Donkey Kong (arcade game)

is a 1981 arcade video game developed and published by Nintendo. As Mario, the player runs and jumps on platforms and climbs ladders to ascend a construction site and rescue Pauline from the giant gorilla Donkey Kong. It is the first game in the ''Donkey Kong'' series as well as Mario's first appearance in a video game.

''Donkey Kong'' is the product of Nintendo's efforts to develop a hit to rival ''Pac-Man'' (1980) and break into the North American market. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president at the time, assigned the project to first-time video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Drawing from a wide range of inspirations including ''Popeye'', and King Kong, Miyamoto developed the scenario and designed the game alongside chief engineer Gunpei Yokoi. They broke new ground by using graphics as a means of characterization, including cutscenes to advance the game's plot and integrating multiple stages into the gameplay.

Although Nintendo's American staff was initially apprehensive, ''Donkey Kong'' succeeded commercially and critically in Japan and North America, where it became the highest-grossing 1981 and 1982, respectively. It was ported to the Game & Watch, selling units, while Nintendo licensed the game to Coleco, a developer of arcade conversions for home consoles, selling cartridges; the game's various ports sold more than units worldwide. Other companies cloned the game and avoided royalties altogether. Miyamoto's characters were mass marketed in multitudes of products, including breakfast cereal, toys, and television cartoons. Universal City Studios filed a lawsuit alleging ''Donkey Kong'' violated its trademark of King Kong, ultimately failing.

The success of ''Donkey Kong'' positioned the company for market dominance from 1981 through the late 1990s. The game debuts Mario, who became Nintendo's mascot and one of the world's most recognizable characters. ''Donkey Kong'' pioneered the platform game genre before the term existed, is one of the most important games from the golden age of arcade video games, and one of the most popular arcade games of all time.

Gameplay

Following 1980's ''Space Panic'', ''Donkey Kong'' is one of the earliest examples of the platform game genre, even prior to the term being coined; the U.S. gaming press used 'climbing game' for games with platforms and ladders. As the first platform game to feature jumping, ''Donkey Kong'' requires the player to jump between gaps and over obstacles or approaching enemies, setting the template for the future of the genre. With its four unique stages, ''Donkey Kong'' is the most complex arcade game of the time, and one of the first arcade games with multiple stages, following games such as 1980's '' Phoenix'' and 1981's ''Gorf'' and ''Scramble''.

In addition to the goal of saving Pauline, the player has a score. Points are awarded for the following: leaping over obstacles; destroying objects with a hammer power-up; collecting items such as hats, parasols, and purses; removing rivets from platforms; and completing each stage according to a steadily decreasing bonus counter. The player starts with three lives with a bonus life awarded at 7,000 points. A life is lost when Mario touches Donkey Kong or any enemy object, falls too far, or lets the bonus counter reach zero. The game ends when all lives are lost.

Each of the four single-screen stages represents 25 meters of the structure Donkey Kong has climbed: 25, 50, 75, and 100 meters. Stage one involves Mario scaling a construction site made of crooked girders and ladders while jumping over or hammering barrels and oil drums tossed by Donkey Kong. Stage two involves climbing a five-story structure of conveyor belts, each of which transport cement pans. The third stage involves the player riding elevators while avoiding bouncing springs. The final stage requires Mario to remove eight rivets from the platforms supporting Donkey Kong; this causes Donkey Kong to fall and the hero to be reunited with Pauline. These four stages combine to form one level.

After each level, the stages repeat with increased difficulty. For example, Donkey Kong begins to hurl barrels faster and sometimes diagonally, and fireballs speed up. The victory music alternates between levels 1 and 2. The fourth level consists of 5 stages with the final stage at 125 meters. The 22nd level is colloquially known as the kill screen, due to a programming error that kills Mario after a few seconds, effectively ending the game. However, in the Japanese Version 1, the player can complete all the stages up to 100 meters. 100 meters in level 22 is the true kill screen of this version.

Plot

''Donkey Kong'' is considered to be the earliest video game with a storyline that visually unfolds on screen. The eponymous Donkey Kong character is the game's ''de facto'' villain. The hero is a carpenter originally unnamed in the Japanese arcade release, later named Jumpman, and then Mario. Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario's girlfriend, originally known as Lady and later renamed Pauline. The player must take the role of Mario and rescue her. This is the first occurrence of the damsel in distress scenario that provided the template for countless video games released after.

The game uses graphics and animation for characterization. Donkey Kong smirks upon Mario's demise. Pauline has a pink dress and long hair, and a speech balloon crying "HELP!". Mario, depicted in red overalls and a red cap, is an everyman character, a type common in Japan. Graphical limitations and the low pixel resolution of the small sprites prompted his design. A mustache implies a mouth, a cap obviates the animation of hair, and colored overalls distinguish his arm movements. The artwork of the cabinets and promotional materials make these cartoon-like character designs even more explicit. Pauline, for example, is depicted as disheveled like ''King Kong''s Fay Wray in a torn dress and stiletto heels.

Like ''Pac-Man'' (1980), ''Donkey Kong'' has cutscenes, but innovates by advancing a complete plot. The game opens with the gorilla climbing a pair of ladders to the top of a construction site, accompanied by a variation on the musical theme from '' Dragnet''. He drops Pauline and stomps his feet, warping the steel beams. He moves to his final perch and sneers. A melody plays, and the level starts. This brief animation sets the scene and adds background to the gameplay, a first for video games. At the stage, a heart appears between Mario and Pauline, but Donkey Kong grabs her and climbs higher, causing the heart to break. The narrative concludes when Mario reaches the end of the rivet stage. He and Pauline are reunited, and a short intermission plays.

Development

Nintendo of America was founded in 1980 with minor success at importing its parent's arcade cabinets from Japan. In early 1981, its president Minoru Arakawa bet the small startup company on a major order of 3,000 '' Radar Scope''. Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold ''Radar Scope'' machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president Hiroshi Yamauchi send a conversion kit of new game software. Yamauchi polled the company's entire talent pool for fresh game design concepts to save the distressed startup. 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.

Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for some of the development, with no role in the game's creation or concept, but to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo". Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards (PC boards). 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. '' Game Machine'' called it "simply a nuisance tactic" on the part of Ikegami.

At the time, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the ''Popeye