Background
- Developer: Nintendo
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Debut: July 1981
- Platform: Arcade
(Author's note: Because I'm the most organized person ever, I played Donkey Kong before Jump Bug. The latter hit arcades approximately four months before DK. Jump Bug should be game #3; Donkey Kong is game #4.)
Monkeying Around
In the first chapter of Dungeon Hacks, my book about
formative roguelike RPGs such as Rogue (obviously) and NetHack, I gave a brief
overview of convergent evolution. It's a biological process where two or more
unrelated organisms follow similar evolutionary paths. These organisms don't
have to be related, nor does convergent evolution end up making them
interchangeable. For instance, a bird and a bat can both fly, but they share little
else in common.
Donkey Kong evolved from ideas found in Space
Panic and Crazy
Climbers. It has more in common with the former than the latter, really,
since Crazy Climbers is a pure climbing game rather than a platformer.
Still, grasping DK's fundamental similarities and differences is
important to realizing just how influential and evolved it was compared
to its forebearers.
The
origin of Donkey Kong and its popular protagonist has been exhaustively
covered, so I'll keep my telling brief. Aspiring toymaker Shigeru Miyamoto
landed a job at a company called Nintendo after his dad called in a
favor with a mutual friend of Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo
Company Limited (aka NCL, Nintendo's headquarters in Japan) from 1949 until
2002. Miyamoto was hired as the company's first
artist. His first job was drawing artwork for a coin-op game called Sheriff.
Then moved on to Radar Scope, a submarine game where players looked
through a telescope and shoot enemy ships. Radar Scope bombed, so
Yamauchi, determined to put all the monitors, cabinets, and circuit boards taking
up space in Nintendo's warehouses, to good use, assigned Miyamoto to another
project, a game inspired by
(but not based on) Popeye.
When Nintendo failed to acquire the Popeye license, Miyamoto
pivoted, designing a King Kong-like ape who kidnaps Pauline, the girlfriend of
a construction worker named Jumpman, and holds her hostage at the top of four
unique construction sites. (Okay, I guess climbing four tall buildings is
another shared trait of DK and Crazy Climbers. It's very
specific, and likely accidental.) You play as Jumpman, and your goal is to
scale those construction sites and rescue Pauline. Before the game launched in
America, higher-ups at Nintendo worried that Americans wouldn't get behind a
character named Jumpman. They renamed him Mario, named after Mario Segali,
Nintendo of America's landlord in the early '80s who stormed
a board meeting and demanded rent that was past due.
Saving Pauline isn't as simple as climbing ladders and
running across platforms. Donkey Kong antagonizes you the whole time, throwing
barrels, siccing autonomous fireballs on you, and challenging Mario to cross a
variety of terrain from platforms to lifts to collapsing floors.
Those are surface details. We've established that Donkey
Kong was not the first platformer. In every way, however, it was the first
platformer that counted. The innovations Miyamoto and his scrappy team
introduced are many, so let's get to climbing.
Kong Country
Nintendo's engineers kept things simple. The cabinet
supported two players who took turns controlling Mario/Jumpman, guiding him
with a joystick and a single button. It's not exaggeration to say that that
single button revolutionized video games.
You'll remember that the object of Space Panic is to
dig holes and wait for aliens to fall into them. The trouble is, digging a hole
creates more problems than it solves. There's no way to jump over the hole
should you need to cross to the other side. You have to either fill it in, or
climb down a nearby ladder, run across the platform below it, and scamper up
another ladder on the other side of the hole. The lack of a jump action adds to
the game's strategy, but it's more frustrating than anything else, one of many
reasons why the game failed to make money in arcades.
Donkey Kong lets you jump, but that's just the tip of
the iceberg. Pressing jump without touching the joystick launches Mario a few
feet off the ground. To jump over obstacles, press the button while moving left
or right. The elegance and versatility of such a simple action cannot be
overstated.
Mario's jump works so well because the elements of that jump—namely
height and horizontal distance—are immutable. Unlike later games featuring
Mario, Donkey Kong has no run button; you can't build momentum to jump
farther. What you see is what you get: No matter how fast you're moving, the
height and distance of your jump never change. When you attempt to jump over a
pit and onto, say, a rising platform, but fall short, you know it's not because
the game cheated. It's because you jumped too early. The game tacitly
communicates this information visually: you see Mario, you see where you jumped
from, and you see where you landed. Players absorb that knowledge and learn to
apply it.
Unlike later games, Mario doesn't control well in midair; he
rises and falls at the same velocity no matter where you jump from. In fact,
you can't steer him midjump at all. This, too, is a limitation that works in
the player's favor. In 1981, virtually every type of coin-operated video game
except shoot-em-ups—popularized by Space Invaders in '75—was unknown to
players. I could be wrong, but my bet is that introducing mechanics such as
maneuvering a character in midair would have overcomplicated the design and
frustrated players. It's enough, and better, for players to know exactly how
high and how far they can jump, and put that into practice stage by stage,
secure in the fact that their mastery over the few tools at Mario's disposal is
all they need to win.
You're given one more tool: a power-up, Mario's hammer.
After picking it up, Mario automatically swings it for a limited of time,
obliterating any obstacles within range and increasing your score. Hammers can
be used whenever you're ready to grab them, but they're best saved for
desperate situations, such as when barrels and fireballs close in on all sides.
Run, jump, climb, and pound. The particulars of when and
where those maneuvers come into play changes from stage to stage. Donkey
Kong's stages are another game changer. Space Panic's arrangement of
ladders platforms changes slightly from stage to stage, but the architecture
itself remains the same. You always run across stony-like platforms and climb
ladders. The same can be said of other popular video games of the era. Space
Invaders doesn't take place in any other venue other than against a starry
backdrop. You always fight the same waves of aliens with the same barriers
between you and them. Other shoot-em-ups such as Asteroids change up the
configuration of obstacles like rocks or waves of enemy ships, but the terrain is
always the same.
Donkey Kong features four unique stages, or
"boards"—an apt term, since each stage can be thought of as a
different board game, each of which happens to use the same pieces. The first
stage, and the most iconic, features quintessential platforming: sloped
platforms for barrels to roll down, ladders to ascend, and obstacles to jump
over. It's a tutorial in every way except name. The difference from DK's
first stage and most contemporary games is there are no lengthy cinematics to
sit through or walls of text to climb. Nintendo has you learn by doing, a
practice that would come to define their games going forward (with the
occasional misstep such as 2011's ponderous The Legend of Zelda: Skyward
Sword).
The next level, another construction site, introduces subtle
changes. You're still climbing ladders and dodging obstacles, but to get to the
top, you have to run over rivets until the structure collapses and sends the
titular ape tumbling to the ground. Running over a rivet causes it to disappear.
Enemies on one side won't be able to reach you on the other; the catch is that
you can fall through holes after removing rivets, and even a one-story fall can
kill Mario. This adds a note of tension. By this time, you're comfortable with
your jump, and you'll have to perform more of them, and more accurately, to avoid
fireballs and holes.
Yet another stage, a factory, has you riding lifts and
leaping narrow pits. A spring-like obstacle bounces across the topmost floor and
drops into the stage. The factory's design is methodical. The spring starts in
the same place, bounces the same distance, and falls from the same location, at
the same interval. Your advantage is that the spring falls near the right edge
of the screen. Players figure out that the stage is best tackled in two phases.
Phase on: ride and jump from lifts to cross from the left side of the screen to
the middle. Phase two: carefully hop pits and avoid springs as they fall while
climbing to the top.
All
four stages take place on a single screen, but the factory functions as two
stages in one. That purposeful design by Nintendo lets you devote all your
attention to one or two obstacles at a time: lifts and perilous fall distances
on the left, and ladders and springs on the right. Moreover, each half of the
screen builds on what you've learned thus far. You know how to climb ladders. You
know obstacles can be avoided or jumped over, depending on their actions. You
know pits must be jumped, and that falling too far will result in a lost life.
Teaching
players how to use their tools and placing them in situations that call on them
to use their tools in slightly different but always related scenarios is a
staple of platforming games, and it started with Donkey Kong.
Last but not least, Donkey Kong is one of the first
video games to present a narrative. I say "one of" because earlier,
text-only adventure games on PC, such as Colossal Cave Adventure, had
stories… kind. Adventure just had you exploring a cave; the narrative
was, figure out what's going on and escape. What else are you going to
do? The designers of Infocom's Zork series deserves more credit for
constructing what is essentially an interactive novel. Those games were
effective. They were also limited. Personal computers were relatively expensive
in the early '80s, limiting access to the businesses and high-income households
able to afford them. Arcades were everywhere.
Enter Donkey Kong, widely acknowledge as the first
video game to feature visual
storytelling. Donkey Kong, Mario, and Pauline are individual characters
with (sometimes threadbare) motivations. Donkey Kong is angry at this carpenter
and wants to hurt him, so he steals his girl. Pauline wants to escape, and,
presumably, not fall to her death. Mario, the hero, wants to save her. There
are even cutscenes, such as a reunion "cinematic" (in the leanest
sense of the word) that shows Donkey Kong falling to the ground while Mario and
Pauline make goo-goo eyes at each other, represented by a giant pink heart at
the top of the screen.
Admittedly, Donkey Kong's narrative is cruder than something
like Zork, whose text-driven adventure unfolds over the entire game. Remember,
though, that Donkey Kong's theatrical-like narrative was unprecedented. Protagonist.
Antagonist. Goal. The stages repeat after you conquer the rivet stage, but the
difficulty scales upward, so you can reunite Mario and Pauline again and again.
That brings us to the elephant in the room. Miyamoto has
stated in numerous interviews that he didn't put much thought into the game's
story. The fairytale archetype of a damsel in distress fit the bill: it was simple
to execute and easy for players to grasp. That archetype would become the gold
standard for dozens of arcade games that followed, especially in beat-em-ups
like Technōs Japan's Double Dragon and Capcom's Final Fight.
Reducing women to trophies and finish lines is, admittedly,
problematic. Without defending Miyamoto or other designers, bear in mind that most
game designers in the '80s weren't setting out to tell grand stories, nor could
they. Technology was limited. Developers were learning as they went along,
budgets were shoestring-sized, and time was limited. They needed quick and
dirty archetypes, and Donkey Kong made one accessible.
To this day, Miyamoto maintains that gameplay must take
precedence over every other aspect of game development. He used the archetype
because he had neither the resources nor inclination to attempt a loftier
narrative. Back in these halcyon days, most games were designed by men, for
boys. This is not my attempt to defend the damsel-in-distress archetype or its
widespread application; I only want to provide context. Videogame stories have
come a long way, and more women are playing and making games—all of which is
for the best.
Most germane to our discussion, even platformers have grown
far beyond simple archetypes. One of my favorites, and one of the most effective
in terms of narrative, in 2014's Shovel Knight by Yacht Club Games. Shovel
Knight's creators started out with a damsel in distress, only to take a
step back, evaluate the trappings of the games they were seeking to emulate—platformers
such as Mega Man, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Zelda II: The
Adventure of Link—and take their damsel to the next level. Shield Knight ended
up framed as Shovel Knight's "partner." She was abducted by a woman, and
you do rescue her, but the final boss against the evil enchantress can only be
completed with Shovel Knight fighting alongside you. (Disclosure: I wrote a
book about the making of Shovel Knight for Boss Fight Books.)
I discussed the damsel-in-distress archetype because it was
important to Donkey Kong, and it played a huge part in games to come. I'm
glad we've moved past it. Make no mistake, thought: its presence does not take
away from Donkey Kong's fantastic design, or its influence. It may not
be the first platformer, but it's the one that gave designers and players all
the tools they needed to take the ball and run (and jump) with it, and remains
the crowning achievement of the genre's first generation.
Score
Graphics: 3/5. Simple, but effective. Bonus points
for cramming four distinct stages into a measly 20 kilobytes of memory.
Gameplay: 4/5. Responsive, accessible, and addictive.
This is what platformers are made of.
Sound: 5/5. Donkey Kong featured iconic sound
effects for every action, from jumping, to bouncing, to Donkey Kong's roaring
laughter, to smashing obstacles with a hammer. Background music was used
sparingly, but it's as catchy in 2020 as it was in 1981.
Overall: 4/5. This is as good as it gets for the
first generation of platform games, and it's very good indeed.
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