Donkey Kong
Introduction
Donkey Kong began as a 1981 arcade platformer built by Nintendo R&D1 under Shigeru Miyamoto, assigned by Gunpei Yokoi to rework unsold Radar Scope cabinets into something with wider appeal. The result introduced a carpenter hero originally called Jumpman, his captured love interest Pauline, and the giant ape Donkey Kong, wrapped in some of the earliest story-driven cutscenes the arcade medium had seen. Nintendo brought the game home to the Famicom in 1983 and to the NES in North America in 1986, trimming the arcade original down to three stages instead of four, since the cement-factory level was cut to fit early cartridge memory limits, though the port otherwise plays close to the coin-op it’s based on. Players guide Jumpman up a series of girder-and-ladder construction stages, dodging rolling barrels and fireballs to reach the top and rescue Pauline, all in service of a rescue plot that would go on to define the character now known worldwide as Mario.
