If you’re a gaming history buff, then you likely know all about the landmark 1983 Universal case in which Nintendo had to defend the right to keep using Donkey Kong. Decades later, King Kong is thriving (and BFFs with Godzilla), and both entertainment giants are happily collaborating on the box office juggernaut that is the Super Mario Bros. franchise. But even if that’s all old news to you, the nitty-gritty of that case is only really known to the people inside the courtroom.
Gaming Historian is a YouTuber known for producing extensively researched documentaries that some fans compare to Ken Burns. In early April, citing burnout, the personality saddened fans by announcing that he would no longer make educational videos about retro games. To mark the occasion, the YouTuber left fans a parting gift in the form of a document dump.
The collection is the paper trail for the Universal vs. Nintendo case in its entirety. We’re talking about everything from the evidence presented in the proceedings to logs of the witness interrogations. Nintendo argued that its ditsy gorilla was not influenced by the other famous gorilla of that time, King Kong, because the franchise actually began as a licensed adaptation of Popeye the Sailor Man.
You already know the outcome of this trial, but the cache of documents is still worth perusing to get a sense of how the lawsuit actually unfolded. Nintendo provided the court with things like the original design documents for the first Donkey Kong game and the first handwritten list of names that the company considered for the franchise we now know as Super Mario Bros. There are dozens of pages where the father of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi, describes the initial meeting where Nintendo came up with the classic ladder game concept. The repository is full of fun exchanges from a lawyer referred to as “Mr. Kirby” — that would be John Kirby, the naming inspiration behind the pink ball character — in a trial where people uttered sentences like, “You can’t have a pronoun for a gorilla.”
Miyamoto pleaded ignorance on Donkey Kong’s potential names
My favorite find so far is the deposition of Shigeru Miyamoto, during which the legendary game designer kept insisting that he couldn’t remember when specific ideas were thought up or by whom. He often pointed to Yokoi as the authority on any given subject. Yokoi, naturally, deferred to Miyamoto in his own deposition. The circular nature of these depositions, alongside the language barrier, made for some tedious exchanges. Miyamoto gave away nothing except for the fact that Donkey Kong is a gorilla that exists. Someone at Nintendo might have written down the words “King Kong” at some point during or after the creation of Donkey Kong, sure. But Miyamoto maintained that he hadn’t considered a comparison until the lawsuit itself.
Here, Miyamoto was asked what other names he considered for Donkey Kong. His answer? “The names which were in my mind.” Honestly, iconic.
You can read the full Miyamoto deposition here, or check out the larger document trove here.