Miyamoto and his team had designed game mechanics and levels for Donkey Kong that could not be included, so they used them as the basis for a sequel. The victory cemented Nintendo as a major player in the video game industry. The lawsuit failed when Nintendo's lawyer, Howard Lincoln, discovered that Universal had won a lawsuit years prior by declaring that King Kong was actually in the public domain. In 1982, Universal City Studios filed a lawsuit alleging Donkey Kong violated its trademark of King Kong. It grossed $4.4 billion across various formats, making it one of the highest-grossing games of all time. Donkey Kong achieved further success in 1982, when Nintendo released a Game & Watch version and licensed it to Coleco for ports to home consoles. The windfall of $280 million rescued Nintendo of America from its financial crisis and established it as a prominent brand in America. It was released in July 1981 and became Nintendo's first major international success. ĭonkey Kong was one of the earliest platform games, following Mario as he ascends a construction site to rescue Pauline from Donkey Kong. Four programmers from Ikegami Tsushinki spent three months turning Miyamoto's concept into a finished game. As he lacked programming expertise, he consulted technicians on whether his concepts were possible. Miyamoto named ' Beauty and the Beast' and the 1933 film King Kong as influences. Popeye became Mario, the new protagonist, while Olive Oyl became Pauline, the damsel in distress. He named the character Donkey Kong- donkey to convey stubborn and kong to imply gorilla. Bluto evolved into a gorilla, an animal Miyamoto said was 'nothing too evil or repulsive'. Supervised by Gunpei Yokoi, Miyamoto settled on a love triangle with the characters Bluto, Popeye, and Olive Oyl from the Popeye franchise, but Nintendo was unable to obtain the license. Most of Nintendo's top developers were preoccupied, so the task went to Shigeru Miyamoto, a first-time game designer. Its founder, Minoru Arakawa, asked his father in-law, the Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi, to provide a new game that could salvage the unsold Radar Scope cabinets. It was a commercial failure and put the newly established subsidiary Nintendo of America in a financial crisis. In 1980, Nintendo released Radar Scope, a Space Invaders-style shoot 'em up. This followed the 1973 oil crisis having increased the cost of manufacturing toys and the success of Taito's Space Invaders (1978). In the late 1970s, the Japanese company Nintendo shifted its focus from producing toys and playing cards to arcade games. A total of more than 80 million copies in the Donkey Kong franchise have been sold worldwide as of 2022.ĭonkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto in 2013 An icon of the Donkey Kong franchise is barrels, which the Kongs use as weapons, vehicles, furniture, and lodging. Games outside the platforming genre include spin-offs of various genres including rhythm games such as Donkey Konga, racing games such as Diddy Kong Racing, and edutainment such as Donkey Kong Jr. Rool, who has stolen the Kongs' banana hoard. In 1994, the franchise was relaunched with the platformer Donkey Kong Country, in which Donkey Kong is antagonized by a variety of anthropomorphic enemies, mainly the Kremlings, a clan of crocodiles led by King K.

The game was a massive success and was followed by two sequels released in 19. The first is the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, debuting the main antagonist Donkey Kong and the hero Mario, in an industrial construction setting. The franchise primarily consists of platform games-originally single-screen action puzzle games and later side-scrolling platformers. It follows the adventures of a gorilla, named Donkey Kong, and his ape and monkey friends. Donkey Kong is a video game franchise created by Shigeru Miyamoto and owned by Nintendo.

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