This past weekend saw the release of a treasure trove of classic Nintendo information from YouTube’s own Gaming Historian. Norman Caruso, aka the Gaming Historian, announced his retirement after 18 years of making videos and revealed he was planning a documentary about the legendary Universal Versus Nintendo court case of 1983. Since he did a ton of research before realizing he didn’t want to make videos anymore, he didn’t want his scans of all the court documents to go to waste. As such, he uploaded the entirety of his findings to the Internet Archive.
There’s way too much to go through in a short article, but Games Radar found a rather spicy tidbit that seems hilarious in retrospect some 40+ years later. Along with the original name of Donkey Kong, the game, apparently being “Build On,” creator Shigeru Miyamoto states that he tried to make Donkey Kong “close to a human being” and envisioned him as an actor wearing a gorilla costume. The English wording is a little stilted due to it being a translation, but he clarifies, “I tried to make it as a human being wearing a stuffed doll.” Wow.
This information comes as part of Nintendo’s deposition during court case, which saw everyone from Miyamoto, to Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi, and then current Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi explaining why they believed there were enough differences between Donkey Kong and King Kong to justify the game’s existence. As we all know, Universal eventually lost the case because it didn’t even own the trademark on King Kong, which is rather hilarious.
Watch the Gaming Historian
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
