Donkey Kong – one of the first games with a story

The most popular series of the company Nintendo are definitely Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Pokemon, but when we talk about their oldest series – we are talking about Donkey Kongu. Today he celebrates his 45th birthday.

That is, he is celebrated by the first Donkey Kong game, but he is not celebrated by Donkey Kong as a character – we have to distinguish between those two things. You see, the first Donkey Kong to launch for arcade machines, as Nintendo’s answer to the then-popular Pac-Man, was actually named after the main villain of the game. Donkey Kong was a monkey who kidnapped Pauline, the girlfriend of an unnamed carpenter who was later named Jumpan.

In Donkey Kong we actually played as Jumpman rescuing his girlfriend from Donkey Kong, and if Jumpman looks familiar that’s because he was Today’s Mariobefore Nintendo named him that and retrained him as a plumber.

Donkey Kong bio is one of the first video games with a story which had plot and denouement shown on the screen itself. Before that, game plots were always described on the game box, etc.

Donkey Kong was one of the first video games with a story that had the plot and denouement displayed on the screen itself.

It is interesting how the idea of ​​a love triangle between a carpenter, a girl and a gorilla was modeled after the love triangle of Popeye, Oliva and Grubač. from the cartoon Popeye the Sailor. Nintendo then wanted to make a game with these characters, but they didn’t get a license for it, so they had to invent their own. And that came in handy, because if they had gotten the license for Popeye, maybe we wouldn’t have Super Mario today!

Basically, Jumpman in this game had to climb the platforms of the construction site, avoiding the barrels that Donkey Kong threw his way. Barrels were avoided by jumping over them, and Donkey Kong was the first game with such mechanics, thus the earliest example in the platformer genre. In addition to jumping over barrels, the main character had to climb a ladder and could break objects with a hammer.

Barrels were avoided by jumping over them, and Donkey Kong was the first game with such a mechanic.

The rules of the game were such that the player had three lives he could have lost in contact with Donkey Kong or the barrels. An extra life could be won after 7000 points, which were obtained by jumping over barrels and destroying objects. The game had four levels that formed one level. After passing the first four levels, the second set accelerated and made the game more difficult. This could continue until the 22nd level which was known as the “Kill Screen” where the Jumpman dies after a few seconds.

When Donkey Kong was released in 1981, it immediately became an arcade hit, and Nintendo had a lot of offers to launch the game on the home consoles of the time. Although there was some hesitation at first, eventually Donkey Kong appeared on almost every living platform. In Japan, it was one of the three games with which Nintendo’s NES console was launched.

Donkey Kong brought unimaginable profits for Nintendo at the time and collected 280 million dollars in the first two years in the US alone. In the territory of Japan and the USA, more than 132 thousand arcade machines with this game were sold, and more than 7 million copies of the game for home consoles.

A sequel, Donkey Kong Jr., followed soon after. which put us in the role of Donkey Kong’s son on a rescue mission – where Jumpman was the villain. It was followed by another sequel for Nintendo’s Game & Watch system and the third part, which ventured into the genre of shooting games. In 1994, Donkey Kong received its “modern” adaptation for the Game Boy console.

Since 1994, the title of Donkey Kong in the series Donkey Kong Country has been taken by a new character, the grandson of the first DK and the villain of the first game. The new Donkey Kong was presented as a good thing and had nothing to do with Mario going his own way. In retirement, old Donkey Kong grew a beard, got crutches and became – Cranky Kong.

By the way, it is worth mentioning that one of the biggest scandals in gaming is connected to this game. You see, back in the day, Donkey Kong was an extremely competitive game where players tried to score as many points as possible. The American Billy Mitchell was known as the absolute record holder, and a documentary film was made about his results.

However, his records were doubted for many years because he refused to play the game live against other players, and then after a months-long investigation in 2018 it was factually confirmed that Mitchell was playing an emulated version of Donkey Kong, breaking the rules. All his records were erased after that, and Mitchell went from the status of a legend to a hated figure in the gaming world.