Prerelease:Donkey Kong (Arcade)
This page details pre-release information and/or media for Donkey Kong (Arcade).
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Contents
December 1996 to April 1997 articles
The Origin of the Donkey Kong Development
The Donkey Kong development began as a means of clearing out the extra printed circuit board (PCB) inventory of Radar Scope (1980/Nintendo), an arcade game which Nintendo had subcontracted Ikegami to develop.
From our perspective as the programmers, the Donkey Kong project began rather abruptly. On April 6, 1981, then-manager Mr. Masayo Oka instructed Minoru Iinuma, Mitsuhiro Nishida (currently president of MediaWave), Yasuhiro Murata (currently employed by Sony), and myself to stop what we were working on and assemble together in the meeting room, where we were ordered to begin this new project. He explained that the purpose of this development was to use up the large amount of leftover PCB inventory and create a new game that made the most of the hardware capabilities. He then made a copy of the game plans Nintendo had sent over and handed them to us.
The plans consisted of three A4-size sheets briefly explaining the game's content and characters, about five game screen sketches, and a one-sheet diagram of the final animation. The documents were stamped with a seal dated "55.3.30" (3/30/1980) by Nintendo's creative section chief Shigeru Miyamoto. At this point, no one dreamed that a mere three months later, Miyamoto's game idea would become the smash hit Donkey Kong.
However, Miyamoto's ideas were not immediately greenlit. At this initial meeting we considered various issues: could Miyamoto's ideas actually be realized on this hardware? Was it a suitable idea for a game? In order to answer these questions, we were instructed to identify any problems with his plans and to consider other game ideas as well.
A rough schedule was also decided at this point: the development was to be completed in mid-June… giving us only two and a half months! In other words, the due date was our summer vacation. The four of us had only been with the company for one year, and we had no idea how demanding this schedule would be. On the contrary, we were very excited about this job--the first we had been entrusted with since joining Ikegami. The next three months (the development went about a half month over schedule) would prove to be an incredible challenge for all four of us.
Miyamoto's game proposal was at that time called "Popeye's Beer Barrel Attack Game." The sketch showed the character of Popeye as the player and Olive as the girl, just as the name implied. With Popeye and Olive, you would naturally expect the antagonist to be Bluto. However, the mock-up sketch featured Kong (a gorilla). Being close in shape to a human, a gorilla had been chosen to make it more interesting and add a humorous touch.
Later, Miyamoto would change the Popeye character into the famous Mario we all know and love. I remember that it was hard to faithfully represent Popeye's character due to the small size of the sprite (16 x 16 dots), and there were also copyright issues.
Identifying Potential Problems
"Popeye's Beer Barrel Attack Game" was set in a construction site of a steel-framed building. Kong has snatched Olive and climbed to the top of the girders, and Popeye has to rescue her by climbing the ladders and dodging the barrels Kong throws down at him. In addition to the barrels, other characters such as the "ojama-mushi" ("Bother Bug", localized as "Fireball" in English) try to stop Popeye.
Our first impression of this game proposal was that it was "like Crazy Climber and Pac-Man added together and divided by two." Dodging barrels while ascending the steel girders was similar to the gameplay of Crazy Climber, where you climb the front of a building while dodging falling obstacles; likewise, the way the ojama-mushi blocked your path reminded us of Pac-Man.
In any event, the four of us worked together to identify the potential problems with Miyamoto's proposal (assuming it was made exactly as he described it in the documents). The issues we identified then were:
1. Movement of the obstacles is monotonous.
The barrels simply roll.
2. Complexity of the controls (ergonomics of the joystick controls)
Initially, Miyamoto imagined you would clear the stage by lifting up the topmost steel girder with a jack, causing the barrels to flow backward towards Kong, effectively making him destroy himself. However, this idea would have required a special joystick to implement, and we were worried this would be too complicated and confusing for players.
3. Uninteresting stage design
The stages have no individuality. Each stage needs to be unique enough that you could describe it in a sentence or two, such that someone who has never played it before could easily understand it. There's an opportunity here with the stages to do something that really catches people's attention.
4. Comicality
If this is to be a "character game", the characters themselves need to appear lively, animated, and funny.
5. Varying up the Stage Design (screen composition)
It's very important that players feel excitement: "what's coming next?!" ... "I wonder what the last stage will look like." More distinctive stage design (screen composition) is needed.
6. Timers and Urgency
Since this is an arcade game, we've got to find ways to increase the income it brings. In order to let players feel like they've had a satisfying experience within a short playtime, we should use time limits to impart a sense of urgency and pressure.
7. Storyline
The game is about the player trying to rescue a girl kidnapped by Kong, so we should make sure the presentation emphasizes this storyline.
8. Sense of Speed
Same as the Timers and Urgency above.
9. Uninspiring; "no dream"
The setting is a construction site, which brings to mind laborers--there's no sense of beauty which inspires you to dream about the future.
10. No centerpiece feature
If we don't include some kind of unique, eye-catching feature that other games don't have, it'll be seen as an imitator. Accordingly, we need an idea that breaks free from the preconceived notions found in other games.
11. No Stage Select
A game needs to be intellectually stimulating. Considering that the later stages won't vary much in their stage design [composition], in order to make the game deeper we should have a stage select.
...the above 11 problems needed to be addressed as much as possible in order to make the game more appealing. Even then, that didn't mean the game would necessarily be a hit. Such are the challenges of game design.
In addition to identifying these problems, we also considered other new game ideas. The four of us, led mainly by Iinuma, came up with 13 brand new game ideas which we each considered in turn. I can't list them all here, but some of the major ones were a "Jack and the Beanstalk Game" based on the children's fairy tale; a "Fishing Game" for hobbyists; "Space Shuttle" (a space station construction game), which was a hot topic in newspapers at the time, and "Save the Patient! A Micro-Battle within the Human Body" based on a story from a movie.
In the end, after identifying the issues listed above, we were inclined to work on improving Miyamoto's original Popeye Beer Barrel Attack idea.
From Plan to Game
As we worked to turn Miyamoto's plans into a real game, we attempted to solve the eleven issues above. In this section, I'll discuss three of them.
(1) A Centerpiece Feature: The Jump
The first idea we hit upon was something that, at the time, was not common in video games: the jump. In the first draft game plans, when a barrel rolled down, the player had to climb up to a nearby escape ladder (a short ladder with a break in the middle) and wait for the barrel to pass by. At the top of the escape ladder you could grab a hammer and smash the barrels. However, it was pointed out that this was basically a "running away game", which was stressful. To solve this problem, the idea was put forth to let the player jump over the barrels.
I remember that there were few games back then that incorporated jumping as a basic movement of the player. We therefore considered this unique jumping movement as the "centerpiece" of this game. Being the main attraction, we wanted the jumping to feel more realistic. So we decided to use actual physics to realistically calculate the trajectory and arc of the jump.
Unfortunately, video game PCB hardware back then used the z80 chip for the CPU, which did not have floating-point arithmetic instructions. Although integer multiplication instructions were available, they couldn't be used because they took too much processing time. We thus had to use second-order derivatives, which required only bit shift and addition calculations. Mr. Nishida created the program and adjusted the parameters. The following is a brief description of the calculations.
First, recall the equation of a parabola: since the speed along the x-axis is constant, the following equation is obtained by considering only the y-axis.
S(t)=v₀t-½gt²
(S: position of object, v₀: initial velocity, g: acceleration of gravity)
We take the first-order difference of this equation (the difference is taken because it is a discrete value).
S(t+1)-S(t)=v₀(t+1)-½g(t+1)² -v₀-gt-½g =v₀-gt-½g
Then, we take the second-order difference, which becomes:
S(t + 2 )-2S(t+1)+S(t)=-g
From the above, the y-coordinate value S(t) of an object on a given screen frame (the game screen updates every 1/60th of a second) is:
S(0)=0 (reference position) S(1)=v₀-½g (initial velocity) S(t+2)=2S(t+1)-S(t)-g
Thus, the value of the previous screen frame (t+1) is added twice, the value of the screen frame before that one (t) is subtracted, and the constant g is subtracted.
If S(t) were precisely computed for each screen frame, it would require three multiplications, but by taking the second-order difference, the computation can be done with one bit shift and two additions. This calculation is used all over the place, including the trajectory of Mario's jump and the way a barrel bounces as it rolls off the steel girders. It's what makes Donkey Kong such a richly expressive game.
(2) Complexity of the controls (ergonomics of the joystick controls)
Many shooting games in those days used a basic control scheme of "joystick (up, down, left, right) + multiple buttons". I remember that most of them had two buttons rather than one.
In Western games, it was common to see more buttons, and some games even required four. Many had over-complicated controls where you had to read the instructions in order to play the game. Although these games were popular among certain enthusiasts, we rarely hear of them achieving wider popularity.
Design Document
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A document found at the US National Archives shows some early designs from the game's Popeye phase of development.
-prerelease-design_doc.jpg)
- At the top-right, next to Miyamoto's signature, is a date. While the first two digits (representing the current Shōwa year) aren't quite fully legible, what is present suggests "56", which would date this to March 21, 1981 - about three-and-a-half months before the game's release.
- The level shown is an early version of 25m, looking somewhat different:
- The stage is taller, consisting of eight girders. The final dropped this to six girders plus a short platform for Pauline.
- The playfield is horizontally flipped, with the start and end points on the right side instead of the left. While a few of the home ports do have a left-to-right top girder, no official version has the starting point in the bottom-right corner.
- The timer seems to be represented by a fuse leading up to an explosive.
- All of the ladders are intact.
- No hammers are present, however it appears that Olive Oyl would perhaps drop cans of spinach for Popeye to consume, which would likely provide the same functionality as the hammer, being Popeye's signature "power-up".
- There are bombs placed on two of the girders.
- Below the playfield is what looks to be the game's controls, but only the joystick portion is present.
Another early sketch mockup of 25m. Bluto has been replaced by Donkey Kong, although he still has no name.
What appears to be concept art for the game's cutscenes and logo.
Concept art of Mario sprites.
Pauline has very different colors from the final game.
What we've seen until now.
Mario's jumping sprite is a little different.
Mario's death sprites would be 3 frames instead of 2 frames
Two concept arts and another scan of one already seen here.
