The year was 1981, and the video game was enjoying its greatest era: the Golden Age of the Arcade. During this time, arcade games were HUGE; arcades were big money makers, and people would line up to spend a quarter on any game they could get their hands on. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Centipede, these were just some of the games that were taking the world by storm. However, one game would come to revolutionize gaming, not just inventing a new genre, but also reinventing how game presentation works. That game was Donkey Kong.
Before 1981, Nintendo was a company that made Hanafuda playing cards. Getting their feet wet in the electronics market beginning in the 70's, Nintendo began eyeing the then new video game market. Nintendo began their gaming venture by licensing the Magnavox Odyssey, one of the early game consoles. Their first console was the Color TV-Game, a specialized console that could only play one game. One model played only Pong, to give an example. The casings for these consoles were designed by a young man named Shigeru Miyamoto. These consoles were only sold in Japan.
Nintendo had made some arcade games beforehand; just a few titles like Sheriff. Wanting to break into the North American gaming market (which has consistently been the biggest, or at the very least one of the biggest markets in the world) Nintendo decided to assign their artist, Shigeru Miyamoto, to design their next game.
Miyamoto originally envisioned a game starring Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl. If you don't know who these characters are, they used to be some of the biggest names in Western animation. Anyway, Nintendo couldn't secure the rights to the characters, so Miyamoto instead kept the dynamic (two guys fighting over one girl, one a hero, the other a brute) and redesigned the characters. He eventually settled for a gorilla for the villain, a carpenter for the hero, and a red haired girl for the damsel in distress. Thus was born Donkey Kong.
Donkey Kong was released right in the middle of the Golden Age of the arcade, and of video games as a whole. Games like Pac-Man were taking the world by storm, so the gaming market was hungry for innovation. Of course, there were plenty of nay sayers, negative people who thought the game would fail because it was too "different" from what was the usual fare at the time: shooters, maze games, and the like. Donkey Kong was none of those things, instead, it was something new.
A game like Donkey Kong had never been made before. You jumped over enemies and obstacles, avoiding them instead of destroying them. You didn't shoot enemies, either. Donkey Kong was taking incredible risks. That is precisely the reason why Donkey Kong succeeded.
Donkey Kong was precisely what the video game market needed: innovation. Donkey Kong's innovation wasn't just on the technical, however, but also in the art. Donkey Kong had a built in story, one that was actually told via in game graphics. This is something NO OTHER GAME was doing at the time. Now, this is not to say that there weren't games telling stories, far from it. Games like Zork were already giving players gripping, original stories. But those were text based adventure games, not arcade games like Donkey Kong. In fact, Donkey Kong was one of the first video games to be built around the story, not the story around the game!
Every video game in the world that tells stories, from Final Fantasy, The Witcher, Uncharted, and so forth owe their entire existence to Donkey Kong. THIS was the game that started it all. So what kind of story did this game tell? A really simple one: one day, an ape named Donkey Kong kidnapped a girl, so it was up to her boyfriend, Mario, to save her. Simple? Yup. Done before? Sure was, hundreds of times. But in this case, it isn't about the story being original, it's about the story being told as a video game.
Donkey Kong proved to be more than a major hit, it became a pop culture PHENOMENON. This was a game that grabbed people's attention. It was even adapted into a Saturday morning cartoon!
But none of that is what makes Donkey Kong so important to the history of Nintendo. So, why is this game so important? Because it established what kind of game company Nintendo would become: one unafraid of taking creative risks. Nintendo would become one of the biggest innovators in gaming, if not THE big innovator. Nintendo would go on to create some of the greatest franchises in gaming history. Hell, in many cases, Nintendo would become synonymous with video games entirely! And it all started here; with a game about a gorilla, a carpenter, and their fight over a girl.
Sorry this entry was so short, I'm dealing with finals. But tune in next week when we explore how Nintendo SAVED the video game industry in America!
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