However, at some point prior to the release of this seminal video game featuring a bad-ass monkey and a squat Italian-American handyman, a blurred fax resulted in it forever being known as Donkey Kong. If I had any doubts - or I didn't know these words in the first place - a quick flip through an English-Spanish dictionary would easily set me right.Īccording to Mark Smith, editor of the Club Nintendo magazine, the game should have been called Monkey Kong - it did indeed feature a large gorilla, with nary a donkey to be seen - but there was a typing error on a fax from Nintendo (Japan) to Nintendo: "pavo") but only because I've learned enough Spanish to know these words in the first place (and even then, part of my difficulty in distinguishing these words would stem from the fact that they refer to somewhat similar animals). For example, I might confuse the Spanish words for "duck" and "turkey" ("pato" vs. At best, this is an error in orthography, one unlikely to be made by someone who wasn't already somewhat familiar with English.
Nor does this seem likely to be the product of a spelling error, as the sounds represented by the letters "d" and "m" are distinctly different in both Japanese and English (and we'd have to believe that by an amazing coincidence, the translator misspelled "monkey" in just the right way to produce the name of another animal). Confusing "donkey" and "monkey" could hardly be considered a "translation mistake" (especially since they're two quite different animals whose names aren't the least bit similar in Japanese). However, chalking up the name "Donkey Kong" to a mistranslation is a rather dubious explanation. (Even if it were obvious from the name that Pocari Sweat was a beverage that replenished what your body lost through physical exertion, who wants to drink something named for "sweat"?) And even when Japanese product names are rendered in English in ways that correctly reflect the concepts their manufacturers wanted to express, they can still be rather awkward. By the time the error was discovered millions of labels had already been printed.Ĭhalking up an unusual Japanese product name to a "mistranslation" is bound to be a popular explanation to anyone who's struggled with the often bewildering English instructions that accompany Japanese consumer electronics products, or who's tried to make sense of the lyric sheets provided with imported Japanese CDs. Legend has it that the Japanese wonk who developed the game made a mistake when translating the Japanese for "Monkey Kong" into English. Now that we're older and have the capacity to ponder weightier issues than we did back then, it's time to consider: Why was the game named "Donkey Kong"? The "Kong" part is obvious (giant ape = King Kong), but whence comes the "donkey"? We find that there are several competing alternatives to choose from, starting with the mistranslation theory: well, those Japanese had funny names for lots of things which didn't make any sense to us. Few of us stopped to ponder why the game was called "Donkey Kong" when it featured no donkeys - the name was euphonious enough, and. Those of us who spent our after-school hours hanging around arcades in those days were intrigued by the new game's departure from the traditional "shoot and destroy" motif, its use of comical characters, and its distinctive music and sound effects. Some Nintendo executives were skeptical that Miyamoto's new game would be an even bigger flop than "Radarscope," but it proved a hit both in Japan and America, pulling in $100 million for Nintendo of America in its first year alone. In Miyamoto's version, the beast was a giant ape who captured a young woman, and her carpenter boyfriend had to rescue her from his clutches by navigating the shell of an unfinished building while trying to avoid rolling barrels and other obstacles hurled by the enraged ape. Instead of revamping "Radarscope," Miyamoto instead created a new game from scratch, somewhat inspired by the tale of Beauty and the Beast. So, Yamauchi turned to a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto, who had never designed a video game before, and tapped him to turn "Radarscope" into something profitable. Even worse, Nintendo's development teams were busy working on other projects and couldn't be pulled away to try to salvage the fiasco. Unfortunately, the game Nintendo head Hiroshi Yamauchi selected to spearhead the assault on the pockets of American youth was "Radarscope," a dull "shoot-down-the-airplanes" effort that gathered far more dust than quarters.
In 1980, Nintendo was a one-time toy company that had ventured into the field of electronic games and was trying to duplicate the success of Taito's "Space Invaders" and Atari's "Asteroids" by cracking the lucrative American arcade game market.
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