Donkey Kong

1981 video game

Original description from the source, not translated.

YEAR 1981

GENRE Platformer

PLATFORM ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Famicom Disk System, DOS, Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy Advance, arcade video game machine, IBM Personal Computer, Atari 2600, Game & Watch series, Atari 8-bit family, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Amstrad CPC, Atari 7800, MSX, Commodore VIC-20, Coleco, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Nintendo e-Reader, Apple II

ABOUT THE GAME

Donkey Kong 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 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.

Source: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 — Donkey Kong (1981 video game) · retrieved October 19, 2026

Text is shortened from the original article; the full version is linked.

PROVENANCE

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