Development
Nintendo of America was founded in 1980 with minor success at importing its parent's arcade cabinets from Japan. In early 1981, its president Minoru Arakawa bet the small startup company on a major order of 3,000 Radar Scope games.[23] Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president (and his father-in-law) Hiroshi Yamauchi send a conversion kit of new game software. Yamauchi polled the company's entire talent pool for fresh game design concepts to save the distressed startup.[23] This yielded Shigeru Miyamoto's debut as lead game designer of his Donkey Kong concept, and Yamauchi appointed head engineer Gunpei Yokoi as project supervisor with a budget of US$267000 1981 according to Miyamoto.[26]
The conception of Donkey Kong can be traced back to early 1980, when Miyamoto made three A4-size sheets briefly explaining the game's content and characters, about five game screen sketches, and a one-sheet diagram of the final animation.[27] Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for most of the development, heavily involved in the game's creation and concept, and to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo".[28][29] Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards. This later led to mutual lawsuits in 1983, as Ikegami asserted ownership over Donkey Kong which Nintendo denied as Ikegami was a subcontractor who had already been paid. Game Machine called it "simply a nuisance tactic" on the part of Ikegami.[30] Production on Donkey Kong began in January 1981 and lasted between 4–5 months, as Miyamoto was focused on developing it for a global market rather than just for Japan.[31][27]
The game was originally designed to have Mario escape from a maze, and jumping was not yet implemented, making platforming too difficult.[32] The four screens were also supposed to make up a single long stage, but this idea was scrapped due to the inability to implement vertical scrolling.[33] By late March 1981, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the Popeye comic strip, tentatively titled Popeye's Beer Barrel Attack Game.[27] In this iteration of the game, the player, as Popeye, would attempt to rescue Olive Oyl from Bluto in a similar manner to the final game, with the first level being completed by having the player use a jack to bend the top girder upwards, causing the barrels to roll back towards Bluto. After experiencing difficulty portraying the Popeye characters within the limits of the game hardware, Nintendo elected to replace Bluto with a newly created gorilla character before ultimately deciding to make the rest of the game's cast original, reserving the Popeye IP for future use.[34] Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter with a large hammer, and a girlfriend, mirroring the original rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl. The ape that had originally replaced Bluto would evolve into the titular Donkey Kong, which Miyamoto said was "nothing too evil or repulsive". He would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy". Miyamoto has named "
Full-scale development began in early April 1981 when then-manager Masayo Oka instructed Minoru Iinuma, Mitsuhiro Nishida, Yasuhiro Murata, and Hirohisa Komanome to stop what they were working on and assemble together in a meeting room for a new project. He explained that the purpose of this development was to use up the large amount of leftover PCB inventory and create a new game that made the most of the hardware capabilities. They were scheduled to complete the game in mid-June of that year.[27] Yamauchi wanted primarily to target the North American market, so he mandated that the game be given an English title, as with many previous Nintendo games. Miyamoto decided to name the game for the ape, who he said was the strongest character. The story of how Miyamoto came up with the name "Donkey Kong" varies. A false urban myth says that the name was originally meant to be "Monkey Kong", but was misspelled or misinterpreted due to a blurred fax or bad telephone connection. A more credible story claims Miyamoto looked in a Japanese-English dictionary for something that would mean "stubborn gorilla", or that "Donkey" was meant to convey "silly" or "stubborn"; "Kong" was common Japanese slang for "gorilla". A rival claim is that he worked with Nintendo's export manager to come up with the title, and that "Donkey" was meant to represent "stupid and goofy". In 2001, Miyamoto stated that he thought the name would convey the thought of a "stupid ape".[35]
Miyamoto had high hopes for his new project. He was not a programmer, so he consulted technicians for feasibility. He wanted to make the characters different sizes, and have different movements and reactions. Yokoi thought Miyamoto's original design was too complex, though he had some difficult suggestions, such as using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen which was eventually found too hard to program. Miyamoto then thought of using sloped platforms, barrels, and ladders. When he specified that the game would have multiple stages, the four-man programming team complained that he was essentially asking them to implement the game repeatedly. Nevertheless, they followed Miyamoto's design, creating a total of approximately 20 kilobytes of content. Yukio Kaneoka composed a soundtrack to serve as background music for the levels and story events.[36][37]
The circuit board of Radar Scope was restructured for Donkey Kong. The Radar Scope hardware, originally inspired by the Namco Galaxian hardware, was designed for a large number of enemies moving around at high speeds, which Donkey Kong does not require, so the development team removed unnecessary functions and reduced the scale of the circuit board.[38] The gameplay and graphics were reworked for updated ROM chips; the existing CPU, sound hardware, and monitor were left intact.[39] The character set, scoreboard, upper HUD display, and font are almost identical to Radar Scope, with palette differences.[40] The Donkey Kong hardware has the memory capacity for displaying 128 foreground sprites at 16x16 pixels each and 256 background tiles at 8x8 pixels each. Mario and all moving objects use single sprites, the taller Pauline uses two sprites, and the larger Donkey Kong uses six sprites.[41]
Hiroshi Yamauchi thought the game was going to sell well and phoned to inform Arakawa. Nintendo of America's distributors, Ron Judy and Al Stone, brought Arakawa to the lawyer Howard Lincoln to secure a trademark.
The game was sent to Nintendo of America for testing. The sales manager disliked it for being too different from the maze and shooter games common at the time, and Judy and Lincoln expressed reservations over the strange title. Still, Arakawa adamantly believed that it would be a hit. American staff began translating the storyline for the cabinet art and naming the characters. They chose "Pauline" for the Lady, after Polly James, wife of Nintendo's warehouse manager Don James. Arakawa suggested that the name of "Jumpman", a name originally chosen for its similarity to the popular brands Walkman and Pac-Man, be changed to "Mario" after Mario Segale, the landlord of the original office space of Nintendo of America.[42][43] These character names were used in promotional materials, although Mario was called Jumpman in the operations manual and instructions.[44] Donkey Kong was ready for release.
The game was completed in mid-June 1981 after debugging and adjustments, shipping a few ROMs for location tests a few days after.[27] Stone and Judy convinced the managers of two bars in Seattle, Washington, to set up Donkey Kong machines. The managers initially showed reluctance, but when they saw sales of $30 a day—or 120 plays—for a solid week, they requested more units. In their Redmond headquarters, a skeleton crew composed of Arakawa, his wife Yoko, James, Judy, Phillips, and Stone converted 2,000 Radar Scope machines to Donkey Kong using conversion kits imported from Japan, consisting of motherboards, power supplies, and marquee graphics.[23] The game officially went on sale in July 1981.
