Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong
July 9, 1981
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5
In a 1984 commercial promoting Donkey Kong-brand cereal, Mario can be heard with a distinctly Italian accent, even saying what would become one of Mario's catchphrases "Here We Go". This predates Charles Martinet portraying Mario with an Italian accent by 7 years.
subdirectory_arrow_right Radar Scope (Game)
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Some concepts considered for alternate games to use unsold Radar Scope cabinets for if Donkey Kong couldn't be developed were a Jack & the Beanstalk game, a fishing game, a space shuttle construction game due to space shuttles being a hot news topic at the time, and a game about fighting a disease in the human body, based on a movie (likely Fantastic Voyage).
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The development team behind Donkey Kong had concerns that the game had "no dream", in that the theme of construction sites and carpenters lacked a "sense of beauty which inspires you to dream about the future."
2
There are five unused audio files within the game, An alternate Pauline theme, two unused pieces for cutscenes, and two voice samples of what appears to be Pauline saying "Thanks" and "Help". These sounds weren't discovered until 33 years after the game's release.
subdirectory_arrow_right Crazy Kong (Game)
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Crazy Kong was an officially licensed clone of Donkey Kong released by Falcon Inc. to compensate for Nintendo's inability to make enough Donkey Kong machines as there was demand for. However, Crazy Kong was only allowed to be distributed in Japan, but Falcon released the game abroad anyway with Elcron Industries, leading to a lawsuit where Nintendo won.
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Attachment The Donkey Kong start theme is plagiarized from the 1950s police drama Dragnet.
subdirectory_arrow_right Mario (Franchise)
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Attachment In 1983, an album was released on vinyl by Kid Stuff Records titled Donkey Kong (alternatively called Donkey Kong Goes Home), retelling the story of the video game of the same name. It is notable for not only potentially being the first time Mario was voiced (having an unknown release date in 1983, which was also the debut year of Saturday Supercade), but also giving Mario a stereotypical Italian accent with an "-a-" verbal tic as opposed to the gruff Italian-American accent that would be used in multimedia projects for the rest of the 80s (including Saturday Supercade), predating Charles Martinet's debut as Mario in Mario Teaches Typing by 8 years. According to Kid Stuff Mario voice actor Pat McBride, the reasoning for this voice direction was

"He was Mario, he had that Italian background, we knew what his occupation was, and we knew he was a really good guy, in my brain, if there were kids in the neighborhood, he’d always pat them on the head and say hi. He’d look out for everyone, so he became the real good guy."

Nintendo never gave the team behind Donkey Kong Goes Home any form of guidance for the project, and did not give any word - positive or negative - about the finished album beyond approving it.
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month October 11, 2023
subdirectory_arrow_right Donkey Kong (Game)
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Attachment The earliest version of the "cross" design for a directional pad, developed by Gunpei Yokoi and named by the patented inventor Ichiro Shirai as the "Multi-directional switch", was first developed, patented and introduced for the 1982 Game & Watch port of Donkey Kong.
subdirectory_arrow_right Donkey Kong Junior (Game)
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The development of the first Donkey Kong game was outsourced by Nintendo to Ikegami Tsushinki, a company who is believed but not confirmed to have previously worked with Nintendo on several of their early ventures into arcade games. They produced and sold to Nintendo somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 printed circuit boards for Donkey Kong, and it is believed that Nintendo went on to copy an additional 80,000 boards from this batch without Ikegami's permission. Despite the sale, because no formal contract was known to have been signed between the two companies, Ikegami owned the source code to Donkey Kong as they had created it, and never sent it over to Nintendo.

In order to create a sequel on the coattails of the success of the first game, Nintendo employed subcontractor Iwasaki Giken to reverse-engineer Donkey Kong so Nintendo’s staff could develop the game's sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. Should this narrative be verifiably true, this would make Donkey Kong Jr. Nintendo's first "in-house" video game created by themselves without any assistance from outside development companies. Ikegami viewed this use of the source code as blatant copyright infringement, and sued Nintendo in 1983 for ¥580,000,000 (around $91,935,800). A trial in 1990 ruled that Nintendo did not own the source code to the original Donkey Kong, and the parties settled out of court the same year for an undisclosed amount.
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In the Japanese version of the game, the message is "How high can you try?" This was changed to "How high can you get?" in the North American Release.
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Attachment An unused Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd logo can be found along side the title graphics in the game's data. ITC developed the hardware and program code for the Arcade version of the game.
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The tune that plays while you have the hammer is based on the "Charge" bugle call that plays when a cavalry or troops are about to rush towards their enemies.
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If the "INTEND" part of the "NINTENDO" string (the data used to display the name) is altered in anyway in the game's code, the game will freeze after approximately 4 seconds. This is a form of copyright protection used to protect the game's data.
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The twenty-second board is the final level of the game; Mario instantly dies within eight seconds of playing in the level, regardless of how many lives the player has left. This bug, known as a kill screen, happens due to a programming oversight which causes the game to set an impossibly short time limit.
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subdirectory_arrow_right Radar Scope (Game)
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Attachment Donkey Kong started off as a game called Radar Scope. Radar Scope was a success in Japan, but failed to sell successfully in North America. They reused some of the unused arcade machine in order to avoid any financial loss.
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The game originally didn't have a jumping mechanic. It was implemented as a way to avoid obstacles when Shigeru Miyamoto and his team thought "If you had a barrel rolling towards you, what would you do?"
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In the arcade versions of the game, there's a hidden message in the files:

CONGRATULATION !
IF YOU ANALYSE
DIFFICULT THIS
PROGRAM,WE WOULD
TEACH YOU.*****
TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN
044(244)2151
EXTENTION 304

SYSTEM DESIGN
IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

While the first three lines were overwritten with other data in the American build, the rest survived unchanged.
subdirectory_arrow_right Popeye (Franchise)
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Attachment Shigeru Miyamoto originally wanted to do a Popeye game, specifcially based on the 1934 cartoon A Dream Walking, where Popeye and Bluto fight over Olive Oyl as she sleepwalks through a construction site, but couldn't get the license. He would later use the characters as inspirations with Mario taking the role of Popeye, Pauline as Olive Oyl and Donkey Kong as Bluto. Nintendo would eventually release a Popeye game a year after Donkey Kong in 1982.
person Bean101 calendar_month March 24, 2013
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When Donkey Kong became popular, Nintendo was sued by Universal. Universal claimed Donkey Kong was a rip-off of King Kong. Lawyer John Kirby proved that Universal didn't even have trademark rights to "King Kong", and so they lost the case. Nintendo gave Kirby a boat named Donkey Kong and exclusive rights to the name Donkey Kong for sail-boats as a strange way of thanking him. It's also rumored the character Kirby was named after John Kirby, but this was never confirmed by Nintendo.

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