Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong is the arcade game that gave Nintendo its first big hit in North America and gave the world Mario. It was unveiled to the trade in Japan on 9 July 1981, at simultaneous showings in Osaka and Tokyo attended by more than 700 arcade operators, and went on test in the United States the following month. Within a year Nintendo of America, a struggling importer with a failed shooter on its hands, had become a company turning over more than a hundred million dollars.

The game itself fits on a single upright screen. A gorilla has carried a woman to the top of a building site; a carpenter in overalls runs along the girders, climbs the ladders and leaps the barrels the ape rolls down at him. Reach the top and the gorilla simply picks her up and climbs higher, to a cement factory, then a set of elevators, then a final platform held together by eight rivets. Pull them all out and the ape falls on his head, the couple are reunited under a heart, and the whole thing begins again, faster.

That was a lot of story for 1981. Arcade games were about spaceships and mazes; this one had three recognisable characters, an opening scene, an ending and a hero whose main skill was jumping. Guinness World Records lists the cabinet as the first platform video game, and both Wikipedia and Super Mario Wiki call it the first platform game in which the hero can jump. Shigeru Miyamoto, who had never designed a game before, drew the characters, planned the screens and, according to Super Mario Wiki, wrote the tunes himself (Wikipedia credits the music to Yukio Kaneoka); the code was written under contract by Ikegami Tsushinki, an arrangement that later ended up in court.

It also became one of the most widely converted games of the decade. Coleco bundled it with the ColecoVision, Atari put it on home computers, Nintendo made it a two-screen Game & Watch and then a launch game for the Famicom. Most of those versions leave something out, usually the cement factory, which is why the 2018 Arcade Archives release on Nintendo Switch mattered: it was the first time the complete arcade game had been sold in its own right for a home console (it had been tucked inside Donkey Kong 64 in 1999). On this site it matters for a simpler reason. Before Super Mario Bros., before Luigi, before the Mushroom Kingdom, there was a man with a hammer and a very angry ape.

“How high can you get?”

Between-stage screen, Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981), as documented by The Cutting Room Floor.

The question the game asks before every screen, beside a stack of gorillas showing how far up the building you have climbed. On the very first Japanese boards it read “How high can you try?”; later Japanese and all American boards use the wording above.

The questions people ask most about the original Donkey Kong, answered briefly here and in depth further down the page.

The plot takes about ten seconds to tell and the game tells it without a word. Miyamoto’s own version, given to Nintendo in 2016, is that the gorilla is Mario’s pet, that he has escaped, and that he has taken Mario’s girlfriend with him. Nintendo of America’s sales text put it more breathlessly, with a maiden crying for help as she is dragged up a maze of steel beams and “Little Mario” the carpenter giving chase. Super Mario Wiki, citing a 2023 Nintendo Dream interview, places the building site in New York.

What follows is one climb in four parts, each 25 metres higher than the last.

The ape climbs the building

Put in a coin and the arcade game opens with a short scene of Donkey Kong carrying the Lady up the ladders to the top of an unfinished building. It lasts a few seconds and tells you everything you need to know: who the villain is, who needs rescuing and which way is up. Similar interludes follow each screen, as the ape grabs her and climbs again. Most home versions, Nintendo’s own NES cartridge included, cut all of them but the ending.

A card then asks how high you can get, and Mario appears at the bottom left with the entire building above him.

25 m: the girders

The screen everyone knows. Sloping girders are joined by ladders, some of them broken, and Donkey Kong stands at the top left beside a stack of barrels, rolling them down one after another. They trundle along each girder and drop off the end, or take a ladder if the mood takes them. Mario runs up the slopes against the flow, jumping each barrel as it arrives.

An oil drum stands at the bottom. The very first barrel is dropped straight down into it to light it, and after that every blue barrel marked with a skull that reaches the drum produces a Fireball, a small living flame that wanders after Mario and can climb ladders. Once five are loose Kong stops sending blue barrels. Hammers hang over the girders for anyone who would rather fight than jump, and this is the only screen with none of the Lady’s belongings on it.

Reach the top girder and the ape scoops her up and carries her off up the ladders.

50 m: the cement factory

The second screen is all conveyor belts. They run along the second, fourth and fifth floors, changing direction without warning, and the lower two carry trays of wet cement (the “pies” of arcade slang, and the “sand piles” of many an old guide) that are fatal to touch. An oil drum in the middle of the floor breathes out Fireballs. Near the top, a pair of ladders slide up and down out of reach each time the ape beats his chest, so the last climb has to be timed.

Donkey Kong himself rides the top belt from side to side, harmless for once. The Lady’s hat, parasol and bag are all here to be collected. Mario only has to reach Kong’s floor, not hers, to finish.

This is the screen that most home versions leave out, including Nintendo’s own Famicom and NES cartridges, which is why many people who grew up with the game at home have never seen it.

75 m: the elevators

Two columns of moving lifts, one going up and one coming down, split a screen of small platforms. Mario starts at the bottom left, rides the first lift up, hops across to the middle, takes the second lift down and then climbs the last few ladders to the Lady. A drop from any height much greater than his own is fatal, and there is no hammer anywhere on the screen.

The danger at the top comes from the jacks, coiled springs that bound in from behind Donkey Kong, bounce along his girder and plunge straight down past the last ladder. Two Fireballs patrol the platforms below. Players learned to wait at the edge of Kong’s girder, just out of reach, let a spring skim past and then dash for the ladder before the next arrives.

100 m: the rivets

The top. Donkey Kong stands in the middle of a tidy steel framework with the Lady on a perch above him, and this time there is nowhere higher for him to go. Eight yellow bolts pin the floors to their uprights. Mario does not have to reach the top at all; he has to run or jump across every bolt, each of which pops out and leaves a gap.

Fires, larger cousins of the Fireballs, drift in from the edges of the screen, up to five at a time, and hunt him along the floors. Two hammers hang ready, and a removed bolt has a useful side effect: flames cannot cross the hole. Take out the eighth and the central section drops out of the building. Kong falls with it and lands on his head, while Mario and the Lady are finally brought together and a heart appears between them.

Then the building is back, the timer is higher and the ape is at the top again.

Japan and America: two different climbs

In Japan the game plays exactly as described above: every level is 25 m, 50 m, 75 m, 100 m, and the picture of stacked gorillas between screens counts up neatly.

For America the order was reshuffled. Level 1 is just the girders and the rivets. Level 2 adds the elevators (25 m, 75 m, 100 m). Level 3 is the first to include all four screens. Level 4 has five (25 m, 50 m, 25 m, 75 m, 100 m) and from level 5 onwards every level has six (25 m, 50 m, 25 m, 75 m, 25 m, 100 m), so the barrels come round three times per loop. The home computer versions published in Europe by Ocean in 1986 follow the Japanese order.

There were smaller revisions too. The Cutting Room Floor lists three Japanese and two American program sets. The earliest Japanese boards ask “How high can you try?”; the last American set, sent out as a speed-up kit in December 1981 to stop experts playing for hours, all but removes the rule that stops a barrel coming down a ladder Mario is standing on.

Level 22: the end of the line

The game was never given a final level, but it has one all the same. The bonus timer for each level is worked out as ten times the level number plus 40, multiplied by a hundred, and the first part of that sum is kept in a single byte, which cannot hold anything larger than 255. At level 22 the answer ought to be 260. It wraps round to 4 instead, the timer starts at 400, and Mario keels over a few seconds into the girders.

On Japanese boards that is the 85th screen of the game; on American boards, with their longer levels, it is the 117th. Players call it the kill screen, and for competitive purposes it is the finish line: a record attempt is a matter of how many points can be squeezed out of the 116 screens before it. More about the ways people have found round it is in Glitches.

The four stages of Donkey Kong

Each screen is named for its height above the ground. The arcade game has all four; the Famicom and NES versions have three.

1. 
   25 mGirders · barrels and Fireballs · hammersSloping girders, broken ladders, an oil drum and a gorilla with an endless supply of barrels. The only screen without any of the Lady’s belongings.
2. 
   50 mCement factory · cement tubs and Fireballs · hammersReversing conveyor belts, trays of cement and ladders that retract when Kong beats his chest. Cut from most home versions.
3. 
   75 mElevators · jacks, 2 Fireballs · no hammerRising and falling lifts over a long drop, then a dash past the bouncing springs. Later rebuilt as a stage in Super Smash Bros.
4. 
   100 mRivets · Fires · 2 hammers · Donkey Kong defeatedRemove all eight bolts to bring the structure, and the ape, down. Six bolts on ColecoVision and Intellivision.

In the arcade a level is one pass through the screens in the order for your region. In the American game, “L=05” and everything after it is the hardest the game gets, and L=22 is as far as it goes.

One joystick, one button. The stick walks Mario left and right and climbs him up and down ladders; the button makes him jump. That is the entire control panel, and almost everything that has happened in platform games since is an elaboration of it.

Running, jumping and falling

Mario can walk along girders, hop over anything that rolls towards him and climb any complete ladder. Broken ladders can be climbed only part of the way. He cannot attack on his own, he cannot jump while climbing, and he is fragile: a drop greater than his own height costs a life, as does touching Donkey Kong, a barrel, a flame, a cement tub or a bouncing jack. You begin with three lives and, on the usual settings, earn one more at 7,000 points.

Miyamoto has explained that the jump was a late addition. He had meant the game to be played with the stick alone, but once the design involved dodging things rolling down a slope the player needed a way over them, and the cabinet’s single button was put to work. The same jump then solved the problem of how to get on and off the moving lifts of the third screen.

The hammer

The only weapon in the game hangs in mid-air on three of the four screens (the elevators have none). Jump up and grab it and Mario swings it back and forth without being asked, smashing barrels, flames and cement tubs for points while a frantic little tune plays. It lasts only a few seconds, and while he is holding it he can neither jump nor climb, so a hammer picked up at the wrong moment can leave him stranded on a girder with the bonus running down.

In the arcade the flames turn blue while a hammer is in play, a detail that several of the home computer versions drop.

Scoring and the bonus timer

Points come from leaping over things, hammering them, picking up the Lady’s belongings, pulling rivets and, above all, finishing a screen quickly. According to the long-standing arcade-history.com tip sheet, clearing one barrel in a jump is worth 100 points, two together 300 and three or more 500 (the game flashes up 800 by mistake); a hammered barrel is worth 300 and other hammered objects 300, 500 or 800; each rivet is worth 100; and the parasol, hat and bag pay 300 points in level 1, 500 in level 2 and 800 from level 3 onwards.

The box in the top right corner is both a clock and a prize. It starts at 5,000 in level 1, 6,000 in level 2, 7,000 in level 3 and 8,000 from level 4, and ticks down a hundred at a time. Whatever is left when Mario reaches the top is added to the score; if it reaches zero he dies on the spot. Expert play is therefore a balance between climbing fast for the bonus and loitering to milk barrels for points.

Levels, loops and difficulty

Finish the rivet screen and the game begins another “level”: the same screens again, with barrels thrown more often and flames that move faster. There is no ending as such. Japanese boards play all four screens every time; American boards ration them out over the first few levels (see the level order below). From level 5 the American game settles into its final six-screen pattern, and a good player can keep going until the timer bug at level 22 ends the game for them.

Two can play, but only in turns.

The cabinets

The game was sold in three shapes: the standard upright, a sit-down cocktail table and a smaller cabaret model. The red uprights are converted Radar Scope cabinets; the blue cabinet that most people picture is much the commonest. In 2004 Namco built a combined Donkey Kong / Donkey Kong Junior / Mario Bros. machine for the North American market, using the international version of the game.

Items and objects

A short list, because the game is a simple one, but every object here has been turning up in Mario and Donkey Kong games ever since.

• 
  HammerSmashes any enemy for a few seconds. Mario cannot jump or climb while holding it. Found on 25 m, 50 m and 100 m; there is none on 75 m.
• 
  ParasolOne of the Lady’s three lost belongings. 300, 500 or 800 points depending on the level.
• 
  HatHer hat, dropped on the way up. Worth the same as the parasol. Missing from the Famicom/NES version.
• 
  BagHer handbag. Also worth 300, 500 or 800 points.
• 
  Bolt (rivet)Eight of them hold up the 100 m screen. Walk or jump over one to pull it out for 100 points.
• 
  Oil drumStands at the foot of 25 m and in the middle of 50 m. Anything that falls into it comes out as a living flame.
• 
  LadderWhole ladders lead upwards; broken ones stop short. Barrels can come down either kind.
• 
  The lost items in artworkThe parasol as drawn for the 1981 character sheet; the hat and bag had portraits too.

Few games have been spun off, sued over, sung about and quoted as often as this one. A selection, from 1982 to this year.

Donkey Kong (Game & Watch)Nintendo · 3 June 1982A two-screen handheld (model DK-52) in which Mario dodges barrels, rides a crane and cuts the wires holding up Kong’s platform. Super Mario Wiki, citing an Iwata Asks interview, calls it the first piece of gaming hardware with the cross-shaped directional pad. It was later remade in Game & Watch Gallery 2 and 4.

Saturday SupercadeRuby-Spears / CBS · 1983–84Nintendo of America began licensing the characters in 1982 for toys, food, a Milton Bradley board game and more, which led to Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior cartoon segments in this Saturday-morning show. Most of the merchandise used the character designs from the American arcade flyer.

Crazy KongFalcon · 1981A clone that began life with Nintendo’s permission, for sale in Japan only. When Falcon overproduced and exported the boards, Nintendo cancelled the licence in January 1982 and took the company to court in Kyoto.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of QuartersDocumentary · directed by Seth Gordon · 2007The film that made the high score famous, following Steve Wiebe’s attempt to take the record from Billy Mitchell. It opened at Slamdance in January 2007 and in American cinemas that August.

Donkey Kong (Game Boy)Nintendo · 1994Starts with all four arcade screens, then keeps going for another 97. See our page on Donkey Kong for Game Boy.

Donkey Kong JuniorNintendo · 1982The sequel swaps the roles: Mario has the ape in a cage and Kong’s son must rescue him. See Donkey Kong Junior.

Donkey Kong CountryRare · 1994Introduces Cranky Kong, a grumpy elder who is presented as the Donkey Kong of this very game, and has him play the NES title tune in the opening. The oil drums of Oil Drum Alley are the ones from 25 m.

Donkey Kong 64Rare · 1999A working cabinet stands in the Frantic Factory level, running the Japanese arcade version: all four screens, hidden inside a Nintendo 64 cartridge.

Super Smash Bros.Nintendo · 1999 onwardsThe hammer has been an item since the first game. Brawl added a 75 m stage that returned on Wii U and in Ultimate, where Donkey Kong and “Lady” also appear as a Legend-class spirit in their 1981 artwork.

Super Mario OdysseyNintendo · 2017New Donk City is a love letter to the game: red girders, oil drums, taxis with “1981-ND” number plates, an 8-bit section of girders and barrels, and Pauline’s song Jump Up, Super Star!, which quotes the 25 m tune. See Super Mario Odyssey.

Captain Toad: Treasure TrackerNintendo · 2014The Super Pickaxe plays the hammer tune, and the stage Retro Ramp-Up rebuilds 25 m with a Spike rolling spiked balls in Kong’s place.

The Super Mario Bros. MovieIllumination / Nintendo · 2023The cabinet appears under the name Jump Man, played by Giuseppe, a character drawn to look like the 1981 Mario.

Mario Kart WorldNintendo · 2025The DK Spaceport course is built around references to the arcade game. See Mario Kart World.

Museums2017–2024The game entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 2017; the museum’s 2023 extension includes a playable cabinet 20 feet tall. The Nintendo Museum shows it among its “Nintendo Classics”.

Three characters, one of whom became the most famous in video games. Their names took a while to settle.

Character	Who they are	In this game	Abilities & notes
MarioJumpman, the carpenter	A small man in a cap and overalls with a moustache. Miyamoto has said he pictured him as a young, unmarried man of about 24 to 26. In Japan during development he was “Ossan” (roughly “middle-aged bloke”), then Mr. Video and Jumpman; the arcade materials use Jumpman.	The hero, and the owner of the escaped ape. He runs, climbs, jumps and swings a hammer. Nintendo of America renamed him Mario before the game went on sale, after Mario Segale, the landlord of its warehouse, and its sales text calls him “Little Mario”.	Three lives; one extra at 7,000 points. Dies from any fall greater than his own height.
The Lady (Pauline)The one who needs rescuing	The woman held at the top of every screen. The Japanese game and manual call her simply Lady. In America she became Pauline, according to Chris Kohler’s book Power-Up (as cited by Wikipedia) after Polly James, the wife of Nintendo of America’s warehouse manager.	Waits at the top, calling for help, and loses a parasol, a hat and a bag along the way. The name Pauline was used on merchandise first; in the game itself it arrived with the MS-DOS and Apple II versions of 1983, then the Coleco Adam and the Western NES release.	Her three lost items are worth 300 to 800 points each.
Donkey KongThe ape of the title	A large, cross gorilla, and in Miyamoto’s telling a runaway pet rather than a monster. He took the place of Bluto when the game stopped being a Popeye project.	Rolls barrels on 25 m, rattles the ladders on 50 m, sends out jacks on 75 m and stands guard on 100 m until the floor is pulled from under him. Touching him is fatal. Donkey Kong Country later presented this original Kong as the elderly Cranky Kong.	Cannot be harmed by the hammer. Jumping right beside him on 100 m scores 100 points a time.

Enemies and hazards

Everything that can kill Mario, in order of appearance. The names are those used by Nintendo and Super Mario Wiki; arcade players have their own.

• 
  Donkey Kong (boss)Every screenNever attacks directly, but contact means a lost life. Beaten only on 100 m, by removing all eight bolts.
• 
  Barrel25 mRolled down the girders, sometimes dropping down ladders. 100 points to jump, 300 to smash.
• 
  Blue barrel25 mMarked with a skull. If it reaches the oil drum it becomes a Fireball. Missing from several home versions.
• 
  Fireball25 m, 50 m, 75 mA small flame with eyes, born in the oil drum. Follows Mario and climbs ladders.
• 
  Fireball (hammer active)25 m, 50 mFlames turn blue while Mario holds a hammer, showing they can be hit.
• 
  Cement tub50 mA blue tray of wet cement riding the conveyor belts; the “cement pie”. Jump it or hammer it.
• 
  Jack75 mA bouncing spring that crosses Kong’s girder and drops off the end. Cannot be destroyed, because the screen has no hammer.
• 
  Fire100 mBigger than a Fireball and harder to clear. Up to five on screen in the arcade, four on the NES. Old tip sheets call them Firefoxes.
• 
  Fire (hammer active)100 mThe blue, vulnerable form.
• 
  Oil drum25 m, 50 mHarmless in itself, but the source of every Fireball.
• 
  Falling cement tub (unused)In the ROM onlyA frame of the cement tub tipping over. The Cutting Room Floor notes it is never shown, since the cement never falls.

Key people

The arcade game has no credits screen. These are the names the sources agree on.

A rescue job that turned into a revolution. Most of what follows comes from Nintendo’s own interviews with Miyamoto, from Super Mario Wiki’s documented history and from David Sheff’s Game Over and Steven Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games as cited by Wikipedia.

A warehouse full of Radar Scope

Early in 1981 Minoru Arakawa, president of the young Nintendo of America, staked the company on an order of some 3,000 cabinets of an arcade game called Radar Scope. It sold poorly in North America, and about 2,000 machines sat unsold in a warehouse. Arakawa asked Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, for a new game that could be fitted into the same cabinets.

Yamauchi gave the job to Shigeru Miyamoto, a staff artist who had never designed a game, under the supervision of Gunpei Yokoi. The replacement had to suit the existing cabinets, with their one joystick and one button, and be ready quickly. Miyamoto has said that games then took about three months and this one took four or five, and that it was the project that first made him think about players outside Japan.

The Popeye game that wasn’t

The first idea was a Popeye game: Bluto carries off Olive Oyl, Popeye climbs after her. Concept drawings dated 21 March 1981 show exactly that, on girders. Nintendo already made Popeye products, and a Popeye Game & Watch was in development at the same time, but the arcade game went ahead without the sailor.

Why is less clear than the usual story of a licence refused. Miyamoto told Satoru Iwata, “while I can’t recall exactly why it was, we were unable to use Popeye in that title.” Super Mario Wiki, citing a deposition by Yokoi unearthed by Gaming Historian, says the characters were changed for technical reasons, and Wikipedia now describes the claim that King Features turned Nintendo down as an error. Either way Miyamoto drew replacements: a gorilla for Bluto, a carpenter for Popeye, a lady for Olive. Nintendo’s Popeye arcade game followed in 1982.

Designing the climb

Yokoi’s starting point, according to Super Mario Wiki, was the Popeye cartoon A Dream Walking, set on a building site; King Kong supplied the ape and the skyscraper. An early version had the hero escaping from a maze with no ability to jump, which proved too awkward to play. The four screens were at first meant to be one tall, continuous stage, an idea dropped because the hardware could not scroll vertically.

Miyamoto thought up ideas, he has said, in the company bath that Nintendo’s head office shared with its playing-card factory. The hero’s look came from what a handful of pixels and colours could show clearly.

The arcade board could even talk. The Lady was meant to shout “Help!” and to say “Nice!” when Mario cleared a barrel, but an English speaker who heard the samples thought the first word was “kelp”, and they were replaced by Kong’s growl and a blip. Both recordings are still in the ROM.

Ikegami Tsushinki writes the code

Nintendo had artists and engineers but few programmers in 1981, so the program was written by Ikegami Tsushinki, a contractor which had already worked on several earlier Nintendo arcade games. Wikipedia’s account, drawn from Japanese sources, has a team of four starting full-scale work in early April 1981 and aiming to finish by the middle of June. Their contract gave Ikegami the sole right to manufacture the circuit boards.

The programmers left a calling card. Hidden in the code is a message that ends “TEACH YOU”, followed by the company’s name drawn in pixels, and an unused Ikegami logo sits beside the title graphics. Programmer Hirohisa Komanome later said it was put there as a joke for the bootleggers they expected to take the code apart.

Naming the ape, and the man

The boards are stamped “TKG”, which Super Mario Wiki explains as a working title of “Table Kong Game”, and Gaming Historian’s research credits export manager Shinichi Todori with fixing the final name at the end of May 1981. Miyamoto’s own account is that he wanted an English name for a silly gorilla and believed “donkey” carried the sense of “stupid”. Nintendo of America told him it did not. He kept it, and drew a lesson from it: “impact is important, and that’s something else that Donkey Kong taught me.” The old tale that the name is a mistyped “Monkey Kong” is, according to Wikipedia, a myth.

The hero was Mr. Video and then Jumpman until the game reached America, where the staff named him after their landlord, Mario Segale, who was said to look a little like him. The Lady, in time, became Pauline.

From a tavern in Renton to 132,000 cabinets

In Japan the game was shown to operators on 9 July 1981 at the Ark Hotel in Osaka and at the Tokyo offices of Nintendo Leisure System. In America a test machine was installed in mid-August at The Spot Tavern in Renton, Washington; Wikipedia, citing the book Arcade Fever, says the test machines brought in roughly $30 a day (120 plays) across a week, and the bar managers asked for more. A small crew in Redmond converted the stranded Radar Scope cabinets using kits shipped from Japan, and Nintendo of America recorded its first sale on 10 September.

After that it sold as fast as it could be built: 4,000 machines a month by October, and 60,000 in the United States by June 1982, according to the same sources. In December 1981 Nintendo sent operators a speed-up kit to stop the best players occupying a machine all evening on one coin.

Universal City Studios v. Nintendo

Success brought a letter from Hollywood. In April 1982 MCA Universal’s president Sid Sheinberg decided that Donkey Kong infringed the studio’s rights in King Kong and demanded Nintendo’s profits. Coleco, about to launch its console with the game in the box, agreed in May to pay Universal a royalty. Nintendo of America’s lawyer Howard Lincoln advised fighting, and Universal sued in New York on 29 June 1982.

Nintendo’s trial lawyer, John Kirby, had a simple answer: Universal itself had argued in court in 1975, against RKO, that the story of King Kong was public domain. Judge Robert W. Sweet ruled for Nintendo, also ruling that Tiger’s handheld King Kong game, licensed by Universal, copied Donkey Kong. The appeal court upheld him in October 1984, and in 1985 he awarded Nintendo $1.8 million in costs and losses.

Nintendo thanked Kirby with a $30,000 sailing boat named Donkey Kong, along with what David Sheff records as “exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats”.

Crazy Kong and the Ikegami lawsuit

Demand in Japan outran supply, so Nintendo licensed Falcon to build a version called Crazy Kong for the home market only. Falcon made more than 9,000 boards beyond its allowance and shipped them to America; Nintendo ended the agreement on 29 January 1982, won an injunction in Kyoto that June and pursued importers in the American courts as well. From Donkey Kong Jr. onwards it manufactured everything itself.

That decision led to the second lawsuit. Ikegami sued in 1983, saying Nintendo had broken their contract by producing around 80,000 boards on its own and had reverse-engineered Ikegami’s code to make the sequel. The contract did not say who owned the program. The case ran in the Tokyo courts for seven years and was settled privately on 26 March 1990. Ikegami is not credited in the game.

The Famicom and NES version

When the Family Computer went on sale in Japan on 15 July 1983, Donkey Kong was one of its launch games. The conversion, handled by Nintendo R&D2, was easily the closest yet seen at home, but it is not the whole game: the cement factory is gone, so is the opening scene and every between-screen interlude except the ending, the Lady has lost her hat, and the palette is darker, with a brown rather than orange ape. It gained a title tune the arcade never had, the one Cranky Kong plays in Donkey Kong Country.

This is the version that reached America as part of the NES Arcade Classics Series in June 1986, and the one behind almost every later re-release. Because its levels are shorter, its own timer bug does not strike until level 133.

A game this old collects a lot of claims. These are the ones with a source behind them.

There are no codes in the arcade game: what it has is technique, most of it worked out by players in the early 1980s and written down in tip sheets ever since. The home computer versions do hide a couple of genuine secrets.

Barrels and ladders

On every arcade revision except the last American one, and on the NES, a barrel will not come down a ladder while Mario is at the top of it with a hand on the girder, so a ladder is a safe place to wait. The American speed-up kit shrinks that safe zone from 16 pixels to 4. On any version, barrels on the upper girders tend to be drawn towards Mario: step just past a ladder and a barrel will often take it, clearing the girder ahead. Experts call this steering.

Hammer discipline

A hammer lasts five to seven seconds and pins Mario to his girder. Stand under the end of the girder above to smash barrels as they drop, jog back and forth to catch two close together, and keep an eye on the bonus box.

Jumping for points

One barrel is 100 points, two together 300, three or more 500. Because barrels bunch up after coming down ladders, patient players wait for a group. Not every jump scores, and the game sometimes awards points for objects behind Mario.

The conveyor belts

Jump towards a ladder rather than walking to it, in case the belt reverses. On the fourth floor, cling to one of the retracting ladders to let cement tubs pass underneath, then climb when it extends. You only need to reach Donkey Kong’s floor.

The elevators

Take the upper route: ride the first lift up and step off when level with the next girder, then catch the descending lift while it is still slightly above you and run straight across. At the top, stand at the very edge of Kong’s girder, where the jacks skim past without touching; when one has just gone by, run past the ladder, turn and climb. With good timing Mario can also hop from the second lift straight to a higher platform.

The rivets

Use the holes. Stand beside a bolt, wait for a Fire to approach and jump backwards across it: the bolt comes out, you score 100 and the Fire cannot follow. Jumping into the side walls bounces Mario back on to his girder. Leaping up and down right beside Donkey Kong scores 100 points a jump for as long as your nerve holds.

The Japanese shortcut

On the earliest Japanese boards (the ones that say “How high can you try?”), jumping right from the far end of the bottom girder bounces Mario off the edge of the screen and through the floor, which the game counts as finishing 25 m. It was fixed in the next revision. Arcade Archives on Switch offers an early Japanese version alongside the later and international ones.

Atari 8-bit: the programmer’s initials

Finish a game with a score in the 37,000s, in the 73,000s or in the 77,000s, losing your last life by falling. Back at the title screen set the difficulty to 4 and wait for the demo to finish: “LMD”, for programmer Landon M. Dyer, appears at the bottom of the screen.

Apple II: keypad cheats

In the Atarisoft Apple II version, pressing 1 on the number pad adds extra lives and 2 makes Mario invincible.

The barrel behaviour differs between board revisions: if a tip does not work, you may be playing a different set.

One bug defines the game; several others are worth knowing.

The kill screen

At level 22 the starting bonus should be (10 × 22 + 40) × 100 = 26,000. The first part is held in one byte, so 260 wraps to 4 and the timer starts at 400. Mario dies within seconds of the screen starting. With no way to finish the screen the game is effectively over, whatever lives are left.

Getting past it

It can be done, on paper. On the first Japanese revision the through-the-floor shortcut clears the screen, though the rivet screen three stages later (the 88th) is then impossible, because there is not enough time to pull eight bolts. On American boards a trick with a broken ladder gets Mario to the top in time, provided Donkey Kong happens to delay his fourth barrel twice, a one-in-32 chance; the rivets of level 22 (the 122nd screen) are again out of reach. Wikipedia notes a tool-assisted run of January 2025 that found a further route, not possible with a real joystick.

The 800 that is really 500

According to the Arcade-History notes, jumping three or more barrels at once makes the number 800 float up while only 500 is added to the score.

Trapped Fire

On 100 m, pulling a bolt while a Fire is directly over it can leave the flame stuck between two floors.

NES: ladder wraparound

The NES version has a ladder glitch on 25 m that wraps Mario around the screen. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition forbids it, rewinding the player to the start while the clock keeps running.

NES: the other kill screen

With only three screens per level the NES game takes much longer to reach its own timer overflow, at level 133, the 397th screen.

The copy-protection freeze

Not a bug but a trap. Each time a barrel is destroyed the program checks that the letters “INTEND” in the on-screen NINTENDO copyright line are intact. Bootleggers who changed the name found their game locking up about four seconds in, when the first barrel hits the oil drum.

Nintendo’s own Treehouse team playing the arcade original on Switch at E3 2018, and Gaming Historian on how Jumpman, the Lady and the ape got their names.

• The arcade circuit boards are numbered “TKG”, a leftover from the working title. Super Mario Wiki gives it as “Table Kong Game”.
• Hidden in the program is a message from the uncredited programmers ending “TEACH YOU”, followed by the name IKEGAMI spelt out in pixels. The last American revision overwrote the first part of it with other code.
• The Lady was going to speak. Samples of her saying “Nice!” and shouting “Help!” are still in the arcade ROM, along with three unused pieces of music.

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  Coleco’s live-action American television adverts dressed Mario in 1930s clothes and a fedora.
• The Japanese manual for the Game & Watch version calls the hero “Kyūjo Man” (rescue man), and British print adverts for it named the Lady “Louise”.
• 50 m is the only screen on which Donkey Kong appears to move about, and even then it is the conveyor belt doing the work.
• The Atari 8-bit version swaps one of the Lady’s belongings for a birthday cake on 50 m and 75 m.
• Coleco showed a version for its Adam computer at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1983. Atari, which held the home computer rights, objected, and according to Super Mario Wiki the row sank a nearly complete deal for Atari to distribute the Famicom in North America.
• The Intellivision cartridge will not run on the redesigned Intellivision II, which was built to lock out other companies’ games.

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  On the Famicom and NES the ape is dark brown rather than orange. Miyamoto has explained that the arcade characters used four colours each and the home console could manage only three.

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  The Famicom and NES version adds a title tune the arcade game never had. Donkey Kong Country and Mario Power Tennis later borrowed it.
• Miyamoto says he did his thinking for the game in a bath at Nintendo’s head office, shared with the playing-card factory next door and empty at night.
• In Donkey Kong Country 2 Cranky Kong grumbles about his days of whisking off maidens and chucking barrels, which is this game in seven words.
• An advert for the first Super Smash Bros. in Nintendo Power pointed out that Mario and Donkey Kong had not “duked it out” for over a decade.
• Pac-Man’s reveal trailer for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U ends with arrows pointing at Mario and Donkey Kong, labelled “1981”.
• The 2012 Club Nintendo giveaway of Donkey Kong Original Edition came with American eShop text presenting it as the first time the full set of four stages, cement factory included, had been offered in North America.

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  Namco’s 2004 three-in-one cabinet put Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior and Mario Bros. in a single machine, for North America only.
• In May 2026 a Pikmin Bloom event marked the game with a Famicom cartridge decoration for Red Pikmin.
• When The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, opened its extension in 2023, it built a working Donkey Kong cabinet 20 feet high.
• Guinness World Records marked the 45th anniversary on 9 July 2026 by pointing out that Donkey Kong is still 24 years younger than Fatou, the world’s oldest living gorilla.

An arcade game has no box, so the covers begin with the home versions. Nintendo’s Famicom box came first in 1983; the black NES box with its chunky pixel art followed in 1986 and was translated for half of Europe. Coleco and Atari drew their own.

The same first screen, fifteen different ways. Between 1982 and 1988 the game was converted for almost every machine on sale, and no two versions agree on what could be left out.

Logos, the 1981 character artwork, Miyamoto’s concept drawings, flyers and trade adverts, and the paper parts of the cabinet itself.

Forty-five years on, the game is still on sale, still being argued over and still being played for records. This is everywhere it has been.

Releases and re-releases

• Arcade 1981Shown in Japan on 9 July 1981. On test in the United States in mid-August and on sale there from 10 September; The Cutting Room Floor dates the American release to 31 July. Europe followed later in 1981.
• Game & Watch 3 June 1982A two-screen handheld with its own design, model DK-52, and the first with a cross-shaped D-pad.
• ColecoVision, Atari 2600, Intellivision 1982All published by Coleco under a deal agreed in November 1981 and signed on 1 February 1982. The ColecoVision version, packed in with the console, and the Atari 2600 version arrived in July 1982; Intellivision in October. A Coleco tabletop unit and, in 1984, a Coleco Adam version followed.
• Home computers (Atari) 1983–84Atari 8-bit in June 1983, then Atarisoft versions for TI-99/4A and MS-DOS (November 1983), Apple II (December 1983) and VIC-20 and Commodore 64 (February 1984).
• Famicom 15 July 1983A launch title in Japan, without the cement factory. Reissued on Famicom Disk System on 8 April 1988.
• NES 1986North America on 15 June and Europe on 15 October 1986, in the Arcade Classics Series; later paired with its sequel on the Donkey Kong Classics cartridge.
• Home computers (Ocean) 1986Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX and ZX Spectrum versions for Europe, using the Japanese level order; Spain in 1987.
• Atari 7800 November 1988Announced with Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros. at the June 1988 Consumer Electronics Show.
• Donkey Kong 64 1999The Japanese arcade version is playable on a cabinet in Frantic Factory.
• Animal Crossing GameCubeThe NES version is one of the playable NES games in the GameCube original.
• Donkey Kong-e 11 November 2002The NES game on e-Reader cards for Game Boy Advance in North America, with no two-player mode.
• Classic NES Series 2004Game Boy Advance: Japan (as Famicom Mini) on 14 February, North America on 7 June and Europe on 9 July 2004.
• Namco arcade cabinet 2004Donkey Kong / Donkey Kong Junior / Mario Bros., North America only, with the international arcade version.
• Wii Virtual Console 2006NES version: North America 19 November, Japan 2 December, Australia 7 December and Europe 8 December 2006; South Korea 26 April 2008.
• Donkey Kong Original Edition 2010–2014The NES game with 50 m and some animations restored. Pre-installed on the European Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary Wii consoles (red, 29 October 2010; black, 26 November 2010); a Club Nintendo download for 3DS in Japan (28 July to 2 September 2012) and the United States (1 October 2012 to 6 January 2013); then sold on the 3DS eShop in Europe from 18 September 2014 and Australia from 19 September.
• Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console 2012–2016NES version: Japan 17 October 2012, North America 15 August 2013, Europe and Australia 21 November 2013, South Korea 2 March 2016.
• Wii U Virtual Console 15 July 2013NES version, released in every region on the Famicom’s 30th birthday.
• NES Classic Edition November 2016One of the built-in games on the miniature NES (10 and 11 November 2016) and on Japan’s Nintendo Classic Mini: Family Computer.
• Arcade Archives June 2018Nintendo Switch, by HAMSTER: North America 14 June, elsewhere 15 June 2018, priced at $7.99 in the US. Early Japanese, later Japanese and international versions, with online score tables.
• Nintendo Switch Online September 2018The NES version was one of the 20 games available when the service began on 18 and 19 September 2018, with online play.

The high score

Because the game ends at the same place for everybody, its high score is one of the purest contests in gaming, and one of the longest-running. The table kept on Wikipedia begins in 1982 and has Billy Mitchell taking the record to 874,300 on 7 November that year. It stood until Tim Sczerby scored 879,200 in August 2000. Steve Wiebe took it to 985,600 in June 2005 and 1,049,100 in August 2006, the period covered by The King of Kong.

Hank Chien and Wiebe traded the record through 2010, Chien finishing the year on 1,068,000, and since September 2014 the name at the top has most often been Robbie Lakeman, who appears ten times in the table, from 1,141,800 to the 1,272,800 he set on 8 June 2021. Guinness World Records still listed that score as the record in July 2026. Scores change; check the date on anything you read, including this.

Mitchell’s place in the story remains disputed. Twin Galaxies, the scorekeeping body, struck out his Donkey Kong scores in April 2018 after concluding that three of them had not been played on original arcade hardware; Guinness followed, then reinstated his records in June 2020; and in January 2024 Mitchell and Twin Galaxies settled their lawsuit, with his scores returned to a historical database but not to the current leaderboards.

Tournaments keep the scene alive. The Kong Off, first held in New Jersey in 2010, has been won by Hank Chien, Jeff Willms, Robbie Lakeman and Jeff Wolfe, and an Australian Kong Off has run annually since 2018.

What came next

Nintendo followed up quickly with Donkey Kong Junior (1982), in which Mario is the villain, and Donkey Kong 3 (1983). By then Mario had a game of his own, and soon afterwards Super Mario Bros. made the carpenter a plumber and a star.

The original design was properly revisited in 1994, when Donkey Kong for Game Boy used the four arcade screens as the prologue to a puzzle platformer of a hundred-odd stages. That game in turn became Mario vs. Donkey Kong on Game Boy Advance, remade for Switch in 2024 as Mario vs. Donkey Kong. And in 2025 the ape and a young Pauline shared top billing again in Donkey Kong Bananza.

Sales figures

Arcade games were sold to operators, not players, so the numbers are cabinets. Super Mario Wiki, citing a 2017 Newsweek article, gives about 132,000 machines across Japan and North America; Wikipedia breaks that down as roughly 65,000 in Japan and 67,000 in the United States, and, citing Steven Kent, says 60,000 had been sold in America by June 1982 for $180 million. Court papers from the Universal case, quoted by Super Mario Wiki, show Nintendo of America’s sales rising from $4.7 million to $111 million in the year after September 1981.

The home versions added millions more. Wikipedia’s figures, taken from period reports, are six million cartridges sold by Coleco and 840,000 copies of the Famicom cartridge in Japan. Guinness World Records, in its 45th anniversary piece of July 2026, puts the game’s total across arcade, NES, Game & Watch and ColecoVision at around 15 million units, and notes that no later Donkey Kong game, Bananza included, has yet overtaken it.

• 132,000arcade cabinets, Japan and N. America (Newsweek via Super Mario Wiki)
• 60,000US cabinets by June 1982 (Kent, via Wikipedia)
• 6 millionColeco cartridges (Wikipedia)
• 840,000Famicom copies in Japan (Wikipedia)
• c. 15 millionall versions (Guinness World Records, 2026)
• 1,272,800record score, Robbie Lakeman, 8 June 2021

Reception and review scores

There were no review scores for arcade games in 1981; operators judged a machine by its cash box, and this one filled it. Scored reviews exist for the home conversions and the modern re-releases, and they mostly mark the game on how much of the arcade original is present.

In the trade press of the day it was simply the game of the year: Wikipedia records that Japan’s Game Machine listed it as the highest-earning arcade game of 1981. Home reviewers were pickier. Joystik gave Coleco’s Atari 2600 cartridge a single star in January 1983, objecting to the two missing screens, and told readers the ColecoVision version was far better.

The same complaint followed the NES version for decades. Reviewing the Wii Virtual Console release, IGN’s Lucas M. Thomas gave it 4 out of 10 and asked Nintendo for the real thing: “Give us the real Donkey Kong, Nintendo, not the same old incomplete port.” Nintendo Life found the 3DS release “a somewhat shallow gaming experience”. When the arcade game finally arrived on Switch in 2018, Nintendo World Report called it “the real deal” and scored it 8.5.

Its place in history has never been in doubt. Next Generation ranked it 50th among the hundred best games of all time in 1996, Nintendo Power placed it 148th among Nintendo games in February 2006, and in 2017 it was admitted to the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Honours

Donkey Kong has yet to receive a community review on Super Luigi Bros.

If you’ve played Donkey Kong and would like to submit a review, please get in touch.

As a highly influential game, it is just obvious that there are plenty of references in the later titles. If you want to find out more about each of them, then you came to the right place…….

Donkey Kong II – This is a direct sequel of the original game

Donkey Kong Game & Watch – A special version of the game developed for the Game & Watch system

Super Mario Bros. 2 – Clawgrip’s movement is directly inspired by the movement of Donkey Kong from this game. The remakes of this title also have grids in the background of the indoor sections

Donkey Kong (Game Boy) – 4 levels from the arcade original are remade in this version of the game. The hammer item, as well as Pauline’s lost items reappear in this game as well. The plot is also ripped off from the original

Donkey Kong Country – Donkey Kong reappears in this game, and we get to learn that he is actually the old chump Cranky Kong! So, what we had before was, basically, a younger version of Cranky Kong himself. Cranky also plays the title theme of the arcade version of the game in the intro of this title. The oil drums that are found in Oil Drum Alley are the same oil drums that we can see in the 25 m stage of Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest – When Cranky says: “Whisking off maidens and chucking barrels seven days a week, I was” he makes a direct reference to this game

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars – One of the challenge rooms that can be found in Bowser’s Keep involves Mario avoiding barrels that are thrown by a Chained Kong

Donkey Kong 64 – A port of the arcade version of the game can be found on an arcade machine in the Frantic Factory stage. The song that you can hear in Creepy Castle is a cover of the theme that can be heard when Donkey Kong is climbing the ladders after the stage is cleared

Donkey Konga – When you get to choose whether you want the 50 Hz or 60 Hz refresh rate, you can notice that Mario’s sprite acts as a cursor and the sprite of Donkey Kong can also be seen on the left side of the screen

WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$! – There is a minigame that is directly inspired by this title, in which Mario needs to jump over the barrels

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga – If Mario jumps when when the Border Bros. tells Luigi to jump, you will hear a direct reference to this game – “give the jumpman thing a rest”. In order to save Luigi in Woohoo Hooniversity, you need to jump over rolling barrels which is another direct reference to this game. And last but not least, there is also a skeleton-pirate that is throwing barrels in a mini-game (in the same fashion as Donkey Kong)

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door – One of the badges that you can acquire in the game is the Jumpman badge. Along with that, if you return to the Glitz Pit and get the first place again, a person from the audience will say: “JUMPMAN!!! Wait, who? ”

Mario Power Tennis – A theme that is heard when Donkey Kong wins the trophy is actually the title music from this game

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat – The battle music that plays during the battles with Ghastly King and Cactus King has some parts from this game (when Donkey Kong takes Pauline and climbs the ladder after the stage is cleared)

Donkey Konga 3: Tabehōdai! Haru Mogitate 50 Kyoku – One of the themes from Donkey Kong reappears in this title as well

Mario Hoops 3-on-3 – Mario’s baller name in this game is…………you guessed it, Jumpman!

Donkey Kong Barrel Blast – The theme that plays in Cranky’s flight school as well as Cosmic Highway features the opening theme from this title

Super Smash Bros. Brawl – 75 m stage reappears in this game. In addition to that, there are also coves of the title theme and 25m stage theme. A demo of this game is also playable on in form of a Masterpiece

WarioWare D.I.Y. Showcase – There is a small microgame that is directly inspired by this game. The objective is to destroy the rolling barrel by tapping it

New Super Mario Bros. Wii – Broozers have the same moving patterns like Donkey Kong. They can pick-up and throw barrels in the same fashion

Donkey Kong Country Returns – The background of Foggy Fumes has the 25 m stage on it. You can also find a statue of the Donkey Kong sprite that holds a Wii remote in the Wonky Waterway stage. Also, some of the secret temples and stages have elements from this game as well

Super Mario 3D Land – At one point during the final battle with Bowser, he will start throwing barrels at Mario just like Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze – In the Aqueduct Assault there is a statue of the Donkey Kong sprite holding a Wii-U Gamepad

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker – Both the music and the animation that you experience when you pick-up the Super Pickaxe are ripped-off from this game

Super Smash Bros. for Wii-U – 75 m stage reappears in this game as well. The game is once again available as a Masterpiece.

Legal Issues   Every now and then you get to hear about various legal issues, regardless of the subject we are talking about. Video games are no exception. These problems existed since as early as 1982. The 2 different legal issues about this game happen to be the first 2 serious lawsuits in the history of video games. What was the problem in this game you ask? Well….read the following lines to find out…

Donkey King Kong by Penguinline on Deviantart – a parody of the Nintendo universal Kong based debacle of 1982.

Issues with Universal About a year after the game was released (1981), folks from Universal Studios decided to sue Nintendo, claiming that the company has damaged the intellectual property rights they have on the King Kong movie. So, what they basically thought is that Donkey Kong is a direct rip-off of King Kong, or actually the big monkey himself!

Yep, as silly as it may sound today, that is what happened. However, Nintendo didn’t want to step back and they had their trumps as well.

The future president of the company Howard Lincoln hired one of the best lawyers available on the market to represent Nintendo in this case – John Kirby. Kirby has not only shown that Nintendo didn’t break any of the copyright laws, but also that Universal had legal issues with RKO Pictures in 1975.

They sued the company to prove that the plot of King Kong was in the public domain. After this, Nintendo managed to win in this fight, and the court demanded that Universal must pay them a total sum of $ 1.8 million in legal fees.

One more thing has to be noted here – It is also shown that Tiger’s King Kong video game, that was licensed by Universal, actually broke the copyrights of Donkey Kong! Now isn’t that shameful?

After this case reached its conclusion, Nintendo awarded Kirby with a $ 30 000 sailboat and gave him the permission to use the name of Donkey Kong on the boat itself! Now, that’s a real happy ending.

Despite the fact that this case had a good ending for our favorite video game developers, it was one of the biggest lawsuits in the video game history. And most well-known as well.

Many different websites still have records and articles about this case. The Gaming Historian has a very good retrospective of the whole case, and Techdirt has a short but spot-on article as well.

And a spot-on title as well: “Historical Hypocrisy: Donkey Kong, King Kong, and The Public Domain”. We can’t stop wondering what would happen if Universal took the victory here?

On Kotaku you can find the article named “In 1983, Donkey Kong Nearly Died” that begins with the following lines: “As we celebrate what’s (probably? Maybe?) Donkey Kong’s 30th birthday, today let’s take a look at the 1983 court case which nearly brought a premature end to Nintendo’s big ape”.

Whether they are right or not, we will never find out, luckily. We will never find out because, among other things, this nonsense was never supposed to happen in the first place!

And since justice won in the end……who cares anyway? Issues with Ikegami Tsushinki There

Every fact on this page was checked against the 29 sources listed here.