Donkey Kong (eng.)

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong (DK for short; Japanese: ドンキーコング, Donkī Kongu) is a popular video game character from Nintendo, who is the eponymous hero of several, sometimes highly successful, video games. Along with Super Mario, Pokémon, and The Legend of Zelda, the Donkey Kong games are among the company’s most successful video game series and, with few exceptions, are distributed exclusively by Nintendo. Donkey Kong depicts an adult gorilla with brown fur.

Completed in 1981 by Shigeru Miyamoto, the arcade game Donkey Kong, starring an ape of the same name, established the platforming genre and became the second most successful arcade game of all time. Two more arcade games followed, as did various adaptations for multiple gaming platforms (e.g., for the Commodore 64), and Donkey Kong made several appearances in other games. The very first platform game, however, was Space Panic (1980), which is less well-known.

In 1994, the character Donkey Kong was redesigned by the British developer studio Rare for the SNES game Donkey Kong Country. Distributed by Nintendo, the game was a huge success thanks to its revolutionary CGI graphics for the time and has been remade several times to this day. A character named Cranky Kong appeared several times in the Donkey Kong Country series. This character was an old ape with a gray beard who claimed to be the real Donkey Kong from the original Donkey Kong series.

After numerous appearances in various games, often alongside Super Mario, some merchandise, and a television series, Donkey Kong is now one of the most popular and commercially successful characters in the video game world.