Nintensive Care: Donkey Kong Saved Nintendo of America and Changed Gaming In the Process

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By Elijah Gonzalez | July 24, 2024 | 12:00pm

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Nintensive Care: Donkey Kong Saved Nintendo of America and Changed Gaming In the Process

How did Nintendo become the Nintendo we know today? Our column Nintensive Care tracks the history of Nintendo’s videogame era and its outsized influence on games and the gaming industry. This time around, we cover 1981’s Donkey Kong. It doesn’t need an introduction, but we’ll give one anyway: the game saved Nintendo of America from financial ruin, further established the company’s house style, and foreshadowed their dive into the home console market. Put simply, it’s as influential as they come.

In early 1981, Nintendo of America was in trouble. Minoru Arakawa, the president of this recently established subsidiary, had sunk most of the branch’s budget into 3,000 cabinets of their Space Invaders clone, Radar Scope. Unfortunately, by the time the units made their way to America, the craze around Space Invaders had already died down, leaving the company with 2,000 unsold machines and on the verge of financial ruin.

In the ensuing scramble, Arakawa convinced higher-ups to let them salvage the hardware by repurposing it for a new game. Shigeru Miyamoto, an up-and-coming developer at the company who had worked on Sheriff, was chosen as the lead designer on the project and worked with a team of four programmers to complete it in the coming months. Of course, that game was Donkey Kong, and you probably know what happens next.

This proto-platformer, where an everyman, eventually named Mario, leaps over barrels to rescue Pauline from a giant ape, quickly took over the arcades when it was released in July 1981, eventually becoming one of the highest-selling cabinets of the late ’70s to ’80s, ranked behind only Pac-Man and Space Invaders. It would eventually be ported to the Game and Watch, where it would sell 8 million units, to the Coleco home console, where it sold another 6 million, to the Atari 2600, and more down the line. The war chest from Donkey Kong allowed Nintendo to expand further into videogames, culminating in the release of the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System.

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However, more than just upping the company’s profits and further bankrolling its multiple-decade presence in the medium, Donkey Kong comes with a host of milestones that only early trendsetting works can achieve. For starters, it was the game that introduced one of the most common verbs in the medium: jumping. While earlier titles like Space Panic featured moving between platforms via ladders, Donkey Kong’s introduction of jumping helped codify what we think of as platformers today, as Jumpman (eventually renamed Mario) leaped over obstacles, flame creatures, and gaps. In an arcade landscape where the popular paradigms of play were shooting things, like in Space Invaders, or navigating mazes, like in Pac-Man, Donkey Kong spawned its own wave of clones that added another style of experience to developers’ toolboxes.

Creatively, Donkey Kong feels like the birth of Nintendo as we know it, featuring innovative elements, quirky mascot characters, and a focus on presentation. Not to sound like a Nintendo propagandist, but the company has historically created and published games and hardware that set trends, whether immediately with Donkey Kong or further down the line with Metroid. They’re rarely the first to implement these ideas (again, you can see a lot of Space Panic in Donkey Kong), but they tend to hone these concepts to appeal to as many people as possible, something that Donkey Kong did as it pioneered a genre.

As for the presentation side of things, unlike many other games at the time, there is a lot of personality in the introductory cutscene: the opening jingle’s borderline ominous tone feels like a direct challenge to the player; after climbing to the top of the construction zone, Donkey Kong stomps to create the layout of the level and then smiles cockily; when you reach Paulette, a little heart pops above her and Mario before DK snatches her away and it breaks. Similarly, there is flavor, charm, and a hint of weirdness to the character designs, so much so that it helped kickstart two of the most iconic game series: Mario and Donkey Kong. Going forward, the company’s creatives would craft a host of loveable oddballs that mashed together an amalgamation of influences to great effect. This game, which pulled from American pop culture from the ‘30s, such as Popeye cartoons and King Kong, feels like the start of that trend.

However, you don’t only see where Nintendo would eventually go with Donkey Kong but also shades of where the entire medium was headed. While this game’s plot is so rudimentary that describing it as such feels a tad generous, it was one of the first arcade games that had a “full” story with a beginning and end—you can eventually beat Donkey Kong and see a small cutscene where Mario saves Pauline. While events reset after you witness this conclusion (because it’s a high score game, after all), there’s still a complete arc here, however derivative it may be in a broader context. It isn’t much, but it provides just a hint more framing around its gameplay than was customary for the era and is a precursor for how the medium would capitalize on storytelling down the line.

On top of this, Donkey Kong is a rare early arcade game that features multiple distinct stages. There’s the classic first map where you dodge barrels and scale ladders, the second (in the original Japanese release) where you fight against conveyor belts, the third that involves jumping between elevators, and the final one where you dismantle rivets to send Donkey Kong to his demise. While this is still very much a high score chasing experience, the usage of distinct regions with dramatically different obstacles offers a glimpse at the eventual shift away from the focused repetition of many early arcade experiences into the level-based approach of later works. When you first play it, there’s a sense of anticipation for what’s next (at least until you’ve seen all the areas and they start repeating).

Overall, this forward-looking quality contributes to one of the game’s most impressive accomplishments: more than 40 years later, it’s still pretty fun. Impressively, Nintendo sort of got it in one regarding the platforming. Yes, I get that the fixed jump arcs of early platformers aren’t for everyone, but the fact Mario is committed to his trajectory means that you need to decide when to jump in place (this is a safe option but doesn’t put you closer to your goal), use a forward jump (this can get you over multiple barrels/hazards, but leaves less time to recover before another obstacle comes your way), or climb a ladder to avoid what a jump couldn’t. It also helps that your actions come out fairly instantly, and while it feels a little unresponsive that there’s a cooldown after landing where you can’t jump again, overall, the game is spry despite its age.

Another important element is that each stage comes with unique challenges that help avoid repetition. The first area is the most iconic for a reason: it’s unpredictable and engaging to maneuver through these changing patterns of incoming barrels. However, the little micro behaviors learned here, of knowing when to scale the ladder or use the two jump types, are relatively distinct from how you approach the last stage, where you work around flame creatures while attempting to topple Donkey Kong. These fiery foes move erratically, meaning you can’t jump over them like you do with barrels, so the stage becomes more about finding a path to avoid them altogether. It always feels great to run straight at one of these enemies, remove a rivet, and jump back right before they reach you, leaving them stranded on the other side of the gap you just created.

There is barely controlled chaos in these stages that requires adaptation and quick thinking to stay alive. It’s this underlying randomness that’s kept the game fresh and difficult to conquer, helping fuel a long-running high score scene that’s still alive to this day. It usually speaks favorably to your game’s design when people are still obsessed with its intricacies decades removed.

Donkey Kong is one of those games where it’s hard to stop listing milestones: it was an artistic and financial turning point for Nintendo, pioneered platformers, saw the introduction of two of the most popular videogame characters in Mario and Donkey Kong, kickstarted Miyamoto’s career, and was an important stepping stone for videogame storytelling and level design. Hell, even its ports were incredibly significant: Gunpei Yokoi invented the d-pad while bringing it to the Game and Watch, and Nintendo releasing the game on the Coleco is what inspired them to get into the home console business with the Famicom/NES. Even by the standards of consequential videogames, this one is a pretty big deal. And unlike some early retro hits, you don’t need to only imagine why people went bananas for it back in the day—decades later, dodging hazards and punking on this ape holds up remarkably well.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.