Donkey Kong is originally a 1981 release on arcade cabinets in Japan. In 1983, Nintendo developed a port for the Famicom, and in 1986 for the NES. This review will focus on the NES version, which has a notable difference in each level containing only 3 stages, rather than 4. Unlike many other games, Donkey Kong always has a black background, allowing the player to focus on the playable stage in the foreground. The player controls an unnamed character who attempts to climb stages to reach his girlfriend Pauline, who Donkey Kong has kidnapped. It is noted that the player’s character develops into what we know as Mario in future years, so for simplicity I will refer to the character as Mario even though in this game he is nameless. As the player ascends each stage, Donkey Kong will throw barrels, springs, and fireballs, with 2 options: jump over the obstacle or pick up a hammer and destroy it.
The game’s plot is simplistic and entirely inferred, as the game gives no text of instructions or backstory throughout the entire game. For the first stage, Mario avoids barrels to climb sloped girders. In the second stage, Mario utilizes elevators and dodges springs while ascending. In the third stage, Mario must destroy 8 rivets to cause Donkey Kong’s platform to fall and to reunite with Pauline. After completing the 3 stages, the game resets to the first stage with added difficulty for each level cleared. The difficulty increases only in the frequency of Donkey Kong creating the obstacles, barrels, springs, and fireballs. If the player is able to clear the 21’st level, then the game has been beaten. Due to an error in the code of the game, the 22nd level is a kill screen, where the code is not read correctly, and Mario is killed without fail. The look of the game is simplistic due to technological limitations of the time, with little color. This allows the player to focus themselves on the gameplay.
It is noteworthy that Donkey Kong was the first game to have a theme of a damsel in distress and is widely credited for developing the damsel in distress subgenre or theme in future games. I believe that this game is viewed differently because it was the pioneer for the genre, rather than if it had followed in other’s footsteps. Due to the game being the first to center its plot on rescuing someone and its lasting impact on other games, the plot or lack there of is notable. As players, we can immediately recognize that our objective is to climb to the top of the tower. Additionally, one of the characters is an ape throwing barrels at us, and the other is a woman wearing pink, it is implied that our goal is to reach her. At no point, however, are we explicitly told that we must ascend. There is nothing to stop the player from staying at the lowest level and assuming the goal of the game is to dodge as many barrels for as long as they can. Because there is no inherent timer, the goal is implied at best, and it is on the players to go for this goal.
It is also worth noting that this game is most successful when viewed in the culture and society of its release in 1981. Putting gameplay aside and focusing on the plot, the damsel in distress narrative would be questioned far more strongly in today’s society. There is a strong assumption that it is the female that is taken away and the male that must save her. If this game was adapted and rereleased today, I believe that the culture we have would want it to allow customization on the gender of both the player and the kidnapped character. I recognize that this customization was not available for the games creation and this game led to Mario becoming somewhat synonymous with Nintendo games, but I think this game would be different today.
Additionally, I think the success of this game led Nintendo to heavily lean their stories on the female character being kidnapped and the male protagonist needing to rescue her. After initial success, Mario has been featured in almost every Nintendo game, save a few franchises. Mario has appeared in hundreds of games for Nintendo, while Peach has only been a main character that is playable in 3 games. There are other games where many characters in the universe are playable, but as a main story character, Peach is almost exclusively the damsel in distress and Mario is the man to save her.
The impact of Donkey Kong cannot be understated. It developed a video game genre for which a male character is the saving grace of a female damsel in distress that has propelled Nintendo since its release in 1981, almost 40 years. The path of Nintendo, and of videogames in whole would have been drastically different without Donkey Kong. To note, this is not an opinion that Nintendo’s decisions were right or wrong. This is simply a call to recognize the impact, and to raise the question: What does the video game landscape look like if Peach has been rescuing Mario all these years? Or a step in another direction, if Nintendo doesn’t develop the damsel in distress subgenre for their games, does it eventually work its way in to be the defining characteristic of Nintendo’s flagship franchise, the Mario games? Or is there a different narrative that drives the ever-popular Mushroom Kingdom.
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