The case established Nintendo as a major player in the industry and arguably gave the company the confidence that it could compete with the giants of American media.

[1] In 1982, Sid Sheinberg, the president of MCA and Universal City Studios and a seasoned attorney, was trying to find a way to get his company into the booming video game market.

[2] In April, he learned of the success of Nintendo's Donkey Kong video game and sent Robert Hadl, vice president of legislative matters, to investigate.

[3] Sheinberg also learned of a licensing agreement between Nintendo and Coleco, a producer of home video game consoles.

Instead, Universal admonished Greenberg for copyright infringement and threatened to sue if the ColecoVision shipped with Donkey Kong as planned.

He decided that Universal's earnings from it were too low and that the license's granting of exclusive rights to Tiger would impede the agreement with Coleco.

[8] Eventually, however, he decided to fight, reassuring the head of the company's U.S. division, Minoru Arakawa, that this was a sign that Nintendo had made it big.

Lincoln countered that Nintendo had discovered many unlicensed uses of King Kong's name and characters and that Universal's trademark on these was less than 10 years old.

[6] By the end of the meeting, Hadl agreed to send a chain of title to Nintendo regarding Universal's ownership of the King Kong name.

[11]Knowing that a court battle lay ahead, Hadl contacted Rissman, the errant Tiger licensee, to compromise on the handheld King Kong game.

Hadl wanted to remove the exclusivity provision of the license and to distinguish the handheld game from Donkey Kong so as to weaken any potential counterclaims that one of Universal's licensees had violated Nintendo's intellectual property rights.

Rissman complied, giving the hero a fireman hat, replacing barrel graphics with bombs, and making the game platforms straight instead of crooked.

[12] When Ralston Purina's offer of $5,000 for the use of Donkey Kong characters on breakfast cereal was turned down, they also refused to settle.

[14] Kirby researched the game's development, taking depositions from designer Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi in Japan.

He also alleged that Universal had no rights to the King Kong characters and that they had in fact successfully sued RKO Pictures in 1975 in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc., wherein they proved that the plot of King Kong was in the public domain (by way of the original film's Novelisation) and thus opened the way for Dino De Laurentiis' remake.

As evidence of consumer confusion, Universal presented the results of a telephone survey of 150 managers and owners of arcades, bowling alleys, and pizza restaurants who owned or leased Donkey Kong machines.

The October 1982 issue of Videogaming Illustrated, for example, was shown to read "our Donkey Kong presentation continues as we look at other gorillas who have had a fondness for women.

Further, the court ruled that "the 'Kong' and 'King Kong' names are widely used by the general public and are associated with apes and other objects of enormous proportions".

Sweet ruled the cease-and-desist letters that Universal had sent to Nintendo's licensees gave the game company the right to seek damages, and so Universal would pay Nintendo $1.8 million for "legal fees, photocopying expenses, costs incurred creating graphs and charts, and lost revenues".

It embarked on a deliberate, systematic campaign to coerce all of Nintendo's third party licensees to either stop marketing Donkey Kong products or pay Universal royalties.

Finally, Universal's conduct amounted to an abuse of judicial process, and in that sense caused a longer harm to the public as a whole.