Donkey Kong
System: Nintendo Entertainment SystemRelease Date: 1981
Players: 1-2
Extra Information
In a time when gaming was thought to be dead in the United States (the Atari company had collapsed, burning many business men and no one wanted to have anything to do with "video games" any more) Nintendo was trying to establish itself in America. Most games coming out were in a pretty typical "shooter" style and it was commonly thought that any game that didn't have "Space" or "Fighter" in it's name would be a flop.It was a bad situation: The company had just made hundreds of arcade systems with a game that apparently was going to be a flop. Hiroshi Yamauchi, President of Nintendo had hired a young college student recently as an artist, he seemed to have good ideas about games though, so Yamauchi ordered that this young man be placed in charge of converting the game that was in these arcade systems, to something that would sell. Pretty large order for a first job! The young man didn't do at all what was expected, first he sketched out a drawing of a fat little man with a large black mustache. The programmers said that it would be too hard to animate him though, players would expect to see his hair move up when he fell. So a hat was quickly sketched in. Next, a large ape was added. This was because one of the artist's favourite movies had been King Kong. It was decided that this monkey should be called a Kong as well, but what about it's first name? It couldn't be "King." A Japanese/American dictionary was brought into use and they decided on "Donkey" which meant foolish or stubborn. Thus the game Donkey Kong was born, where a dumpy plumber (or then carpenter) was out to rescue his girl friend from this Donkey Kong who had gone bad.