As Mario (also sometimes known at the time as "Jumpman"), the player runs and jumps on platforms and climbs ladders to ascend a construction site and rescue Pauline from a giant gorilla, Donkey Kong.

Drawing inspiration from "Beauty and the Beast" and 1930s American media such as Popeye and King Kong, Miyamoto developed the characters and scenario and designed the game alongside chief engineer Gunpei Yokoi.

It was the most complex arcade game at that point, using graphics for characterization, including it and cutscenes to illustrate a plot, and integrating multiple unique stages into the gameplay.

Points are awarded for the following: leaping over obstacles; destroying objects with a hammer power-up; collecting items such as hats, parasols, and purses; removing rivets from platforms; and completing each stage according to a steadily decreasing bonus counter.

Stage one involves Mario scaling a construction site made of crooked girders and ladders while jumping over or hammering barrels and oil drums tossed by Donkey Kong.

[13] However, in January 2025, it was discovered that by using a TAS to exploit a glitch that allows the player to climb straight up to the top of the stage from the starting point (along with a considerable amount of luck)[e], it is possible to continue the game until level 135.

[29] The game opens with the gorilla climbing a pair of ladders to the top of a construction site, accompanied by a variation on the musical theme from Dragnet.

[31]: 103–105 [25] Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president (and his father-in-law) Hiroshi Yamauchi send a conversion kit of new game software.

[33] Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for some of the development, with no role in the game's creation or concept, but to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo".

[26]: 238 [38] Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter with a large hammer, and a girlfriend, mirroring the rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl.

A false urban myth says that the name was originally meant to be "Monkey Kong", but was misspelled or misinterpreted due to a blurred fax or bad telephone connection.

Yokoi thought Miyamoto's original design was too complex,[31]: 47–48  though he had some difficult suggestions, such as using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen which was eventually found too hard to program, though a similar concept came later in the Popeye arcade game.

Nintendo of America's distributors, Ron Judy and Al Stone, brought Arakawa to the lawyer Howard Lincoln to secure a trademark.

The sales manager disliked it for being too different from the maze and shooter games common at the time,[31]: 49  and Judy and Lincoln expressed reservations over the strange title.

[12]: 68  In their Redmond headquarters, a skeleton crew composed of Arakawa, his wife Yoko, James, Judy, Phillips, and Stone gutted 2,000 surplus Radar Scope machines and applied the Donkey Kong conversion kits imported from Japan, consisting of motherboards, power supplies, and marquee graphics.

When Coleco unveiled the Adam Computer, running a port of Donkey Kong at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Illinois, Atari protested that it was in violation of the licensing agreement.

[63][64] It is an early Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game in the Arcade Classics Series, released in June 1986 in North America and October 15 in Europe.

[82] Computer and Video Games reviewed the ColecoVision port in its September 1984 issue and scored it 4 out of 4 in all four categories of Action, Graphics, Addiction and Theme.

[83] Donkey Kong was popular worldwide, garnering a positive reaction from consumers, and was a significant commercial success for Nintendo, pulling them out of financial troubles.

[31]: 121  Meanwhile, Sheinberg revoked Tiger's license to make its King Kong game, but O. R. Rissman refused to acknowledge Universal's claim to the trademark.

[106]: 74  Nintendo's counsel, John Kirby, countered that Universal had argued in a previous case that King Kong's scenario and characters were in the public domain (by way of the Novelization of the 1933 film).

[32]: 217 Universal appealed, trying to prove consumer confusion by presenting the results of a telephone survey and examples from print media where people had allegedly assumed a connection between the two Kongs.

[114] Donkey Kong spawned a number of other titles with a mix of running, jumping and vertical traversal, a novel genre that did not match the style of games that came before it.

[127] In Japan, a download code for the game for the 3DS Virtual Console was sent to users who purchased New Super Mario Bros. 2 or Brain Age: Concentration Training from the Nintendo eShop from July 28 to September 2, 2012.

The 1982 Logger arcade game from Century Electronics is a direct clone of Donkey Kong, with a large bird standing in for the ape and rolling logs instead of barrels.

One of the first releases from Electronic Arts was Hard Hat Mack (Apple II, 1983), a three-stage game without an ape, but using the construction site setting from Donkey Kong.

The final arcade installment, Donkey Kong 3 (1983), appeared in the form of a fixed shooter, with an exterminator named Stanley ridding the ape—and insects—from a greenhouse.

Several animated commercials were produced by FilmFair Studio for the cereal, featuring Larry Moran as Mario, Jo Belle Yonely as Pauline, and William Marshall as the narrator.

In the show, mystery crime-solving plots in the mode of Scooby-Doo are framed around the premise of Mario and Pauline chasing Donkey Kong (voiced by Soupy Sales), who has escaped from the circus.

Giuseppe is also seen playing Donkey Kong on an arcade cabinet, but in the film the game is called "Jump Man", referencing Mario's original name.