Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. are early examples of the platform game genre. In both games, the player must guide the playable character (Mario in the first game, Donkey Kong Jr. in the second) to scale four levels while avoiding obstacles.

The player jumps to dodge incoming obstacles (such as barrels) or cross gaps, and climbs ladders or vines to reach the top of the level. In the first game, Mario can destroy obstacles by obtaining a hammer power-up, while in the second, Donkey Kong Jr. can do so by knocking pieces of fruit down from vines. Points are awarded for dodging or destroying obstacles, collecting items, and completing stages quickly.

The original Donkey Kong features three characters: Donkey Kong, a large, antagonistic gorilla; Mario, the overall-wearing protagonist; and Pauline, Mario's girlfriend. Donkey Kong follows Mario as he ascends a construction site to rescue Pauline from Donkey Kong, his escaped pet ape. , Mario imprisons Donkey Kong in a cage. The game introduces Donkey Kong's son, the diaper-wearing Donkey Kong Jr.

Mario, Pauline, Donkey Kong, and Jr. return in the 1994 Game Boy Donkey Kong, in which Mario again must rescue Pauline from the Kongs. The Game Boy game was the first Donkey Kong game to depict Donkey Kong wearing a red necktie bearing his initials, "DK".

In the late 1970s, the Japanese company Nintendo shifted its focus from producing toys and playing cards to arcade games. This followed the 1973 oil crisis, which increased the cost of manufacturing toys, and the success of Taito's arcade game Space Invaders (1978). In 1980, Nintendo released Radar Scope, a Space Invaders-style shoot 'em up game. It was a commercial failure and put the newly established subsidiary Nintendo of America in a financial crisis.

Its founder, Minoru Arakawa, asked his father-in-law, Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi, to provide a new game that could repurpose the unsold Radar Scope cabinets. Most of Nintendo's top developers were preoccupied, so the task went to Shigeru Miyamoto, a first-time game designer.

Donkey Kong is one of Nintendo's bestselling franchises, with sales reaching 65 million units by March 2021. Five Donkey Kong games (Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Land, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, Donkey Kong 64, and Donkey Kong Country Returns) have shipped over a million copies in Japan alone, and several have been added to Nintendo's Player's Choice and Nintendo Selects bestseller lines. Excluding rereleases and arcade games, as of 2022 the SNES version of Donkey Kong Country is the franchise's bestselling game, with 9.3 million copies sold worldwide, while DK: King of Swing is the worst-selling, with 280,000 copies sold worldwide.

The original Donkey Kong is regarded as one of the most important video games of all time. Its success established Nintendo as one of the video game industry's leaders. Computer and Video Games called Donkey Kong "the most momentous" game of 1981, as it "introduced three important names" to the industry: Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Mario. Donkey Kong also paved the way for the NES, which rejuvenated the crashed Western game industry and shifted the home console market's dominance from the US to Japan. The NES was largely based on the Donkey Kong arcade hardware; Nintendo took a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet to the semiconductor chip manufacturer Ricoh for analysis, which led to Ricoh producing the NES's Picture Processing Unit.