Donkey Kong’s Identity Crisis

Nintendo's first major character has always been its most unpredictable

By Marc Normandin | July 9, 2025 | 12:04pm

Video Games Features Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong is what brought Nintendo to prominence, what started them on the path that, 44 years later, has the Switch 2 flying off shelves as the fastest-selling console ever. Despite this, Donkey Kong, as a franchise and as a character, has had something of an identity crisis for most of those four-plus decades. It was Mario, the hero of Donkey Kong—at first briefly known as “Jumpman” in English, owing to his being the first character in a platformer to jump—who became the centerpiece of all things Nintendo, the character and franchise around which all future consoles and handhelds revolved, rather than its titular creation.

There are two questions at the center of this identity crisis. The first: Is Donkey Kong a hero, or a villain? There are plenty of Nintendo characters who have played the role of both, but Donkey Kong’s case is different. Wario was introduced in Super Mario Land 2: The 6 Golden Coins as Mario’s nemesis, but that was mostly a case of squatter’s rights that got out of hand. Wario didn’t become a persistent villain for Nintendo—a bit of a nuisance, perhaps, in Wario’s Woods and the Super Famicom-exclusive Mario vs. Wario—but Wario wound up starring in his own platforming series with its own fantastic games, as well as a second series in which he’s the main character and driving narrative force, WarioWare. Sure, he’s a CEO in the video game industry, so he’s not fully pure of heart, but it’s not like he’s heading up Microsoft or anything.

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Even Mario himself has played the role of big bad: back when he was a character that Nintendo and creator Shigeru Miyamoto saw more as one to plug in wherever was necessary, he switched from the hero of Donkey Kong to scoundrel for Donkey Kong Jr., by kidnapping the eponymous Donkey Kong and stuffing him in a cage. In this game, you play as Donkey Kong Jr., attempting to free your father from Mario, who has apparently let his desire for revenge consume him. No wonder Pauline left him.

Typically, though, the role of a Nintendo character is and has always been defined. Kirby is always how you expect him to be, beating great evils to such a pulp that they change their entire personality and become helpful associates of Kirby from then on for fear of a second whupping, assuming they even survive the first. Link possesses the Triforce of Courage, and uses it to defeat his own universe’s great villain(s) across time and space. Samus is a perpetual badass, Pokémon aren’t inherently evil but can be used that way by their trainers… you get it.

Donkey Kong, though, flits between hero and villain, entirely dependent on context. Fresh off of Donkey Kong Jr., he went back to his original role for Donkey Kong 3, stirring up trouble in Stanley’s greenhouses. The character went mostly dormant after this: Hudson Soft produced a PC-88 sequel to Donkey Kong 3—The Great Counterattack—with Nintendo’s blessing, and Sega—yes, Sega—was granted a license for a game starring Donkey Kong as a parking attendant that never came to be, but it would take until 1994 for the ape to actually return to the spotlight. He would do so as a hero… and a villain. Newly-minted Nintendo subsidiary Rare was given the keys to Donkey Kong and produced Donkey Kong Country for the SNES, which introduced King K. Rool as the malefactor responsible for swiping Kong’s banana hoard, but mere months before that was Donkey Kong ‘94 on the Game Boy. This title served as the culmination of the past of Donkey Kong with everything Nintendo had learned about platforming games in the decade-plus since they’d walked away from the character, and Donkey Kong slid right back into the familiar role of villain for it.

Donkey Kong ‘94 ended up as the spiritual predecessor to the Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, which have appeared on the Game Boy Advance, DS, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch, and within which, in all cases, Donkey Kong is the source of whatever strife is occurring. Which is to say that the identity crisis referenced earlier is ongoing for him—it turns out that Donkey Kong is the character that Nintendo throws into whatever role is needed in whatever game is needed, rather than Mario as originally intended.

The second question: what is Donkey Kong? Not in terms of the character, but the franchise. Mainline Mario games are platformers, and come in both a 2D and 3D variety, but even if they all tend to be a little different there’s a clear connective tissue there from title to title, to the point that Super Mario 3D World could be both kinds of Mario platformer at the same time without it feeling anything besides fantastic. Even Mario’s role-playing games are platformers! Kirby bounces around more than anyone at Nintendo (and also anywhere else in video games) but the primary vehicle for the series has been side-scrolling platformers, to the point that Kirby and the Forgotten Land was the first 3D platformer in the series’ 30-year history. Whether overhead or in a massive, fully 3D open-world, Zelda games are action-adventure. There’s an entire genre named after Metroid’s design!

What are you getting when you turn on a game with Donkey Kong on the label, though? That depends. If it’s one of the three original Donkey Kong games, it’s exceptional arcade-style gameplay. The Donkey Kong Country games, both original run and revival, are side-scrolling platformers that reward precision and exploration. In both cases, Donkey Kong might not even be a playable character, and as already discussed his role within the former games might not be a virtuous one, either. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat also rewarded precision, but insofar as how well you could time banging on bongos to get Donkey Kong to move around the screen. Jungle Climber and King of Swing were designed just as differently, with both taking movement cues from the 1984 Famicom and VS. System arcade puzzler Clu Clu Land, using shoulder buttons or the stylus for movement in vertically-oriented games unlike anything else in the Donkey Kong oeuvre.

It’s difficult to say, “Oh, it’s like a Donkey Kong game” in the way you could a Mario or a Kirby or a Zelda or a Metroid, is the thing. You could put a specific qualifier on it—”Oh, it’s like one of Rare’s Donkey Kong games,” but that just brings us to the next point. Who has ownership of Donkey Kong? The original games were conceived of and directed by Miyamoto, and Nintendo R&D1 worked on all three arcade editions of those titles, but after that, things got murky. The original run of Donkey Kong Country titles—as well as the Game Boy’s Donkey Kong Land games—were second-party Rare’s doing, and without Miyamoto’s officially credited input. The revival games, Returns and Tropical Freeze, were by Nintendo subsidiary Retro Studios. Donkey Kong ‘94 was Nintendo EAD, not R&D1, with Miyamoto merely producing. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat was by Nintendo EAD Tokyo, which was the team that would next create Super Mario Galaxy. The Mario vs. Donkey Kong games are developed by Nintendo Software Technology, an American studio that has no other series that truly belongs to them, since their work tends to be whatever Nintendo needs doing, whether it be something the company received the license for (Namco’s Ridge Racer 64), or collections of existing games (the GameCube’s Nintendo Puzzle Collection), development support (Good Job!) or ports (the upgraded Switch 2 ports of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom). Paon, the co-developer of various SNK-published Neo Geo Pocket Color titles like Big Bang Pro Wrestling, was responsible for both Jungle Climber and King of Swing, as well as the Wii racing game Donkey Kong Barrel Blast.

The upcoming Donkey Kong Bananza is only the third time since the original trilogy of games that the property is back in the hands of a primary Nintendo studio, rather than a second-party or a contractor or a subsidiary. Which is not to discount the likes of Rare, Retro, or NST by any means—Rare’s handiwork extended the lifespan of the SNES in a way Sega was simply not able to do with their late-life Genesis output, giving Nintendo time to prepare their next console without the kind of panicked urgency their rivals found themselves experiencing. But whenever something moves away from, historically, one of the two R&D studios, EAD, or SPD, and, in the present, Nintendo EPD—the result of a merger between EAD and SPD, which themselves were the successors to the R&Ds—it’s because it’s seen as less of a priority than whatever it is that those teams were working on. They’re the ones always pushing things forward for Nintendo, and have been since Donkey Kong first arrived on the scene, the teams working on Mario and Zelda and the software most at the heart of whatever weird little hardware they’ve cooked up. Bananza being a Nintendo EPD joint is shocking, then, as it’s a coming home for Donkey Kong that rarely happens: the original games, ‘94, and Jungle Beat are it.

Which makes sense, in a way. Donkey Kong was a highly influential title, and vital to the success of Nintendo. It was created to repurpose the many unsold Radar Scope cabinets into something that arcades and people wanted, in addition to creating the characters of Donkey Kong and Mario. It introduced jumping to platformers—think about that for a moment! Platformers existed before Donkey Kong, though not by that name, and there was no jumping. The dual-screen Game & Watch release of Donkey Kong was the first to ever utilize the cross-shaped D-pad that’s still in use today, and sold eight million units. It had multiple, distinct levels, which arcade games just did not do back in ‘81, and a story that, while in 2025 might seem primitive, 44 years ago was revolutionary for telling a persistent, clear video game story through the use of plot-progressing animated cutscenes. There had been nothing like it before, and its popularity was sustained enough that Nintendo was able to release a home port as one of three Famicom launch titles in 1983. Nintendo made the Famicom in the first place, in part, because of how lucrative the licensing deals had been for Donkey Kong with Coleco—why not cut out the middleman and go into the business themselves?

Donkey Kong ‘94 was a showcase for not just the Game Boy’s then unrivaled pick-up-and-play nature, but also for the Super Game Boy peripheral for the SNES—rather than just a colored version of the game for your television, Donkey Kong ‘94 featured all kinds of exclusives available only through the Super Game Boy, from a new color palette that really popped, to a border based on the original Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, voice clips, and even enhanced music. Basically, if you didn’t have a Game Boy, you would still want Donkey Kong ‘94 without it feeling like “just” a Game Boy game—that it was a massive title with over 100 levels certainly helped to sell the idea that it was a killer app for two systems, rather than one you could just also play on an SNES if you had it.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat was the debut project for Nintendo EAD Tokyo, which was a studio created specifically to lure younger game developers from Japan who weren’t willing to move to Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto, with many members of the Super Mario Sunshine team used as the initial core of the staff. It was meant as a one-off, a way to do something with the still-popular Donkey Kong character after Rare had been sold to Microsoft, that also repurposed the bongos used for the Donkey Konga rhythm games developed by Namco—the result was, arguably, the greatest side-scrolling Donkey Kong platformer out there, and because of it EAD Tokyo, not the Kyoto studio, that took control of Mario’s 3D adventures from that point forward, starting with Super Mario Galaxy.

Which is a long-ish way of saying that Nintendo reaches down and pulls Donkey Kong away from their subsidiaries and their contractors in the moments that they feel that they have something extraordinary to do with the character, both in terms of gameplay and for the hardware it will appear on. That Bananza is in the hands of the Super Mario Odyssey team, that it is appearing on the system before a Mario or a new Zelda, says much about Nintendo’s faith in this project, and for what they want the world to know the Switch 2 is capable of.

We might not be able to easily pinpoint or explain just what Donkey Kong’s role is in terms of hero or villain, or just what a Donkey Kong game is. But what is clear, 44 years in, is that the big guy is plugged in where Nintendo needs him to be, in whatever role that might be. Hero, villain, experimental platformer, rhythm game star, as the vector for a new technology, or savior. Riding high on the historic success of the Switch, Nintendo isn’t in need of a savior. They do, however, have brand new hardware to show off, and a non-Mario hero to show it off with while whatever else is cooking in Kyoto takes its time.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin.