Game #8: Donkey Kong Junior (Aug. 1982)

Background

Developer: Nintendo R&D1, Iwasaki Engineering

Publisher: Nintendo

Debut: Aug 1982 (JP)

Platform: Arcade

Home Ports: NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk System, Atari 2600/7800/8-bit PCs, ColecoVision/Adam, Intellivision, BBC Micro, Virtual Console, and probably 10,000 others I'm forgetting.

Highs and Lows

From the outside looking in, Nintendo often seems to have no idea what it's doing. From sticking with cartridges on the N64 instead of switching to the (admittedly easier to pirate) CD-ROM format, to the bumbling transition from Wii to Wii U, to everything about the Virtual Boy, to its reliance on Friend Codes for online play on the Switch, the "Big N" has plenty of misses. We forgive it, though, because its hits are home runs.

There's another reason I and countless other Nintendo diehards give it a pass: More than most other video game publishers, developers, and hardware manufacturers, Nintendo has shown a willingness, even an eagerness, to experiment. Look no further than Donkey Kong Junior, a follow-up to its seminal Donkey Kong game. Donkey Kong Junior could have been an easy cash-in. Build four or more stages for Mario--then Jumpman--to run and jump around in, have Donkey Kong kidnap poor Pauline again, and watch the quarters flow. Instead, upstart designer Shigeru Miyamoto turned almost everything about his breakout classic on its head. For starters, Mario is the villain, and he's dastardly.

(Shigeru Miyamoto famously classified Mario and friends as actors able to play the wide variety of roles in which he casts them. I like that analogy, but could you imagine Mario being the big bad today? It would never happen. Of course, I'm writing this in 2020, the Year of Ugly and Awful Things, so a monkey's paw lying forgotten in one of Miyamoto's desk drawers probably just curled. Sorry in advance.)

The game begins with a cutscene showing two Marios trapping Donkey Kong in a cage and carrying him off, ostensibly to transport him back to the zoo so he'll stop wrecking construction sites and kidnapping women. (Some fans speculate that the second Mario may have served as the inspiration for Luigi, who made his debut in a game we'll discuss soon.) That leaves Donkey Kong Junior, the big ape's diapered kiddo, to save his papa.

Donkey Kong Junior comprises four stages, but with major changes to Donkey Kong's critically and commercially successful formula. You'll do some running and jumping as Junior, and I'll get to why that's the weakest part of the game soon. Kiddie Kong distinguishes himself from his dad by going back to the platforming genre's roots: Climbing.

We know from the genre's earliest games that climbing went hand in hand with running; jumping didn't arrive on the scene until later. Donkey Kong Junior's stages resemble jungles more than construction sites, with vines hanging from treetops and other platforms that Junior can use to reach Mario, who holds Donkey Kong prisoner at the top of each board. Donkey can shimmy up one vine at a time, or stretch to grab an adjacent vine and shoot upward and double speed. Climbing down also comes in two flavors: grab two vines and descend at the same speed, or stick to one and slide down twice as fast.

This variety in climbing speeds feeds into Donkey Kong Junior's more puzzle-oriented composition. Mario climbed ladders in the first game, but spent most of his time jumping over barrels, fireballs, and pits. In Donkey Kong Junior, you climb, descend, and move across vines while avoiding enemies: some that climb up and down to get at you, others that fly at varying altitudes while dropping eggs. You'll spend most of your time clutching a vine or two and scooting up, down, and from side to side to avoid obstacles while making your way across screens to areas that lead to the top of the screen and the passage to the next stage.

Figuring out the safest route to the top is the highlight of Donkey Kong Junior. While the first game centered on execution--run and jump your way to the top--this follow-up wants you to plan and then execute. No plan survives the battlefield: You can stand around observing the birds on stage two as long as you need, learning when and where they'll descend, and how often they'll drop eggs. Nintendo also evolved fruit from optional items worth a few extra points, the role apples and bananas and other sugary goodies have played in platformers into weapons. Touching a fruit earns you points and causes it to drop. Time your movements well, and you can drop fruit on enemies, buying yourself a temporary reprieve before Mario unleashes a new minion to take its place.

Inevitably, you'll find yourself in the thick of vines, frantically moving from one to the other and climbing and descending to dodge them as you inch your way to the right and, finally, up to the platform where Mario awaits. The game shines at this junction: You've finally reached the top and are as proud of the way you devised to get there as you are of executing your plan and adapting to the chaos that awaits at the top of most stages.

The less time you spend with your feet on the ground, the better. Platforming is the weakest part of Donkey Kong Junior. Fortunately, three of the four stages favor climbing, but the third is heavy on running and jumping, which combines with a franticness to enemy population and movement patterns that proves too much to handle. But there's more wrong with the platforming than The game's namesake moves stiffly, just like Mario in the previous game, but that's more detrimental here, and I needed time to understand why. The answer, as games historian and Nintendo expert Jeremy Parish reveals in episode 20 of his "NES Works" series documenting the chronological release of NES games, lies in sprite proportions.

In short, Junior is wider than Mario. As he should be. He's an ape, and Nintendo gave him an aptly stooped posture as he stands and walks. His dimensions are problematic, however, because they make judging distance difficult. Junior's width and reach often fools you into thinking he can clear a gap when he can't, or that a vine is in reach when it isn't. It's a problem so subtle that most players might not put their finger on why the game feels slightly off. I couldn't, and I've been playing platforms since my single-digit years.

The game suffers from a few smaller issues that add up to a larger problem. Namely, Donkey Kong Junior spans only four stages. Once you finish them, you cycle through them again and again until you run out of quarters or interest. (Seeing Mario die by falling from the top of the last stage to the ground with a halo above his head is a shock the first time it happens, though.)

Climbing, while the game's greatest strength, is a tad cumbersome. You've got to tap the joystick--or your d-pad, depending on how you play--to move not just from vine to vine, but to stretch out and grip an adjacent vine so Junior can climb or descend two at once. I'm not audacious enough to suggest a better method, but sometimes you'll know what you need to do but won't have the reflexes or wrist power to tap-tap-tap your way across vines to pull it off.

Donkey Kong Junior the Wii U of Nintendo's early platformers. Hey, I loved my Wii U! I'd put its first-party lineup against those of the Xbox One and PS4 any day of the week. It differed from the Wii… kind of. Not different enough. Same deal with Donkey Kong Junior. Its highs, namely figuring out what to do and pulling it off, are higher than Nintendo's and Shigeru Miyamoto's first success, but it lacks the freshness and easy-to-pick-up gameplay of its monolithic predecessor.

One More Thing

I'm a historian by nature, so I can't move on from Donkey Kong Junior without putting the game into a historical context. In short, Junior was almost as litigious as the first game, in which Nintendo became embroiled in a lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming Nintendo had ripped off the movie studio's King Kong character and concept.

The legal scuffle around Donkey Kong Junior isn't nearly as well known, probably because Nintendo would prefer to keep it buried. Through the '70s and '80s, a Japanese company called Ikegami Tsushinki manufactured arcade games for Nintendo. Ikegami and Nintendo signed an eight-game contract. Per the agreement, Ikegami would develop and manufacture arcade games, and Nintendo could pass them off as its own creations. The first title Ikegami's engineers made was Radar Scope, which took off in Japan but flopped in the United States. Left with a warehouse full of unsold hardware, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi ordered Nintendo of America president (and Yamauchi's son-in-law) Minoru Arakawa to come up with a new game to use all those cabinets and monitors.

From here, Nintendo's history diverges from actual history, as it often does. Nintendo touts Shigeru Miyamoto as the brain behind Donkey Kong, and that's true. He designed its characters, artwork, and gameplay, but he didn't program it. The onus for that fell on Ikegami, since it had the tech and knowhow to write games. Six of Ikegami's engineers--credited under the names Komonora, Iinuma Minoru, Nishida Mitsuhiro, Murata Yasuhiro, Shigeru Kudo and Kenzo Sekiguchi--followed Miyamoto's design and got the job done, and Ikegami sold Nintendo between 8,000 and 20,000 PCBs, the circuit board that plugs into arcade cabinets.

Back in the '80s, before publishers and developers publicized the programmers, artists, designers, and musicians behind their game, programmers had the habit of leaving signatures in the games they made. A secret room in Adventure for the Atari 2600 in which the sole programmer arranged colored blocks to spell out his name may be the most famous. Ikegami's engineers would engrave their names in the tile sets of some games, or leave a text message. In Donkey Kong, they wrote CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

Nintendo made 80,000 copies of Donkey Kong's PCB without permission, likely to meet overwhelming demand for the game in Japan and the US. Here's where the story gets slippery. Donkey Kong was not part of the contract between Nintendo and Ikegami. I'm not exactly sure why, but my guess is because the game originated from Radar Scope. Whatever the reason, it slipped through the cracks, and because it wasn't explicitly named in that contract, Ikegami kept the game's source code. That's why Nintendo cloned the PCB board: Its developers had no other way to access the code that made Donkey Kong tick.

Donkey Kong's success moved Nintendo to call for a sequel. The problem was it had no way to make such a game in-house. Then and now, sequels often involved taking the first game's source code and repurposing it--adding new systems, new artwork, and so on--into a "new game." Think Zelda: Majora's Mask and every Call of Duty after 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Ha, ha! Just kidding! Mostly.) Rather than ask Ikegami to fulfill another game in its contract, Nintendo hired a contractor by the name of Hiroji Iwasaki to reverse-engineer Donkey Kong and work it into a follow-up. Shigeru Miyamoto crafted the game's design and got help from in-house artist and future Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto to finish up the artwork.

This process grants Donkey Kong Junior two distinctions: it was the first game made entirely in-house at Nintendo; and yet not entirely in-house, since Nintendo blatantly and unabashedly ripped off Ikegami's code to make it. Ikegami was less than pleased by this, as you'd expect, and sued Nintendo in 1983 for copyright infringement to the tune of 580,000,000 yen. Ikegami's basis for the lawsuit was that it owned the code for Donkey Kong, and yes, it totally did. The legal brawl lasted until 1990, when the companies settled out of court. No one knows the terms of the settlement, but another trial that same year concluded that Nintendo did not own the code for Donkey Kong.

Ikegami is still around as a manufacturer from equipment used in professional settings such as broadcast cameras and TV monitors. Its executives talk little about the company's work with Nintendo during those troubling early years. Perhaps because they would rather focus on more modern success stories, and/or because the terms of the settlement forbid it. Either way, Ikegami has unbreakable ties to Nintendo's success.

Score

Graphics: 4/5. Colorful and more varied than Donkey Kong's. The technology (or lack thereof) of the day worked in the game's favor: Platforms and vines stand out against the plain black backdrop, so there's never any confusion over where you should go or what you can climb.

Gameplay: 3/5. The puzzle-focused design sets Donkey Kong Junior apart from big daddy, but there are only four stages and the controls make navigating them less fun than figuring out how to navigate them.

Sound: 3/5. A few tunes and good effects such as the thunder-like boom of Junior landing on platforms. Nothing memorable aside from that, but all sounds serve the gameplay, and I'm all about that.

Overall: 3/5. Inventive but ultimately falls flat. If the controls were tighter, I'd probably prefer this over Donkey Kong.

Ranking

This list is subjective, based on my experiences. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.

1.      Donkey Kong

2.      Ponpoko

3.      Kangaroo

4.      Donkey Kong Junior

5.      Jump Bug

6.      Space Panic

7.      Canyon Climber

8.      Crazy Climbers

References cited in this chapter:

• "Donkey Kong Jr. retrospective: Another vine mess | NES Works #020," Jeremy Parish, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcvxV91H1yI.
• "Q&A: Metroid Creator's Early 8-Bit Days at Nintendo," Wired, https://www.wired.com./2010/04/sakamoto/.
• "Feature: Shining A Light On Ikegami Tsushinki, The Company That Developed Donkey Kong," Nintendo Life, https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/02/feature_shining_a_light_on_ikegami_tsushinki_the_company_that_developed_donkey_kong.
• "Iwasaki," Game Developers Research Institute, http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Iwasaki.
• "Company:Ikegami Tsushinki," Game Developers Research Institute, http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Company:Ikegami_Tsushinki.

Game #4 – Donkey Kong (July 1981)

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.