An Ape Assembled From Scrap: Donkey Kong

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.”

— Igor Stravinsky

Donkey Kong is one of the most well-known and influential games ever created, standing as both a masterpiece of design and a landmark commercial success. Its iconography is immediately recognizable. Both its protagonist and antagonist have become fixtures of global popular culture. There would still be a video games medium today without Donkey Kong, but it might look very different from the one we have.

Yet despite its seemingly boundless influence, Donkey Kong is a game defined by its limits. Both design and technical decisions are the result of careful planning done under severe constraint. The game itself is for all intents and purposes a hack of Radar Scope, a Space Invaders-knockoff that Nintendo hoped would be its foothold in the North American arcade market of the early 1980s. Faced with the prospect of two thousand unsold Radar Scope cabinets gathering dust in a Seattle- area warehouse, Nintendo of America President Mino Arakawa and his Kyoto-based superior (and father-in-law) Hiroshi Yamauchi made the decision to reprogram the existing hardware to play a game from first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto, whose narrative-centric (if not exactly narrative-heavy) tale of an escaped gorilla, a damsel in distress, and a plucky carpenter presented a clear story with a concrete beginning, middle, and end for the first time in gaming history.

Despite the team’s ingenious method of repurposing existing capital, Donkey Kong was bound by decisions that had been made for another game. There was no escaping that. There was no additional memory to be added to the motherboard, no extra power to be squeezed from its primitive processor. Even its controls reflect a design from another genre - a joystick and a single firing button were common for shooters like Radar Scope, but if given the option of designing a game from scratch, it’s unlikely that Miyamoto and his mentor Gunpei Yokoi would have limited themselves to a single action button and a limited, imprecise control mechanism. (Yokoi would go on to design the famous cross-shaped D-Pad for Nintendo’s successful Game & Watch line only a year later, demonstrating that he was cognizant that alternative input modes were viable and often desirable for titles that managed to break free from the standard template of arcade control.)

That the game works as well as it does is a testament to its makers’ understanding of the constraints under which they were operating. True creativity often arises from circumventing limitations rather than taking advantage of unlimited freedom, and Donkey Kong is a testament to the ingenuity of the men behind it.

Donkey Kong establishes the basic conventions not just of Mario games, but also of the platformer genre as a whole. Over a series of four looping levels, Mario chases Donkey Kong through various stages of a construction site with the goal of rescuing his lady love Pauline. While simplistic, the basic concept of level progression in support of a discrete narrative was revolutionary at the time, although it is likely that games would have trended in this direction if given enough time. What is less likely is that the core mechanic of jumping to clear obstacles would have become so ingrained in the minds of arcade gamers worldwide that the entire genre would have been born.

In retrospect, the idea of the jump as a primary verb in a video game seems natural, but there is no reason to believe that it would have emerged in the absence of Donkey Kong. With the exception of certain classes of athletes, who among us counts jumping as a common daily action, much less jumping to clear obstacles (to say nothing of obstacles thrown by an escaped primate)? Defining jumping as the game’s core mechanic separates Donkey Kong from its contemporaries, which often fell into the shooter or chase category, but doesn’t make it any more relatable or accessible in and of itself. In some ways, it might actually have made the game less approachable, because the concept of a jump is not inherently tied to a specific and comprehensible goal in the way that shooters (goal: to kill) or chase games (goal: to catch or escape) would be tied to their core mechanics.

Although we have become accustomed to Mario’s incredible jumping prowess over the last four decades, it’s considerably less impressive in Donkey Kong than we might expect. For starters, the jump actually works against what would later become a staple of Miyamoto games because despite the variety of obstacles Mario encounters, his primary action serves only a single purpose. Jumping helps Mario navigate the world and clear obstacles, but it possesses no offensive capabilities. Part of this is attributable to the nature of the challenges that Mario faces in Donkey Kong - it would make little sense for a man jumping on top of a rolling barrel to do harm to the barrel. Still, given the leaps and bounds the mechanic would take four years later in Super Mario Bros., it is a little disorienting to find the jump so enfeebled in its first permutation.

More disorienting still is Mario’s fragility. It’s not just that he can be killed by a single hit from a foe or obstacle. It’s that he is incapable of surviving even the smallest fall. A drop from any height greater than Mario himself will cost the player a life - a limitation that would be abandoned in Mario’s next game as a playable character, Mario Bros.. Perhaps the designers anchored too heavily to the real-life limits that a human being might encounter in falling from any height. More likely they were simply considering the relationship between the core objectives established in the game (navigating an obstacle course) and the core objective of the game (to churn through a player’s lives quickly but joyfully enough to encourage her to put another quarter into the arcade cabinet). If there was an inherent danger not just in the enemies attempting to foil Mario but also in the environment he was attempting to navigate, then every move, every leap would require careful consideration.

In this way, even Mario’s sole distinguishing ability became something capable of killing him. A bad jump - which was quite easy to stumble into, given the unforgiving nature of the game’s semi- realistic physics - would spell death, intentions be damned. This simple decision to turn not just the environment but also the player themselves into a hazard is actually the game’s masterstroke, because it establishes the fundamental tension of the game by creating multiple motivating factors for players and setting them in opposition to one another. Caution is encouraged mechanically even as the game’s scoring system demanded a speedy ascent through each stage and assorted hazards, including barrels, springs, and piles of cement, applied pressure at various points. The player wants to perform well and not die so as to save themselves a quarter, but also to rack up a high score and etch their initials into the leaderboard. This leads to calculated risks that sometimes result in death, but those deaths are attributable solely to the player’s decision-making, rather than the caprice of the game itself. And the player is then forced to confront the death after the fact and recognize that they is complicit in it. The response is almost inevitably: “I bet I could do better.” Another quarter in the machine. Another coin in the coffers.

Multiple levels, multi-level platforming, environmental hazards, active enemies, moving obstacles, a narrative structure - Donkey Kong is a shockingly complex game compared to its peers, but the basic building blocks to reach it had been established by the arc of gaming to date. Pong established a competitive dynamic between players and a scoring system. Space Invaders pitted the player against the game itself with a simple shooting objective. Pac-Man introduced both the idea of navigating space to avoid obstacles and characters with some semblance of personality. Donkey Kong went one step further, but in a way so unique that it seemed new and fresh at the time of its release. Even with what has followed, it’s hard not to appreciate just how revolutionary the game was. What’s amazing is that even today, it’s still a joy to play.

When sitting down to play Donkey Kong in 2022, two things become readily apparent. The first is that however far games may have come in the last thirty-seven years, there is an inherent level of difficulty that time does not diminish in the absence of frequent play. The second is that neither does the inherent level of fun.

I worry sometimes about how younger gamers might react the first time they lay eyes upon Donkey Kong. Perhaps there is no longer any need to worry. For a time, it seemed that more and more realistic graphics were working to consign the world of pixels, chip tunes, and 224x256 resolution images to the ash heap of history. In the age of Minecraft, the retro game revival, and the concurrent rise of 2D indie games, however, it seems clear that simplistic graphics alone aren’t going to turn young players away. The greater danger might lie in Donkey Kong’s difficulty curve, which remains a challenge even for those of us who have grown older with the game and might be a bridge too far for young gamers who have grown accustomed to the more accommodating design decisions now commonplace in everything from simple side-scrollers to complex open-world adventures.

I say “accommodating” rather than easy because I don’t want to disparage the decisions that have been made to make games more approachable in the last couple of decades, nor do I want to make it seem that modern audiences are too soft to withstand the games in their pure form. I believe firmly that the primary purpose of a game is to be played, and if producing games that remove barriers to entry is going to expand a potential audience, I am all for it. Without making a value judgment, however, I will say that games like Donkey Kong are operating a level of difficulty that may be outside of the comfort zone of a modern gamer. The game’s controls are not clunky but they are constrained. The challenges can be mastered, but only with careful study. Players can grind their way through the first loop of the four stages, but how many will realistically get beyond the second? When the options were limited to whatever cabinet (if any) stood next to Donkey Kong in the local pizza parlor, the player might have doubled down and kept playing the game for hours on end. No 2018 gamer is constrained by such limited options, and when met with a barrier that initially seems insurmountable, they may quickly move on to something that provides a bit more bang for their buck.

This is the challenge that every retro game will face. Like old films, they were made in an era of different tools and different conventions. Modern viewers have been habituated to a different set of conventions that, while built on the foundations established by their predecessors, are nonetheless radically different in important ways. How much an individual gets out of the so-called classics depends largely on how much they are willing to learn these older forms and what inconveniences they are willing to tolerate along the way.

I am not a good Donkey Kong player. I was born five years after the game’s initial release, after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and cut my teeth on games like Super Mario Bros.. The restrictions inherent in Donkey Kong’s design clash with the habits I have built up across more speed-oriented games, and I find myself approaching the challenges within more as puzzles to be solved than obstacles to be overcome.

I have enough skill to get through the first cycle of levels without too much issue, but I quickly fall apart on the second. A typical play for me will last less than ten minutes. But the raw pleasure that I get in that ten minute session is enough to keep me coming back from more. I’m never going to sit down and play Donkey Kong for an hour or more, but I will gladly return to it for short sessions when I feel the need to go back to the beginning and appreciate the craftsmanship of how games are made.

Craftsmanship. There’s a loaded word. In an age when art in games is conflated with evermore beautiful graphics and evermore cinematic storytelling, when teams of hundreds labor for years to create immersive experiences, there is still something to be said for the simple pleasures of an earlier era, when each individual pixel had to placed with care and what you could do was dwarfed by what you couldn’t. When options are infinite, it becomes easier to revert to heuristics in decision-making because it’s often the only way to make sense of the choice before you. But when you are constrained, presented with fewer choices than you would like, your ambitions will exceed your obvious capabilities and you will try to find solutions to problems that you would not otherwise know you had.

Without impugning the amazing work done by modern game developers large and small, it’s hard not appreciate the pure craft in Donkey Kong, a game quite literally scrapped together from the leftover material of a previous failure that nonetheless remains a joy to play. Joy assembled from scrap.