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"How high can you get?"

Nintendo's still answering that question... originally posed to the players of Donkey Kong, Nintendo's first major hit game. That game now celebrates its 45th anniversary, as it was released to arcades on July 9th, 1981.

Nearly half-a-century later, and Nintendo remains completely synonymous with video games. They've positioned themselves as the Disney of the interactive entertainment sector—and are even encroaching upon Disney's turf, now that both Super Mario movies have cleared the top 20 highest-grossing animated films ever.

But, where did this whirlwind of runaway success actually begin? Well, it's certainly no secret, at this point. The Mario franchise technically begins right here, with this game—which puts you in control of the Italian carpenter, for the first time... as you dash, climb, jump over gaps and obstacles, and use a power-up to bash away baddies—just as he would in all successive entries.

A game this monumental's origin story is practically legend, by now... But, let's retread it, for the folks who perhaps haven't heard it, yet—with the benefit of some rare interview snippets, to tell a clearer story of its conception. To start: let's take you back, to the early 1980s...

The world of games had seen a big shakeup. Atari's dominance was beginning to waver, with an influx of Japanese companies—following the lead set by Taito's Space Invaders—entering the playing field and iterating heavily on the shoot-'em-up genre. Nintendo was then one of many: first creating outright copies, and then introducing small twists on the formula. But, they had yet to truly stand out.

Following Space Fever and Space Firebird—their next arcade shooter, Radar Scope (also set in space), saw them climb up the charts in Japan. Encouraged, they decided it would be the game to launch their American subsidiary with. But, Americans didn't take to it in the same way as the Japanese. As the year 1980 drew to a close, thousands of unsold cabinets lingered in Nintendo of America's warehouse, and this emergency at the onset threatened to wipe out their fledgling presence in the West.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, tasked with saving the venture, already had a trusty right-hand man he could turn to... And, it's probably not the one you're thinking of...

Gunpei Yokoi: "Around that time, a game someone at the company had made didn’t sell well, and we had about 3,000 unsold arcade boards lying around. So I received an order from our company president, asking if I could make a new game using the remaining circuit boards. What was I supposed to do with them? I was given this request just at the critical moment when I’d assumed all we could do was get rid of them. At that time, I already had my hands full with designing the Game & Watch series, so I began the project with a pretty carefree attitude, having decided that out of the 3,000 unsold boards I had before me—if I managed to sell even just a few of them, like 1,000 or so, I’d be doing the company a favor, as it was, anyway."

Gunpei Yokoi was the man who, in the 1960s, had changed Nintendo's fortunes and direction as a company. A tinkerer, inventor, and engineer—but originally hired as a mere maintenance technician, just to adhere to Japanese law—his creations were noticed by President Yamauchi, and subsequently turned into products. The Ultra Hand began it all, in 1966... 15 years later, he was the head of his own division, Nintendo R&D1. The recently successful Game & Watch line was his brainchild, and Yamauchi saw him as something of an adopted son.

But, there's another figure crucial to this game's development. Someone whose name I'm sure we all know.

^(Note: These interview quotes have been spliced together from multiple sources, to tell the story of the game's creation.)

Gunpei Yokoi: "In those days, Mr. Miyamoto’s job was package design."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "I designed labels for mah-jong, stencils for Japanese playing cards, the Block Breaker machine, the illustration on the arcade Space Firebird cabinet, the design for the Sheriff arcade cabinet... Yeah, I had a hand in every aspect of design.

In between those projects, I also proposed plans for many different games, but they were all rejected. It was my desire to work in planning, but since I had some design skills, I was given a lot of that kind of work… I sat in the same room as the graphic designers, but given the chance, I knew I wanted to work on game planning…

When Gunpei Yokoi was working on the Game & Watch, he realized that graphics would be more important in the next generation of games. So he came to my section looking for staff who could draw. I jumped at the chance. So each of us submitted a game plan, and Yokoi picked mine."

Gunpei Yokoi: "I called him over one day and told him, 'Let’s make a Popeye game for Game & Watch!', and so we began ironing out the concepts. But due to the aforementioned circumstances, we instead decided to put it out on the remaining circuit boards as quickly as possible."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "Nintendo was considering obtaining the license for Popeye and making a game with those characters. It would have featured Popeye dodging Bluto's barrels, while trying to reach Olive and rescue her. Popeye would start off weak, but if he ate spinach, he would temporarily get strong. I drew some mock-up images depicting what I thought the game would look like, and I figured that even if we ended up not being able to get the license, we could just swap out the characters. That was how the basic structure of Donkey Kong was created.

It was the first game I directed under the guidance of producer Gunpei Yokoi, who created the Game & Watch. Every game I made, up to Mario Bros., was done in the same way (with me directing, and Yokoi guiding and producing)."

Gunpei Yokoi: "There was an episode in the cartoon show for Popeye, in which Olive was sleepwalking and wandered around a construction site. Whenever she was about to lose her footing, miraculously enough, another platform would come out of nowhere and support her, and this left quite an impression on me. So we figured by using a construction site as the setting, there would be all kinds of things we could do, and thus chose that as the setting for our Popeye game.

Once we had established that the game would be set at a construction site, Mr. Miyamoto suggested, 'Let’s make it a game where there are barrels falling from above, and the player has to dodge them.' At that time, he had a simple gameplay idea, which was that whenever a barrel fell, the player could get on a ladder and avoid it. Once the barrel had passed, the player would get off the ladder and then back on the platform to continue climbing."

With the first drafts of the characters and the game design complete, Nintendo outsourced the programming to software engineers working for Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd. This was because they had yet to build up their own arcade programming muscle. That would come later.

Hirohisa Komanome: "From our perspective as the programmers, the Donkey Kong project began rather abruptly. On April 6, 1981, then-manager Mr. Masayo Oka instructed Minoru Iinuma, Mitsuhiro Nishida, Yasuhiro Murata, and myself to stop what we were working on and assemble together in the meeting room, where we were ordered to begin this new project. He explained that the purpose of this development was to use up the large amount of leftover PCB (printed circuit board) inventory and create a new game that made the most of the hardware capabilities. He then made a copy of the game plans Nintendo had sent over, and handed them to us.

At this point, no one dreamed that a mere three months later, Miyamoto's game idea would become the smash hit, Donkey Kong. A rough schedule was also decided at this point: the development was to be completed in mid-June… giving us only two and a half months! The next three months (the development went about a half-month over schedule) would prove to be an incredible challenge for all four of us.

Shigeru Miyamoto: "I did make a point of phoning a few friends to tell them that I probably wouldn’t be in touch for two or three months. The company housing I was living in at the time was nearby across the river. So every day I was just going back and forth between work and home.

The head office back then was in Toba-kaidō, and there was also a factory for making Japanese playing cards. You need a boiler to make playing cards, so we used water boiled there for the adjoining bath facility as well. The people who worked at the card factory would clean themselves up in the bath after work. No one was there at night, so I could use it at my leisure. It was a lifesaver. And it was effective in making time for gathering my ideas."

Hirohisa Komanome: Miyamoto's game proposal was at that time called Popeye's Beer Barrel Attack Game. The sketch showed the character of Popeye as the player and Olive as the girl, just as the name implied. With Popeye and Olive, you would naturally expect the antagonist to be Bluto. However, the mock-up sketch featured Kong (a gorilla). Being close in shape to a human, a gorilla had been chosen to make it more interesting and add a humorous touch."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "Initially, Donkey Kong was not a jump game. It was originally an athletic game, and the levels would have featured things like see-saws and other devices which the characters would use to move up and down. First, we created a slope for the barrels to roll down. Then that gave us the idea for the ladders, to dodge the barrels. At first, that was the whole game: just climbing ladders."

Hirohisa Komanome: "In the first draft game plans, when a barrel rolled down, the player had to climb up to a nearby escape ladder (a short ladder with a break in the middle) and wait for the barrel to pass by. At the top of the escape ladder, you could grab a hammer and smash the barrels. However, it was pointed out that this was basically a 'running away game', which was stressful.

Gunpei Yokoi: "It would obviously get frustrating after a while, and so I told him to make it so that the player could jump over the barrels, when they rolled towards him. This led to the idea of creating a 'jump' button."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "The PCBs we had to use for Donkey Kong then were equipped with a joystick and one button. If all you were doing was climbing ladders, you only needed the joystick, but that felt boring to me. We had a hard time deciding whether that button should be used for jumping over the barrels, or for swinging a hammer to break them. The planning docs had the same note written there: 'button to be used for jump or hammer'."

Gunpei Yokoi: "At first, we had doubts as to whether the idea of jumping over barrels using a button would really work, but once we actually tried it, we discovered that it was pretty effective, and decided to implement it."

Hirohisa Komanome: "I remember that there were few games back then that incorporated jumping as a basic movement of the player. We therefore considered this unique jumping movement as the 'centerpiece' of this game. Being the main attraction, we wanted the jumping to feel more realistic. So we decided to use actual physics to realistically calculate the trajectory and arc of the jump.

Unfortunately, video game PCB hardware back then used the z80 chip for the CPU, which did not have floating-point arithmetic instructions. Although integer multiplication instructions were available, they couldn't be used because they took too much processing time. We thus had to use second-order derivatives, which required only bit shift and addition calculations. Mr. Nishida created the program and adjusted the parameters.

This calculation is used all over the place, including the trajectory of Mario's jump and the way a barrel bounces as it rolls off the steel girders. It's what makes Donkey Kong such a richly expressive game."

With Mario's famous jumping maneuver firmly in place for the first time in history, the controls were cemented. Next, they'd have to tackle the design of the levels. Miyamoto's blueprint was rough around the edges, in this regard, as well...

Hirohisa Komanome: "In the initial plans, the first stage would repeat numerous times, and only the final stage had a different layout."

Gunpei Yokoi: "Pretty early on, we had decided that Popeye would go on the bottom of the screen, and Bluto would be on the top, thus establishing the framework for the game. With that aside, how are we to make the player realize that he has to get Popeye to the top of the screen? First, if we were to show the player a scene in which Olive is kidnapped when they first glance at the game, they’d probably have Popeye go after her."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "A fun game should always be easy to understand—you should be able to take one look at it and know what you have to do, straight away. It should be so well-constructed that you can tell at a glance what your goal is, and, even if you don't succeed, you'll blame yourself rather than the game. These were the kind of issues I discussed with Yokoi-san."

Gunpei Yokoi: "But Mr. Miyamoto and I thought very hard about what we should do in the event that, even then, there were users who couldn’t tell how to move their character.

So, we came up with this idea: once the player has jumped over a falling barrel that had come from above, next we’ll have a fireball appear from behind and chase after them. We figured that, if chased from behind, the player would climb upwards, no matter what. Like this, we have attempted to explain how to play the game within the confines of the game screen."

Hirohisa Komanome: "In addition to the barrels, other characters such as the 'ojama-mushi' ('Bother Bug', localized as 'Fireball' in English) try to stop Popeye.

Our first impression of this game proposal was that it was 'like Crazy Climber and Pac-Man added together and divided by two.' Dodging barrels while ascending the steel girders was similar to the gameplay of Crazy Climber, where you climb the front of a building while dodging falling obstacles; likewise, the way the ojama-mushi blocked your path reminded us of Pac-Man."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "We thought that we could work with that concept. It was at that point when we tried to make the screen scroll and were told: 'That board doesn't scroll!' As we wanted the game to be played on at least four connected screens, we simply referred to that as 'scrolling'. The technical supervisor at the time asked us what on earth we were thinking: 'One screen is plenty for a regular game! But you're making four separate screens! You might as well ask us to make four different games!'"

Hirohisa Komanome: "A popular game in those days was Scramble, a shooting game by Konami. The way the stage scenery unfolded, as the screen scrolled left to right, was very fresh for its time. For Donkey Kong, therefore, instead of just monotonously repeating the first stage, we decided that we needed unique stages. We made a list of the various equipment and items that exist at construction sites, and thought about how we could use those elements as part of the stage design. We also wanted the stages to be designed in such a way that would make good use of the jump action."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "On the second stage, we had vertical lifts and we were concerned as to how the player would be able to get on them. Jumping seemed like an easier way to get onto the see-saws."

Hirohisa Komanome: "As a result of these considerations, we decided to have a four-stage loop: this would also coincide with and convey a clearer sense of story development, in the classic kishōtenketsu style. We then decided on certain characteristics for each stage: the first stage would be a barrel dropping game, the second stage a maze game (the conveyor belt stage), the third stage a jumping game (the lift stage), and the fourth stage would be the climax.

After the above determinations were made, we held further discussions with Miyamoto about how to make the game more interesting, and then we drew up the actual game planning docs for Donkey Kong. At this point, it had only been 10 days since we started the development."

Gunpei Yokoi: "We would later discover that we wouldn’t be able to get the rights to use the characters, after all. It [was] a technological problem. We could not depict or draw the character of Popeye using the circuit [board], in those days, properly. With no other options, we decided to keep the content of the game as it was, and just change the characters."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "There [was] a technological limitation on the number of dots which [could] be used to depict pictures. The number of dots that [could] be used [was] 16 x 16, and I mentioned that Popeye cannot be depicted quite well in such a limitation."

Gunpei Yokoi: Mr. Miyamoto created the character, Mario. He said he was thinking about how he should change Popeye, and decided that since the setting for the game was a construction site, that he would make a character wearing a work uniform. He was also the one who gave the character a moustache. At first though, we simply referred to the character as “Ossan” (Translator’s note: a slightly derogatory Japanese word for a middle aged man, meaning something along the lines of 'pops'.), but when we sent the finished character design to Nintendo of America, there was talk that the character greatly resembled an employee working there named Mario, and before long the name stuck."

Shigeru Miyamoto: "I had confidence in my drawings. The way development worked at Nintendo then, was that the programmers and hardware designers were in control of the game development process, and from my point of view, their drawings and art were terrible. So, if I was going to do it myself, I had to do that part very well. However, I was a rather analog person and did not know anything about technology. So, I learned how the screen was displayed from an in-house engineer. That's how I started doing pixel art.

However, when I put my sprites onto the TV screen, they were slightly stretched horizontally. You see, the ratio of a TV screen is not an exact square, but 4 to 3. So, I made a piece of graph paper with the same ratio as the TV, drew a circle on it with a compass, and drew a barrel on it. Those were the kind of crude techniques by which Mario was born.

think imagination is extremely important no matter what you do. I'm always telling my own kids this, to first envision the result you want to achieve, then take action.

When we made Donkey Kong, I dubbed Mario "Mister Video", and I told everyone how I want him to be used in Nintendo games for many, many years to come. You know, I struggled a bit with his design. In order to show his nose better I gave him a mustache, and to make his running animation easier to understand, I gave him those overalls…

I'm disliked by the programmers. Of course we decide the main, important aspects of the game beforehand, but as the development goes on there are lots of small details we update. So they say about me, "Hey… if you work with Miyamoto, you'll never know when you're done. Watch out, you'll find yourself overloaded with a mountain of work at the end!"

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/06/19/415568892/q-a-shigeru-miyamoto-on-the-origins-of-nintendos-famous-characters NPR

I think that Mario became so popular because the actions in the Mario game are something that are innate to humans everywhere. Everyone is afraid of falling from a great height. If there is a gap that you have to cross, everyone is going to try to run to jump across the gap. These are things that are uniquely human and are a shared experience across, really, all people.

my vision of Mario has always been that he's sort of representative of everyone. He's kind of a blue-collar hero. And so that's why we chose these roles for him that were things like carpenters and plumbers.

in the arcade version, I did the opening music and then the end of it as well.

I grew up watching a lot of cartoons and anime, so I just had this image that at the beginning there's always this dramatic music to start things off — that's where the dramatic (sings tune) came from. And then for the ending, I play guitar a little bit, and so the end song I put together as a bit of a parody of a song I used to play on guitar.