Speaker 1: Here we are for level one Donkey Kong.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody take out a quarter, insert it, press
one player, and here we go.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: So all these games that we're going to talk about
came out in nineteen eighty one. Yes, where do you
want to start?
Speaker 1: How about November seventh, nineteen twenty seven. Wow? Okay, So
that is when a gentleman named Hiroshi Yamuchi was born.
His dad abandoned him. His mother realized she couldn't raise him,
and so she gave him to her parents. His grandfather
ran this little playing card company named Nintendo. Wow.
Speaker 2: Nintendo was created in September of eighteen eighty nine as
a card playing company.
Speaker 1: Yes. So, Hiroshi grew up with his grandparents, ended up
getting married, going to study law. But while he was
studying law, his grandfather, president of Nintendo, has a stroke,
so he leaves school comes over to run the company
at the behest of his grandfather. He doesn't want to
do it because I don't want to do it. His
grandfather's like, you have to do it. I'm not gonna
make it. You neither run the He's like, okay, but
I won't do it unless we agree that no one
else in the family can be a part of the
company because he doesn't want the competition, right, So his
grandfather's like, okay, your cousin fired, and he starts running
this company. And so the cards back in Japan were
just card cards. They weren't the plastic cards that we're
familiar with. And so he decides, I'm going to make
cards like they make in the West. I want to
make these plastic cards. And he starts doing that and
reaches a hit number one by having an agreement with Disney,
Walt Disney to create the Walt Disney playing cards that
end up blowing up because Walt Disney is huge and
makes the company a bazillion dollars, right, Okay, okay, And
so he's like, okay, time for us to diversify. I'm
going to start a taxi company. I'm going to start
a love hotel. You know, love hotel is I think
I do? Yes, you could probably get it. It's rentable
by the hour. And apparently he would frequent those kind
of hotels that he started, okay, and an instant rice company,
well sure, why not? And so as it turns out
all of those failed, Yeah, and so they're at the
brink of bankruptcy. He's fretting. He sees this guy that's
an engineer of his in the factory named gun Pay Yochi,
and he's playing with a claw and I mean you
imagine the claw in the in the cartoons where it's
like you squeeze it and the little arms go back
and forth. You know, it stretches out to grab some
That's the thing that this guy is invented. And he's
like that, that's awesome. Figure out how the factory can
make it. And that's what he does. And it's called
the Ultra Hand ultrahnd and it makes him another bazillion dollars.
It's hit number two. Okay. So he realizes at that point, hey,
what am I doing with taxis and love hotels and
instant rice. We're a game company. We made playing cards,
We've got the Ultra Hand. And so they start toy making,
which leads to game making. Yes, and he sees the
potential video games and he says, I want to break
into that world, okay, And so they invent a few games.
And one of the games that they start is called
Radar Scope. Okay, and Radar Scope becomes a hit in Japan.
It's huge. It is second only to Pac Man okay
that we just mentioned. So he's like, okay, ship three
thousand of these over to the American coast. We are
going to break into the North American video gaming world.
And they sell one thousand out of three thousand, one
thousand out of three thousand, and then nobody orders anymore.
Speaker 2: And the other two thousand are sitting in this warehouse, Yes,
this crappy, little dusty Nintendo.
Speaker 1: Warehouse, Yes, the Nintendo America, the newly formed Nintendo America warehouse.
Speaker 2: And they start to panic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, holy crap, we've got all these games.
The Nintendo America is going down already. I mean they've
they've gotten excited about things and are completely devastated by
the lack of sales. And so they say, what are
we going to do? And so Hiroshi Yamuchi says, I'm
going to find a guy to make us a game
that's going to be a hit. And who does he find.
Speaker 2: He finds this guy called Saguerro Miyamato.
Speaker 1: So, Sagiro Miyamato, forgive us, we're stupid Americans. Yes, we
have no Japanese education whatsoever. So we're probably mispronouncing these names.
Speaker 2: The most Japanese we know how to say, we learned
from a stick song in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: No more, I got them. Hey.
Speaker 2: For my part, though, I did look at Radar Scope.
I checked it out. Yeah, and when I when I
got online and looked at it, yeah, I did not
recognize the game as one that I had played. Right,
But the gameplay is very similar to Space Invaders or Gallaga, yeah,
except it's kind of tilted. It's it's a tilted shoot
him up.
Speaker 1: Game, right, It's almost like Space Invaders if you were
about three feet tall on a regular game and you're
like looking at an angle. It's not It's very odd. Yeah,
I can see why it did not overwhelm the United States.
And so he hits up Shagiro Miyamato and says, I
want you to come up with a game. And Shagiru
Miyomtu was not an engineer, Okay, he was an artist. Okay.
He had wanted to be a magna artist. You know
magna is yeah, Okay, so he had wanted to do that,
but had gotten this job with Nintendo instead and had
done he had done work on one of Nintendo's other games.
Called Sheriff, and he had done work on radar scope,
but it was all kind of artistic development as opposed
to the engineering side of things. Okay, but he does
something unprecedented. He develops a story before any of the
programming is done.
Speaker 2: First story. Yeah, involved in a video game?
Speaker 1: Yes? And do you know who is supervising the development
of this game?
Speaker 2: Who's that?
Speaker 1: Gun pay Yoki, the guy who had invented the ultra hand,
All right, yeah, mister Altrahan. Mister Alterrahan, who, by the way,
also went on later on to invent this thing you
might have heard of called the game boy, the game boy, Yes, ultrahand,
the game Boy, not a bad resume. And our guy
Segeru Miamato. He invents another game down the road you
may have heard of, called Zelda. Yes again, and he
develops the story of a character. But talk about the
two three really biggest icons of video games in the
mid eighties. He started Mario, he started Donkey Kong, and
he started Legend of Zelda.
Speaker 2: This guy's a he's a legend.
Speaker 1: He is. So when he starts developing this game, he
wants to do a Popeye love triangle. He wants Popeye
Olive Oil and Blue Dump.
Speaker 2: You know I heard this in researching Donkey Kong. I
read this and I would I almost fell out of
my chair because I can now every time I play
this game, I will see Blueto grabbing Olive Oil and
Popeye rushing to save her.
Speaker 1: Yep. If you look at the outside of the cabinet, Pauline,
the woman looks like somebody out of King Kong, like
her dress is torn. She's blonde, she's buxom, kind of gorgeous.
If you look at her in the game, she looks
like Olive Oil's got the the skirt down to her ankles,
she's got the hair and a ponytail. She does not
look like the one on the side of the game cabinet. Okay,
so they say, hey, Popeye, people who make Popeye license
it to us, and they say no, right, So Miamatto
comes up with a different set of characters that are
still in this love triangle. Blueto becomes this gorilla, Olive
Oil becomes this pretty woman instead of this gangly woman.
I guess her name is Pauline. We'll get there. Sorry, No,
that's all right, No, that's good. Pauline is her name? Okay,
and jump a man, jumpman? Who is a carpenter? Yes
he is?
Speaker 2: So is he a carpenter or a plumber? That's so
if you'll notice.
Speaker 1: In Donkey Kong the game takes place on a construction site, right,
oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, So Mario Matt started off
as carpenter. Okay. They only changed him into a plumber
later on when they developed Mario Brothers, which was him
and his brother Luigi working in pipes and doing plumbing stuff.
They both had the same look. You got overalls, you
got a hat. He could be a carpenter or a plumber.
But in the original Donkey Kong there's no plumbing going on,
but he is swinging a hammer around. So they create
the game, they send it to the United States. The
guys in the United States are like, I really don't
know about this. This is kind of weird. Yes, and
they're like, do you have a name for the game,
And so that he had tried to come up with
an American name for this game, since it was the
objective was to be a hit in North America. Right,
you know how it came about? I think, so go
for it. Okay.
Speaker 2: So in Japan, a common term for a gorilla is Kong, yes,
which that works in America too, right, you have King
Kong in Japan gorilla. And so I always heard the
urban legend that it was a mistranslation, that Donkey Kong
should have been monkey Kong, and that it was a misspelling.
And by the time they figured it out, it had
already been printed a million times and it was too much,
and so they just became Donkey Kong. But based on
what I have read, and according to Miamato, what he
wanted to do was he wanted to translate stubborn gorilla.
He used a posaurus to come up with the term
for stubborn, and when he looked up the term stubborn,
one of the things he found was the term donkey,
and that's how he came up with the name donkey Kong.
Speaker 1: Right, the idea is simply stupid or stubborn. Eight. So
now onto the names of the other characters. We know
how Donkey Kong got his name. He, by the way,
was supposed to be a pet of jump Man who
had escaped and taken Jumpman's woman with him.
Speaker 2: Now, because people have pet gorillas in Japan.
Speaker 1: Sure they do, right, or America right or whatever. Yeah, okay,
so how did we get the name Pauline? You know
this one?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: I don't, all right, So they ship it to America.
It goes to the going to the warehouse where they
have those two thousand radar scope games sitting right right.
The manager of the warehouse is this guy named Don James.
His wife is named Paulie, and so for her they
say Paulie James. We're gonna call her Pauline as the
character nice. The guy who owns the warehouse, their landlord
who's angry at them because they're going broke and they're
not paying their rent, is a guy called Mario Cigale,
and so they name Jumpman after Mario. Those people all
become very wealthy in a short amount of time. I
bet they do. Don James is still the executive vice
president of Operations for Nintendo America.
Speaker 2: Fantastic.
Speaker 1: He's been with them for what forty years? Almost? Yeah,
forty years now. Yeah, that's the thing. All of these
games are forty years old this year.
Speaker 2: It's incredible.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. So he went from being a warehouse manager
to executive vice president of operations for Nintendo for a
Nintendo of America yes wow, which he was also, by
the way, involved in developing the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Speaker 2: The n E S.
Speaker 1: Harry Christ. So they get the first game in to
North America. The guys who are the Nintendo distributors are
guys named Ron Judy and Alstone. And they look at
this and they're like, this sucks. There's no way that
this is going to be a hit in the US.
We need to start looking for other jobs. Wow. And
so should say Ron Stone, No, Ron Judy and al Stone? Okay, yes, yes, I.
Speaker 2: Was gonna say Ron Stone quit van Halen and bailed
on Donkey Kong Jr. It was Mark Stone Okay, Sorry,
Oh my gosh, that guy was done looking again in
the Little World.
Speaker 1: Okay. So the way that they did it, they realized
that they could restructure the circuit boards on the Radar
Scope games in order to make it into this new
game Donkey Kong. Okay. But these guys looking at saying this,
this is a waste of time. This is not gonna
be a success. But they give it a try, you
know why not. They're in Washington, go to a couple
of bars in Washington and say, hey, can we put
this game in here.
Speaker 2: You know the names of those two bars, go for it.
The names of those two bars Seattle Washington Goldies and
Spot Tavern.
Speaker 1: Right, and so At Goldies and Spot Tavern. People start
playing the game, and they keep playing the game, and
they keep playing the game, and the game is making
thirty dollars a day in Quarters and we're talking about quarters. Yeah,
thirty dollars worth of quarters is a lot for a
bar that's not open twenty four hours a day, right, right,
it's not an arcade, right, And so suddenly they realize,
holy crap, people love this game, right, And so Ron Judy, Alstone,
Don James, all of those guys go to work at
the two thousand left over Radar Scope games that they
have in there, and they start gutting them and converting
them all into Donkey Kong games and sell them all immediately,
and within a couple of months are selling four thousand
Donkey Kong games a month. They end up selling sixty
thousand within their first year, and Ron, Judy and else Stone,
who had been thinking they should go look for other jobs,
become millionaires. That is awesome. Let's talk about the music
on this real quick. Okay. Music is composed by a
guy named Yuki oh Ken. It's a variation of the
Dragnet theme. What, Yeah, you're gonna hear the Dragnet theme.
Speaker 2: Now you're blowing my mind.
Speaker 1: There we go. Yep, you got it.
Speaker 2: Hey, I want to talk about gameplay for just a second.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: So the interesting thing about Donkey Kong is it's a
level up game, right, which was unusual. I think it's
maybe the first of its kind where you start at
the bottom to the top. Yes, along the way, you
have Donkey Kong throwing barrels at you. Yes, you have
fireballs that will change direction and sort of random. Yes,
But the real thing that was really hard on gameplay
was the crazy barrels. Yes, okay, so normal barrels would
roll down the level and you'd see them coming. Occasionally
they'd take a ladder down. But the crazy barrels, you
had no idea where they're going. They're random, and you.
Speaker 1: They were falling down without any rolls at all. Mean,
all the way to the bottom.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know how many words those crazy barrels.
Speaker 1: Caused me in my life. Donkey Kong is an incredibly
difficult game. It's very difficult it is arguably the most
difficult video game of nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: Well, you have all those random movements that it's hard
to figure out what to do.
Speaker 1: And we're just talking about level one. I mean, when
you get to the elevator level, holy crap, that thing
is impossible. But I shovel my quarters in Hey, yeah,
you dude.
Speaker 2: I like the beginning. It shows screen one twenty five
meters and it always asks you how high can you get?
Speaker 1: Yeah? That has been pretty high. Yeah, I bet you
would read.
Speaker 2: It's like taunting you.
Speaker 1: It also had cut scenes in it where it would
give you a little bit of a storyline in between
each of your competitions, each of your levels, yep, which
was nice. You get to figure out what's going on
with the gorilla and the lady and you, which was
something we would we would see also again in mis
pac Man.
Speaker 2: All right, I got something for you, Yes, all right,
I had to dig deep on this. Here are a
few celebrities that are good Donkey Kong players.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, all right, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: Three celebrities that I found are reasonably good to excellent
Donkey Kong players.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Number one Michael Jackson, Okay, the Moonwalker himself, all right,
Like Donkey Kong played it a lot. I couldn't find
any solid info on how good he actually was.
Speaker 1: You don't know his high score.
Speaker 2: I do not know his high score, okay, Okay. Number
two Steven Spielberg had a Donkey Kong cabinet in his
office and is said to be a very good Donkey
Kong player.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Number three Eminem, Okay, he actually tweeted out his high
score and I saw it on Twitter today. It's something
like four hundred and sixty five thousand. Wow, fantastic score, right,
Like that's really good. It's like halfway to world record status.
Speaker 1: Right, and world record status. I mean yeah, it's like
one point one. Yeah. I mean when they made when
they made King of Kong, and we looked at Billy
Mitchell's score, he was top with eight hundred and something thousand,
and next below him was five hundred and something thousand.
So Eminem was within one hundred thousand points of second place. Yeah. Wow, yep,
there you aggressive. Okay.
Speaker 2: So, as I understand it, there was a lawsuit involving
Universal Studios and Nintendo Donkey Kong.
Speaker 1: Yes, So this started the year after it came out
not even a full year after it came out. It
started in April of eighty two, when Sid.
Speaker 2: Sheinberg flashed back to our Jaws episode.
Speaker 1: YEP, learned about the game success and thought it might
be a trademark infringement on Universal's King Kong.
Speaker 2: Is there a possibility that Sid Sheinberg saw this game
in Steven Spielberg's office.
Speaker 1: Could be so they filed a lawsuit against Donkey Kong, claiming,
among other things, trademark infringement, copyright.
Speaker 2: Infringement on their King Kong title.
Speaker 1: On there, Yeah, from King Kong, Donkey Kong. They're saying, no,
this is they have obviously stolen this. Howard Lincoln was
Nintendo's lawyer. He was not a litigator. He was the
guy they were calling about trademarking Donkey Kong. And when
they asked him, he's like, I'm sorry, what did you say? Donkey?
Can you spell that? He was expecting them to be
calling them about bankruptcy. He didn't realize how much the
success Donkey Kong had, and so Universal sues Nintendo America.
Now this is going to be a huge deal because
they're just they're literally just coming up. They're just becoming big,
and Universal is already gigantic and can decimate them. Right,
But Howard Lincoln knows another lawyer named John Kirby and
gives him a call. He says, here's our problem, and
John Kirby is just this humorless aggressive, meticulous, bad a
cross examining lawyer. He's like, all right, let's go do
some research. And so where they go to do research
but Japan. So John Kirby goes out there and he
finds Kong in use for car washes and sandwiches and
about one hundred other different things, and it's always in
reference to some sort of ape. It's not have anything
to do with King Kong the movie, right, And so
he's looking at this and he's like, these lawyers a
Universal have got to be crazy to file this lawsuit.
They're just looking to bullyus. And as he does more research,
he realizes, wait a minute, Universal got sued before about
King Kong being a copyright infringement of somebody else's story,
and at that time they argued that it was public domain.
So not only should they know better, they have to
know that their argument is crap and that they're just
trying to bully us, and so not only does he
win the case for them, but they have to pay
all the legal fees one point eight million dollars to
Nintendo America. Nice. So after that, John Kirby, the bulldog lawyer,
gets boats that are all called Donkey Kong. Yes, and
there's a character that you might have heard of. As
a matter of fact, I sent you a picture of it.
He's round and pink and one of Nintendo's big characters.
And his name is Kirby.
Speaker 2: How about that. Yeah, that's fantastic. That blows my mind. Yes,
I owe Kirby.
Speaker 1: I was hoping to blow your mind. Yes, they created
the character Kirby from the attorney that won the Donkey
Kong loss. Wow. And when asked about that, he was like,
I don't really think I gave them permission to use.
Speaker 2: My That is fantastic, all right. That Mario character from
Donkey Kong has appeared in over two hundred video games.
Speaker 1: I've played a lot of the Super Mario Brothers is
without question, my favorite game of all times. Played it
in the arcade. I can remember with absolute clarity, sitting
in front of the TV in nineteen eighty five and
that first advertisement for the Nintendo Gaming System comes on
and I see the robot, see the gun. I'm like,
this is pretty cool. And for about three quarters of
a second, I see Mario jump up and hit a coin,
and I said, oh my gosh, this is the only
thing that I want for Christmas. I don't care if
you get me anything else. I have to have in
a Nintendo game. Wow, that's awesome. And I got it
and I spent hours. Yeah, my dad said he used
to have dreams where the Super Mario Brothers music was
playing in his grips because I was up so lately
playing that game.
Speaker 2: Okay, which I know, yea, all my kids for Yeah, okay,
it's twenty twenty. That came out in nineteen eighty five.
Then Dune Dun du.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could do that.
Speaker 2: It's ingrained in our childhood.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Well, that's gonna wrap it up for Donkey Kong YEP.
Come back next week as we dive into another title
from nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: It's been fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's gonna play some names. Yes, Doom Doo doo
do do do Doom now