If some higher power dictates that all things come in threes then yesterday a higher power was surely interested in
Donkey Kong.
Yes, I said Donkey Kong!
While reading a book about Nintendo yesterday morning, I reached a chapter, where in the early 80’s Nintendo of America’s new president, Minoru Arakawa had begun to ship Nintendo’s first coin-op arcade hit Donkey Kong.
Video (arcade) games in 1981 were the largest entertainment industry in America. At $8 billion a year the
industry outpaced movies, television and pop music by a large margin, in fact Music and Movies combined for around $7 billion.
Nintendo had a thriving video game business in Japan and while trying to expand to North America they knew they had to gain a foothold in the American market in order to compete. They began to ship a Game called Radar Scope that was a hit in Japan only to have it fall flat in the American market. Nintendo, in an effort to save money on overseas shipping, opted to convert the Radar Scope game cabinets into something else. That game was to be Donkey Kong.
While negotiating a contract for the rights to produce a Popeye game, Nintendo simultaneously began design work. When the deal fell through they used many of the character mechanics and ideas to form the elements of Donky Kong. (Side note: Nintendo did later get that Popeye License and produced a fun game that I often played while my mother shopped in a local grocery store chain)
Nintendo Legend Shigeru Miyamoto who can also be credited with other games such as Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda etc, designed the characters and story elements of Donkey Kong. He felt that if a video game told a story the player could identify with the main character and be drawn into it more. At the time most games were shooter type games, among the most popular were Space Invaders, Galaxian and Asteroids (Radar Scope was shooter too).
This novel concept proved to be a great move as Donkey Kong become the top arcade game of the time. Nintendo sold around 132,000 game cabinets as it churned out over $280 million.
1. The first two coincidences are in my brief history of Donkey Kong, the chapter I read in the morning.
2. I saw the dollar figures later in the day in a ReplayFX tweet of an article on the “10 highest grossing arcade games of all time”
3. Then once more in my facebook news feed I saw that the world record for Donkey Score was broken. You can watch the whole 3 hour video of it here.
I don’t think planets were in alignment or anything but it is funny how Donkey Kong news hit me in a wave of three events all in one day…
I’m mean c’mon it’s a 35 year old game, who woke up thinking DK?
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with 80's Toy Review