Donkey Kong was created only after Nintendo failed to secure the licensing rights for a Popeye video game.

In the early 1980s, Nintendo of America faced a crisis: it had a surplus of unsold Radar Scope arcade cabinets. To salvage the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi tasked young designer Shigeru Miyamoto with creating a new game that could run on the existing hardware. Miyamoto's original concept featured Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Bluto, but King Features Syndicate refused to license these characters to Nintendo.Forced to create original characters, Miyamoto designed a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, and a damsel in distress. The game launched in July 1981 and became a massive commercial success, generating over $280 million in revenue by 1982. The carpenter character, Jumpman, was eventually renamed Mario after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo's Washington warehouse, who had confronted the team about overdue rent payments.The profession change from carpenter to plumber came later with the 1983 release of Mario Bros., where the underground setting made the plumber role more contextually appropriate. This unplanned creation of Mario sparked a franchise that has sold over 800 million copies worldwide. Donkey Kong remains a landmark title in gaming history for pioneering narrative-driven gameplay and establishing platforming as a core arcade genre.