, slightly awkward carpenter, and started, Sheff writes, with the nose: “Noses say a great deal.” Nintendo’s engineers had taught him that a body had to stand out on the screen, so the carpenter got bright overalls and stocky arms that swung as he moved. Hair was hard to animate, because it would have to fly up when he fell, so Miyamoto gave him a cap. Retro Gamer adds that Miyamoto wanted characters that reacted in more ways and see-saws in the levels, and both had to stay in his sketchbook.

Four screens and a kill screen

The game is a climb. Each of its four screens is 25 metres of a building site, and Jumpman has to get to the top:

Girders: ramps and ladders, with Kong rolling barrels down them. Jumping a barrel scores points; a hammer smashes them for a few seconds but stops Jumpman jumping.
The “pie factory”: conveyor belts carrying cement pans, and fireballs.
Elevators: moving lifts and bouncing springs.
Rivets: remove all eight rivets and Kong’s platform collapses, dropping him on his head.

Then the screens repeat, faster. Retro Gamer describes what happens at level 22: a fault in the bonus timer kills Jumpman seconds after he appears, so no one can go further.

Before the first screen, Kong climbs the building with the Lady under his arm and stamps the girders crooked. Retro Gamer notes that it is widely regarded as the first cut-scene in a video game. Players at the time had another name for the genre. Electronic Games called Donkey Kong a “climbing game”, and Video Games in 1982 grouped it with Frogger as games more like “obstacle courses than mazes, since you always know where you’re going—up.”

“It’s over”

The staff at Nintendo of America were not impressed. Sheff describes the salesmen Al Stone and Ron Judy trying the first board and deciding it was a disaster: “Two thousand ‘Donkey Kongs’ were worse than two thousand ‘Radarscopes.’” Stone walked out saying “It’s over.” Arakawa asked Yamauchi to at least change the name. Yamauchi refused: “It is a good game.”

The team translated the story for the American cabinets and named the characters around a couple of card tables in the warehouse. The Lady became Pauline, after the wife of the warehouse manager, Don James. The carpenter was still nameless when the warehouse’s landlord, Mario Segali, knocked on the door to complain that the rent was late. They called the hero Mario.

Ron Judy put a machine in the Spot Tavern, a bar near the office. It took 120 quarters, $30, on its first night, then $35 and $36. All two thousand converted machines sold. Arakawa refused an offer from Taito to buy the rights, and ordered thousands more. Sheff says Nintendo of America sold 60,000 more Donkey Kongs, and ended its second year with more than $100 million in sales. By August 1982 Video Games was calling it “the Number One video fetish—for the last six months and still counting”, and in March 1983 it still topped Electronic Games’ readers’ chart of coin-op games.

Success brought counterfeits. Sheff reports that as many as half the Donkey Kong machines sold were fakes. Nintendo brought 35 copyright suits against counterfeiters and still reckoned it lost at least $100 million in sales.

Universal and King Kong

In April 1982 a telex from Sidney Sheinberg, president of MCA Universal, reached Nintendo in Kyoto. According to Sheff it gave Nintendo 48 hours to hand over its Donkey Kong profits and destroy unsold games, because the game infringed Universal’s King Kong. Coleco, which had licensed the home rights, settled with Universal. Nintendo’s lawyer, Howard Lincoln, refused, and at a lunch meeting told Sheinberg to his face that Nintendo would not settle. Sheinberg, Sheff writes, replied that he viewed “litigation as a profit center”.

Universal sued in New York, and Nintendo was defended by John Kirby. Judge Robert W. Sweet dismissed Universal’s complaint in December 1983, finding that Universal held no valid King Kong trademark and that nobody would confuse the two games. Electronic Games quoted his opinion: the game created “a totally different concept and feel from the drama”, “no reasonable jury could find likelihood of confusion”, and “at best, Donkey Kong is a parody of King Kong, but a parody… is not an infringement.” The Court of Appeals upheld the decision in 1984. Nintendo then won its own counterclaims in 1985, and Sheff puts the award at $1.8 million. Coleco later recovered the royalties it had paid Universal. The Universal vs Nintendo entry covers the case.

Nintendo had been protecting the name for some time. In December 1982 Video Games printed a letter from Nintendo of America’s customer service manager, asking it to drop a reference to King Kong from an earlier article: “There is no connection, authorization, sponsorship, or other association between the Donkey Kong game and the film classic King Kong.”

Home versions

Coleco, Atari and Mattel all wanted the home rights. Sheff says Coleco went straight to Yamauchi, who chose it because “it is the hungriest company”, and that Lincoln wrote a contract in which Nintendo gave no warranty about owning the game. That clause protected Nintendo when Universal came for Coleco. Retro Gamer says Coleco got exclusive home and tabletop rights and then packed the game with its new ColecoVision console. Coleco’s advertisements in 1982 listed “‘Donkey Kong,’ America’s #1 arcade game, included with the original purchase” among the machine’s selling points. Coleco also made versions for the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision, and a tabletop mini-arcade that Electronic Games called “a good solid mini-arcade version of the coin-op”.

Later versions came from elsewhere:

Commodore 64 (Atarisoft): Ahoy! found the graphics crisp and the music, unlike the ColecoVision version’s, “a non-irritant”: “If you’ve been waiting for a Commodore version of Kong, you’ll be delighted.”
Famicom (1983) and NES: Donkey Kong was one of the Famicom’s launch games in Japan, according to Retro Gamer. The cartridge version leaves out the pie factory screen; public sources attribute this to the small cartridges of the time.
Game & Watch (1982): Miyamoto adapted the game for Yokoi’s Game & Watch handhelds. The two-screen version had the cross-shaped control pad that later went on the NES controller.
ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC (Ocean, 1986): the official licence arrived years after the clones. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 48% and called it “a competent conversion of an ancient arcade game”; one reviewer asked why Ocean was releasing it “at least two years too late”. Amstrad Action was kinder, calling the CPC version “a very creditable version” and scoring it 56%.

What came next

Miyamoto’s sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. (1982), swapped the roles: Mario keeps Kong in a cage and Kong’s son has to rescue him. The carpenter became a plumber, with a brother, Luigi, in Mario Bros. (1983), and went on to Super Mario Bros. (1985).

Sources

Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 6, August 1983, p. 91: Mario Bros., in which Mario has “become a plumber with his brother, Luigi”.
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd., 578 F. Supp. 911 (S.D.N.Y., 22 December 1983): the grounds for dismissal; 746 F.2d 112 (2d Cir. 1984), affirmed; 615 F. Supp. 838 (S.D.N.Y. 1985), Nintendo’s counterclaims.
David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 5, “Coming to America” (Radar Scope, the order for three thousand machines, Yamauchi giving the job to Miyamoto and Yokoi, “But he knows nothing about video games”); chapter 6, “For a Fistful of Quarters” (the first board, “It’s over”, “It is a good game”, naming Pauline and Mario, the Spot Tavern takings, Taito’s offer, 60,000 more machines, the Coleco deal and “the hungriest company”, the counterfeits, the MCA telex of April 1982, “litigation as a profit center”, Judge Sweet, Kirby, the $1.8 million and Coleco’s recovery of its royalties); chapter 3, “I, Mario” (Mario’s design and “Noses say a great deal”); the deposition on “King Kong” is in chapter 6.
Retro Gamer issue 43, 2007, “The history of Donkey Kong”, from p. 24: Miyamoto’s new game for the Radar Scope hardware, the hero, damsel and bully, the name, abandoned ideas, the four stages and the level 22 kill screen, the first cut-scene, the July 1981 release and first-year sales, Coleco’s exclusive rights and the ColecoVision bundle, the 2600 and Intellivision versions, the Universal case and the $1.8 million, Donkey Kong Jr., the Famicom launch games.
Video Games volume 1 issue 1, August 1982, pp. 25 and 77: Donkey Kong and Frogger as obstacle courses; “the Number One video fetish”.
Video Games volume 1 issue 2, October 1982: Coleco’s ColecoVision advertisement.
Video Games volume 1 issue 3, December 1982, letters: “What’s Right is Rights”, from Nintendo of America’s customer service manager.
Electronic Games volume 1 issue 13, March 1983: readers’ coin-op chart; review of Coleco’s Donkey Kong mini-arcade, p. 101.
Electronic Games volume 2 issue 13, July 1984, p. 10: report of the court’s decision, quoting Judge Sweet.
Ahoy! issue 3, March 1984: Tim Moriarty’s review of Atarisoft’s Commodore versions.
CRASH issue 37, February 1987, pp. 26–27: review of Ocean’s Donkey Kong for the Spectrum (£7.95, 48%).
Amstrad Action issue 18, March 1987: review of Ocean’s Donkey Kong for the CPC (56%).
N64 Magazine issue 2, May 1997, Nintendo history feature: more than 60,000 US Donkey Kong machines.
Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004, Game & Watch feature: the multi-screen Donkey Kong and its cross-shaped pad.
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd., 578 F. Supp. 911 (S.D.N.Y., 22 December 1983), affirmed 746 F.2d 112 (2d Cir. 1984), via Justia (web): the dates of the decisions. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/578/911/2363221/
Wikipedia, “Donkey Kong (1981 video game)” (web, secondary): the Famicom version’s missing cement factory stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(1981_video_game)