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Classic Game of the Week  Donkey Kong
- By Eric Tajchman
The game that started it all. Donkey Kong not only created everyone’s favorite plumber, Mario, but proved the talents of a young programmer by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto and established Nintendo as an industry leader in the gaming market. Donkey Kong truly was a revolutionary game for its time, and the franchise has expanded to include such hit titles as Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing, and Donkey Kong 64.
In the original Donkey Kong, Mario (or Jumpman as he was first called) owned a giant ape called Donkey Kong. One day, the huge ape escapes and, in typical Kong fashion, kidnaps Jumpman’s girlfriend named Pauline. Jumpman must traverse tall, steel structures, broken ladders, dangerous elevators, and conquer barrels, fireballs, springs, spikes, and death-defying jumps in order to rescue his beloved Pauline.
So how did Miyamoto come up with such a crazy concept, and how did that concept turn out to be one of the most popular arcade games ever? Hiroshi Yamauchi first hired Miyamoto as Nintendo’s first staff artist, as Yamauchi was extremely impressed with Miyamoto’s creativity and art concepts. One of his first assignments was to redesign a previous arcade game called Radarscope, which had not been selling well. Radarscope was a flight game in which players shot down attacking planes. In Miyamoto’s mind, the concept was too bland and derivative of arcade games of that time. He wanted a game where the creativity and ingenuity of cartoons came to life. After considering many ideas to base his game off of, such as “Popeye the Sailor Man” and “Beauty & The Beast,” he finally decided upon an ape that was amusing rather than scary to be the antagonist character.
The design of Jumpman was a little more complicated, as Miyamoto tried to make the small, pixelated character distinguishable against the black background. The protagonist was to be a comical personality as well. He was given a large, easily recognizable nose and a bushy mustache. Since the setting of the game was to be on a steel construction set, he was given the occupation of carpenter. To match his job, he was given carpenter’s overalls, brightly colored to distinguish the different parts of his body. He was also given emphasized gestures, such as arm swinging and leg motions, to accent movement. Finally, his head was topped off with a bright red cap, as animating hair was too complicated then.
 
The success of the game came from the gameplay, which was addictive and entertaining. In that time, graphics were not terribly important, and it shows in Donkey Kong as the game features simple graphics for their time. But no one could deny how fun and successful Donkey Kong was when millions of people jammed quarters into the machine’s slots, and Nintendo saw the promise of the rising industry and from their hidden talent, Shigeru Miyamoto. Indeed, Donkey Kong appeared on the Atari VCS and the ColecoVision and sold well before finally landing on Nintendo’s own 8-bit console, the NES/Famicom.
If you haven’t experienced Donkey Kong, then you haven’t experienced the roots of Nintendo and the roots of gaming.
- 8.3.2001 |
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