Miyamoto Shrine > Writer Kong: Histories > Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong started life as a similarly built but less hairy Bluto as Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi allowed a young designer Shigeru Miyamoto to make a game based on the Popeye license. Towards the end of the design of the game the deal fell through forcing Mr. Miyamoto to design his own characters to replace Popeye, Olive and Bluto so he turned to the latest Japanese cultural phenomenon for inspiration; Godzilla and King Kong.

Shigeru Miyamoto decided to make his own ape called Monkey Kong but after someone accidentally called him Donkey Kong Mr. Miyamoto decided to keep ‘Donkey’ because it meant stupid in English.

Mr. Miyamoto’s Original Sketch

The Donkey Kong arcade game was the first game to ever have a jump button and therefore it was the first platform game. The game was set on a number of different levels and your objective adjective as Mario (then called ‘Jumpman’) was to reach Pauline at the top of the screen whilst avoiding barrels thrown down by Donkey Kong as well as many other dangerous obstacles.

65’000 arcade units were sold in Japan and all of the games characters were shot into videogame stardom, Donkey Kong still remains one of the most important landmarks in gaming history.

After Donkey Kong's huge success in both Japan and abroad Mr. Yamauchi set Shigeru Miyamoto the task of creating a sequel. Mr. Miyamoto knew that he had to create something completely original to be successful in whatever art he was going to create and thus set to work on creating a completely new game.

Donkey Kong Jr was released in 1982 and ‘jumpman’ had finally been named Mario after the Nintendo of America landlord who supposedly looked a lot like ‘jumpman’. Instead of more barrel-jumping, the game consisted of climbing vines and dropping fruit on psycho-traps. Then again in 1983 Donkey Kong 3 was released where you played as Stan the bug man and had to kill off bugs whilst making sure Donkey Kong didn’t come down from the vines.

All the arcade games were eventually converted to NES and Game & Watch and Donkey Kong soon disappeared only returning in 1992 as a playable character in Super Mario Kart.

In 1993 Tony Harman, Development Manager of Nintendo of America, was visiting Rare Ltd as part of one of his globe trotting trips to visit developers making games for the Super NES. He was shown a simple demo of a boxer that used computer modeling techniques, Rare were able to convert the demo to the SNES and make a whole game with these beautiful graphics but only if Nintendo could provide the funding for such a huge project. When Tony returned to the USA he managed to get the backing of Mr. Miyamoto himself.

It was decided that Rare would be given the Donkey Kong franchise to use on their new game because it had little background story and Rare could pretty much make up whatever they liked for the game. Mr. Miyamoto designed a modernized Donkey Kong for Rare (although Rare added his tie) and the new game, Donkey Kong Country, was in development from the fall of 1993 to the winter of 1994.

Shigeru Miyamoto’s new Donkey Kong

In 1994 journalists were shown Donkey Kong Country for the first time, they all thought it was for a new Nintendo system to compete against the upcoming Playstation and Sega Saturn but were shocked to find out it was to be released for the Super Nintendo that year. Donkey Kong Country gave the SNES the edge against the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive in Europe) and persuaded people not to wait for new 32-bit systems that were on the horizon, the game sold 8 million copies and was the greatest selling 16-bit title ever.

Rare created 2 sequels for Donkey Kong Country which each sold extremely well, they then went on to create Donkey Kong country for the N64 and currently have several Donkey Kong games planned for Gamecube and Gameboy Advance. The rest as they say, is history.

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