is a 1981 platform game developed and published by Nintendo for arcades. As Mario (occasionally referred to as "Jumpman" at the time), the player runs and jumps onto platforms and climbs ladders to ascend a construction site in New York City and rescue Pauline (occasionally referred to as "The Lady" at the time) from the giant gorilla Donkey Kong. It is the first game in the Donkey Kong series and Mario's first appearance in a video game.
Donkey Kong was created to salvage unsold arcade cabinets following the failure of Nintendo's Radar Scope (1980), and was designed for Nintendo of America's audience. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president at the time, assigned the project to first-time video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Drawing inspiration from "Beauty and the Beast" and American media such as Popeye and King Kong, Miyamoto developed the characters and scenario and designed the game alongside chief engineer Gunpei Yokoi. Donkey Kong was the most complex arcade game released at that point, using graphics for characterization, including cutscenes to illustrate a plot, and integrating multiple unique stages into the gameplay. The game pioneered the platform genre before the term existed, is the first to feature jumping, and is one of the first video games with a damsel in distress narrative, after Sheriff. It had a limited release in Japan on July 9, 1981, before receiving a wide release in the region some weeks later.
Although Nintendo of America's staff was initially apprehensive, Donkey Kong was a critical and commercial success, becoming the highest-grossing game of 1981 in Japan and the highest-grossing game of 1982 in the United States. It was ported to the Game & Watch, selling eight million units, while Nintendo licensed the game to Coleco, a developer of arcade conversions for home consoles, selling six million cartridges. It was later ported to the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which was designed to replicate the arcade unit's technological capabilities; both the game and NES were integral in introducing Japanese video games to Western audiences. Donkey Kong's various ports sold more than 15 million units worldwide. Other companies cloned the game and avoided royalties altogether. Universal City Studios unsuccessfully sued Nintendo, alleging that Donkey Kong violated its trademark of the King Kong franchise.
Donkey Kong is regarded as one of the most important games of the golden age of arcade video games and one of the greatest video games of all time. Its success positioned Nintendo for market dominance during the 1980s and 1990s. The game debuted Mario, who became Nintendo's mascot and one of the world's most recognizable characters. It was mass-marketed through a wide range of products, including breakfast cereal, toys, and television cartoons. The game has been frequently referenced in popular culture and subsequent video games, and maintains an active high score competition.
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 platformer game to feature jumping, Donkey Kong requires the player to jump between gaps and over obstacles or approaching enemies whilst Donkey Kong throws barrels at the player, setting the template for the future of the genre. With four unique stages, Donkey Kong was 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 five stages with the final stage at 125 meters.
Bugs and exploits The first stage of level 22, the 130th stage overall, is colloquially known as the kill screen because of a programming error that kills Mario after a few seconds, effectively ending the game. In January 2025, a glitch was discovered via a tool-assisted superplay which sometimes allows climbing straight to the top of the kill screen from the starting point. This allows continuing the game until the 135th stage. Due to the limits of the joystick used, it is impossible to perform this trick on an actual Donkey Kong arcade machine within the stage's time limit.
Plot Donkey Kong is the earliest video game with a storyline that visually unfolds on screen. Set on a construction site in New York City, the eponymous Donkey Kong character is the de facto villain. The hero is a carpenter originally unnamed in the Japanese arcade release, later called Jumpman, then Mario. Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario's girlfriend, originally known as Lady and later renamed Pauline. The player takes the role of Mario to rescue her. This is the first occurrence of the damsel in distress scenario used in 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 disheveled like King Kongs 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 sequence sets the scene and adds background to the gameplay—a first for video games. At the end of 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, when he and Pauline are reunited.
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 games. Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president (and his father-in-law) 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.
The conception of Donkey Kong can be traced back to early 1980, when Miyamoto made three A4-size sheets briefly explaining the game's content and characters, about five game screen sketches, and a one-sheet diagram of the final animation. Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for most of the development, heavily involved in the game's creation and concept, and 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. 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. Production on Donkey Kong began in January 1981 and lasted between 4–5 months, as Miyamoto was focused on developing it for a global market rather than just for Japan.
The game was originally designed to have Mario escape from a maze, and jumping was not yet implemented, making platforming too difficult. The four screens were also supposed to make up a single long stage, but this idea was scrapped due to the inability to implement vertical scrolling. By late March 1981, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the Popeye comic strip, tentatively titled Popeye's Beer Barrel Attack Game. In this iteration of the game, the player, as Popeye, would attempt to rescue Olive Oyl from Bluto in a similar manner to the final game, with the first level being completed by having the player use a jack to bend the top girder upwards, causing the barrels to roll back towards Bluto. After experiencing difficulty portraying the Popeye characters within the limits of the game hardware, Nintendo elected to replace Bluto with a newly created gorilla character before ultimately deciding to make the rest of the game's cast original, reserving the Popeye IP for future use. Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he settled on a love triangle between a gorilla (originally envisioned as a man in a gorilla suit), a carpenter with a large hammer, and a girlfriend, mirroring the original rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl. The ape that had originally replaced Bluto would evolve into the titular Donkey Kong, which Miyamoto said was "nothing too evil or repulsive". He would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy". Miyamoto has named "Beauty and the Beast" and the 1933 film King Kong as influences. Although its origin as a comic strip license played a major part, Donkey Kong marked the first time that the storyline for a video game preceded the game's programming rather than simply being appended as an afterthought. An unrelated Popeye game was released by Nintendo for the Game & Watch the following month, as well as a game called Popeye for arcades in 1982.