Gamehiker Wiki:Today's featured article/August 2008

Donkey Kong is a 1981 game considered the very first Nintendo game and the responsible of prompting Shigeru Miyamoto to be known as one of the best game designers of all time. The game was overwritten inside unsold machines of Radar Scope, a game criticized for being too generic for the time.

Being an Arcade game the simplicity in its design wasn't an impediment for it to be the first game to feature a plot argument. This plot featured an hero (Jumpman, later renamed Mario) that had to rescue the damsel (Pauline) in distress from an horrible monster (Donkey Kong), plot that would inspire both other designers to include a history in their games and the very same plot to be reused 4 years later in Super Mario Bros.

The game became an instant hit in the arcade rooms and was ported to almost all the home consoles at the time, sometimes incomplete due to the memory limits of cartridges at the time. The NES version, for example, doesn’t include the second level and lacks some animations. This version was available as a launch title for the Virtual Console service of the Wii. In contrast, a complete version appeared in Donkey Kong 64 even with a detailed cabinet.