You don’t have to be an expert in the history of video games to have ever heard of , one of the most popular electronic entertainment companies on the planet. What perhaps not everyone knows is that this company, incredible as it may seem to us, was founded in Japan at the end of the 19th century (yes, yes, 19th century, we were not wrong), specifically in the year 1889.
At that time, Nintendo was dedicated to the manufacture and sale of ‘hanafuda’, traditional decks of Japanese playing cards that are used in various board games. It was Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder’s great-grandson, who decided – back in the 1960s – to open new and surprising lines of market, such as a taxi affiliate, a television channel and even a chain known there as hotel hotels. love (rooms that are rented by the hour for couples looking for some privacy).
However, from the seventies, Nintendo began to have some success in the world of toys, coming to market some innovative mechanical creations, such as the ‘Ultra Hand’, a kind of robotic arm -very primitive- that It allowed objects to be caught from a distance (more than a million units were sold in Japan).
Shigeru Miyamoto, in an image from the eighties
Yamauchi was one of the first toy businessmen in the world to realize the importance that videogames would gain in the future -especially among the youngest- and he pushed hard to be the distributor in his country of Magnavox Odyssey, the first console domestic.
Based on this license, Nintendo itself would end up developing a rectangular format portable console (something similar to a small case that opened like a book) that only had a single game. They were called Game&Watch, a revolutionary idea that turned out to be quite a bombshell (although today they may seem like ancient pieces of archaeology, in those early eighties, they caused a sensation in Spanish schools among the members of what is now known as the EGB Generation). .
Nintendo perfectly controlled the tastes and customs of the Asian public, but had no experience in the western North American market. Yamauchi decided that the time had come to make the leap to the US and exported thousands of ‘Radar Scope’ arcade machines, an extremely popular Martian game in Japan (it was only surpassed in fame and benefits by the unforgettable ‘Pac-Man’).
Junior version of the Game&Watch console of ‘Donkey Kong’
For some reason, however, the Americans did not like this oriental game at all. It was such a resounding failure that it brought the mother house to the brink of ruin. It was the year 1981 and Nintendo was in serious danger of disappearing after almost a hundred years of history.
It was then that Yamauchi, a bit desperate for not finding professional game designers at his company, decided to give a new recruit who had just been hired, Shigeru Miyamoto (who would end up becoming one of the future legends of the industry) a chance, to who commissioned the creation from scratch of a new video game exclusively for Nintendo
That was an extremely strange and risky decision since, within the closed and very hierarchical Japanese business system, a newcomer would have to ‘do a lot of military service’ (as they say) before assuming a responsibility of this caliber.
For inspiration, Miyamoto dropped into those old arcades of the eighties and, for weeks, he observed and studied the tastes of the kids. In the end, he understood that the video games that were most fashionable at that time were characterized by having a plot, that is, a small introductory story (like a short movie) that the user had to internalize.
A very simple story then occurred to him: a huge gorilla (loosely based on the King Kong character) escapes from the cage where its owner, a carpenter, has locked him up, and kidnaps his girlfriend. The man tries to catch him, but the animal is throwing some barrels at him from above that he must avoid while he climbs up some ramps with stairs.
The graphics were very primitive, almost static, and the chosen name ‘Donkey Kong’ was a sloppy translation without much sense in English (apparently, Miyamoto -without much knowledge of Shakespeare’s language- used it for a pocket dictionary).
Despite such ominous omens, ‘Donkey Kong’ became an unprecedented bestseller around the world, saving Nintendo from bankruptcy (not only that, it made him hundreds of millions) and turning the gorilla out of barrels. an icon in the history of video games (‘Donkey Kong’ would star in numerous versions and adaptations of all kinds).
Yamauchi was so delighted with the result that he ordered a new video game from the ‘rookie’. Miyamoto would think this time of an Italian plumber (instead of a carpenter) named Mario Bros… (maybe that sounds familiar, right?). But that’s another story.
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