Classic Kong

Following 1980's Space Panic, Donkey Kong is one of the earliest examples of the platform game genre, even prior to the term being coined; the U.S. gaming press used "climbing game" for games with platforms and ladders. As the first platformer game to feature jumping, Donkey Kong requires the player to jump between gaps and over obstacles or approaching enemies whilst Donkey Kong throws barrels at the player, setting the template for the future of the genre. With four unique stages, Donkey Kong was the most complex arcade game of the time, and one of the first arcade games with multiple stages, following games such as 1980's Phoenix and 1981's Gorf and Scramble.

In addition to the goal of saving Pauline, the player has a score. Points are awarded for the following: leaping over obstacles; destroying objects with a hammer power-up; collecting items such as hats, parasols, and purses; removing rivets from platforms; and completing each stage according to a steadily decreasing bonus counter. The player starts with three lives with a bonus life awarded at 7,000 points. A life is lost when Mario touches Donkey Kong or any enemy object, falls too far, or lets the bonus counter reach zero. The game ends when all lives are lost.

Donkey Kong is the earliest video game with a storyline that visually unfolds on screen. Set on a construction site in New York City, the eponymous Donkey Kong character is the de facto villain. The hero is a carpenter originally unnamed in the Japanese arcade release, later called Jumpman, then Mario. Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario's girlfriend, originally known as Lady and later renamed Pauline.

The player takes the role of Mario to rescue her. This is the first occurrence of the damsel in distress scenario used in countless video games released after.

Nintendo of America was founded in 1980 with minor success at importing its parent's arcade cabinets from Japan. In early 1981, its president Minoru Arakawa bet the small startup company on a major order of 3,000 Radar Scope games. Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president (and his father-in-law) Hiroshi Yamauchi send a conversion kit of new game software. Yamauchi polled the company's entire talent pool for fresh game design concepts to save the distressed startup. This yielded Shigeru Miyamoto's debut as lead game designer of his Donkey Kong concept, and Yamauchi appointed head engineer Gunpei Yokoi as project supervisor with a budget of $267,000 (equivalent to $946,000 in 2025) according to Miyamoto.

The conception of Donkey Kong can be traced back to early 1980, when Miyamoto made three A4-size sheets briefly explaining the game's content and characters, about five game screen sketches, and a one-sheet diagram of the final animation. Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for most of the development, heavily involved in the game's creation and concept, and to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo". Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards. This later led to mutual lawsuits in 1983, as Ikegami asserted ownership over Donkey Kong which Nintendo denied as Ikegami was a subcontractor who had already been paid.

Upon release in arcades, Computer and Video Games compared it favorably with King Kong and predicted that it would likely become a success. In his 1982 book Video Invaders, Steve Bloom described Donkey Kong as "another bizarre cartoon game, courtesy of Japan" and said it was one of the "most exciting variations" on Pac-Man's maze theme along with Sega's Frogger due to how players need to "scale from the bottom of the screen to the top" which make them "more like obstacle courses than mazes" since "you always know where you're going — up". In January 1983, the 1982 Arcade Awards gave it the award for the best single-player video game and the Certificate of Merit as runner-up for Coin-Op Game of the Year.

In September 1982, Arcade Express reviewed the ColecoVision port and scored it 9 out of 10. Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games in 1983 stated that "Coleco did a fabulous job" with Donkey Kong, the best of the console's first five games and "the most faithful adaptation of the original video game I have seen". The magazine's Danny Goodman stated that of Coleco's three console versions, the one for the ColecoVision was the best, followed by Atari and Intellivision. Computer and Video Games reviewed the ColecoVision port in its September 1984 issue and scored it 4 out of 4 in all four categories of Action, Graphics, Addiction and Theme.

In 1996 Next Generation listed the arcade, Atari 7800, and cancelled Coleco Adam versions as number 50 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", commenting that even ignoring its massive historical significance, Donkey Kong stands as a great game due to its demanding challenges and graphics which manage to elegantly delineate an entire scenario on a single screen. In February 2006, Nintendo Power rated it the 148th best game made on a Nintendo system. In 2017, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Donkey Kong to its World Video Game Hall of Fame. Today, Donkey Kong is the fifth most popular arcade game among collectors.

Donkey Kong spawned a number of other titles with a mix of running, jumping and vertical traversal, a novel genre that did not match the style of games that came before it. S. gaming press adopted the term "climbing games", and eventually the genre came to be known as platform games. The game was also a milestone in terms of video game storytelling and cutscenes.