Today, I want to tell you about a dark
chapter from Nintendo's history that very few people have heard about. About how the
code behind Nintendo's biggest arcade hit, Donkey Kong, was stolen from another developer.
About how Nintendo illegally produced thousands of copies of the game. And about how Nintendo
got sued for ¥580 million because of it. Part 1: The shadow developer So, our story starts back in the early 1980s. For
decades, Nintendo had been one of Japan’s biggest toy manufacturers, but in the early
70s the company began branching out into the world of arcade games. The only
problem was that Nintendo didn’t have a single programmer working at the company! So,
if you look at Nintendo’s early arcade games, almost none of them were developed by Nintendo
themselves. Instead, Nintendo struck a deal with a company called Ikegami Tsushinki. So, Ikegami
would build the hardware and write the code, while Nintendo built the physical arcade
cabinets themselves and marketed the games. Now, nobody outside of Nintendo is 100% sure
which games Ikegami Tsushinki actually created for Nintendo: part of the deal meant that
Ikegami never took any of the credit for the games they created. However, if you look carefully
inside the code of the games Ikegami worked on, you can often find little hints left by the
games' creators. Ikegami’s logo, for instance, can be found hidden inside multiple arcade
games of the 1980s. And inside the original ROM for Donkey Kong, you can find an even more
obvious clue: this message can be found inside: CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS
PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304
SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM. That’s right! Within the code for Donkey Kong,
there’s a message offering a job to anyone who managed to get inside the game’s data. And
written right there is the name of the developer: Ikegami. But before we get to Donkey
Kong, we need to talk about another really important arcade game, Radar Scope.
Now, Radar Scope is nowadays best known as the game that got turned into Donkey Kong,
but when it was released in Japan in 1980, Radar Scope was actually quite a hit! It too was
developed by Ikegami Tsushinki: they built the game’s motherboard and all the hardware the game
needed to run, they programmed all the code too. In fact, it’s even rumoured that
Ikegami Tsushinki actually came up with the idea of the game in the first place -
not Nintendo - but that’s probably just a rumour. Now, this next part of the story is probably
a little more familiar. Nintendo at the time were just branching out into the United
States, and seeing the success of Radar Scope, they placed an order of 3000 units of the game
which Ikegami duly manufactured and sent over to America. The only problem? Nobody in America liked
the game. Nintendo of America managed to shift 1000 units - just about - but this still left them
with 2000 highly advanced and highly expensive arcade cabinets just sitting in their warehouse.
With the company’s future under threat, Nintendo of America’s president Minoru Arakawa asked his
father in law, and president of Nintendo of Japan - Hiroshi Yamauchi - to have a new game developed
that could run on those 2000 arcade machines. Yamauchi asked a relatively new designer at
the company, Shigeru Miyamoto, to come up with the game that Nintendo of America had requested.
Miyamoto had no technical skills when it came to arcade games, but he drew up hundreds of detailed
sketches and plans for the game which would soon become Donkey Kong. Then, he sent all
of those details off to Ikegami Tsushinki, where a team of 6 developers brought his idea
to life over the course of 3 months. After all, Ikegami Tsushinki had designed Radar Scope’s
hardware, so they were likely the only ones who knew it well enough to retrofit a brand new game
onto hardware which was never designed for it! Now, those 6 developers' names are actually
known, so let me read them to you now. There were 4 programmers: Hirohisa Komanome, Minoru
Iinuma, Mitsuhiro Nishida and Yasuhiro Murata. And then, two more developers worked on the
ROM itself: Shigeru Kudo and Kenzo Sekiguchi. Those 6 developers are the
forgotten creators of Donkey Kong, perhaps the most important arcade game ever. And
for their work on the game, Ikegami was paid 10 million yen, just under three hundred
thousand US dollars, adjusted for inflation. The contract between the companies stated that
Nintendo wasn't allowed to produce copies of the game themselves, nor were they allowed
to authorise any other company to do so. Now, Ikegami Tsushinki created 2000 conversion
kits which could be used to convert a Radar Scope arcade machine into one that could play
Donkey Kong. Nintendo themselves created 2000 stickers which could be stuck over
all the branding for Radar Scope. And then, the 3 employees working at Nintendo of America
were tasked with converting those 2000 cabinets into the game by hand, one by one. And so, Nintendo were quite pleased, you can
imagine, when Donkey Kong went on to become a hit in America. Actually, it was more than a hit,
it was a phenomenon. So popular was Nintendo’s new arcade game that Nintendo immediately
ordered around 8000 more units of Donkey Kong from Ikegami Tsushinki. Nintendo’s contract gave
Ikegami exclusive rights to manufacture Donkey Kong hardware at the price of 70,000 yen per game,
about 1700 US dollars adjusted for inflation. However, it was at this point that
Nintendo committed their first of two crimes. Presumably fed up with waiting
for Ikegami to produce more arcade machines, or perhaps not wanting to pay the fees demanded
by the company, Nintendo began illegally copying the ROMs produced by Ikegami Tsushinki, and
producing more Donkey Kong hardware themselves. That way, they could ship this hardware to
America and sell more Donkey Kong arcade machines without any involvement from the game’s developer,
Ikegami. Nintendo ended up producing about 80,000 Donkey Kong arcade machines this way, which
utterly dwarfs the 8000 machines they ordered legitimately! Now obviously, this completely
went against the terms of Nintendo’s contract with Ikegami Tsushinki, especially since Ikegami
believed that they owned the rights to Donkey Kong’s ROM, not Nintendo. We’ll get to more
details on that later. But, here’s the thing: it wasn’t actually this first crime, this illegal
production of 80,000 Donkey Kong machines, that got Nintendo in legal trouble. No,
their real problem only came 1 year later. Part 2: The sequel So, with Donkey Kong a huge hit in the US, the
obvious next move for Nintendo was to produce a sequel. Again, Nintendo’s president Hiroshi
Yamauchi asked Shigeru Miyamoto to design this game, which Miyamoto was delighted about. So many
of Miyamoto’s ideas for the original Donkey Kong arcade game had been cut to get the game done
in time, but now he had a chance to use some of those ideas! The basic plan for this new Donkey
Kong game was to reverse the roles - this time Mario would be the enemy, not the hero. At first,
Miyamoto wanted to have Donkey Kong as the player character, but Donkey Kong was too big to move
around on screen - he would fill most of it - so Miyamoto instead created a new character to fill
this role: Donkey Kong Jr, the game’s namesake. Now, by this point, Nintendo had started
hiring more game development staff, like programmers. And so, instead of having
Ikegami Tsushinki develop the game and giving them exclusive rights to sell it to Nintendo,
this time Nintendo would develop Donkey Kong Jr in house. And, that was fine! There was no
reason Nintendo couldn’t do that. However, since Donkey Kong Jr was going to re-use a lot of
the basic gameplay of the original Donkey Kong, Nintendo figured: why should their in-house
programmers have to build the sequel from scratch? Instead, Nintendo wanted to re-use the
code that Ikegami Tsushinki had written for the game. But Nintendo didn’t ask Ikegami Tsushinki
for that code. They didn’t draw up some agreement between the two companies. Instead, Nintendo went
behind Ikegami’s back. They hired a different company called Iwasaki Giken, to reverse engineer
Donkey Kong’s source code based on the ROMs that Ikegami Tsushinki had produced for Nintendo. Now,
Nintendo did not legally own that source code. It was the property of Ikegami. But secretly,
Nintendo used that reverse-engineered code as the basis for their sequel, Donkey Kong Jr.
An estimated 66.3% of Donkey Kong Jr.’s source code is identical to the code written by Ikegami
Tsushinki. About ⅔ of the game was plagiarised. And when Ikegami found out, they were not
pleased. And so began the legal troubles. Part 3: The lawsuit So, in 1983, Ikegami Tsushinki filed a lawsuit
against Nintendo for copyright infringement to the tune of 580 million yen - about 14 million
US dollars adjusted for inflation. The suit encompassed both Nintendo’s illegal production
of those 80,000 Donkey Kong arcade machines, alongside the use of Ikegami’s code in Donkey
Kong Jr. So, who was in the right? Well, the deal between the two companies never specified who
the copyright owner of the code was - at the time, computer code wasn’t even protected under Japanese
copyright law. So, this made things pretty murky. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi made the
following statement at the time: “[This lawsuit] is hard to understand. When we developed "Donkey
Kong" which was put on the market in 1981, we outsourced the development of software to Ikegami
Tsushinki. We paid for it and it was all over." "Since "Donkey Kong" sold explosively
mainly in the American market, it is presumed that they filed their
suit under the advice of lawyers.” And so, this 1983 lawsuit continued on for the
next 7 years. In those 7 years, Ikegami Tsushinki left the video game industry entirely, moving
their focus to medical equipment instead. In 1989 - 6 years later - Japan’s copyright law was
revised, and computer code became copyrightable. And one year later, in 1990, it was decided
in court that Ikegami was the legal owners of Donkey Kong’s source code. Nintendo owned the
characters, the gameplay, the idea of the game, the name Donkey Kong even, but Ikegami owned
that original code. And, that same year, Nintendo and Ikegami struck a deal out of court.
The details of that deal were never made public, but a large sum of money almost
certainly changed hands in 1990. Which may have had an interesting effect. Because,
2 years after Donkey Kong appeared in arcades, Nintendo themselves ported the game to their new
home console, the NES. And, since that port was done by Nintendo themselves, they wrote the
code from scratch and they owned that code. And every time that Donkey Kong has
been rereleased by Nintendo since then, it’s always been the NES
version, not the arcade version. In fact, over the last 40 years, there have
only been two exceptions to that rule: In 2018, the game ARCADE ARCHIVES Donkey Kong was released,
a faithful port of the original Donkey Kong arcade game. And 1999, Donkey Kong 64 came out, also
featuring the full original arcade version of Donkey Kong. For years, it was believed that the
game’s developers, Rare, must have snuck this game past Nintendo without them noticing. But according
to Mark Stevenson, a developer on the game, Rare just, uh, asked Nintendo. And they said yes. So
perhaps the Ikegami Tsushinki saga wasn’t the real reason Nintendo never re-released Donkey Kong’s
arcade version. Perhaps they just didn’t want to. But either way, now you know the truth - Nintendo,
specifically Shigeru Miyamoto, was of course instrumental in the creation of Donkey Kong. The
whole game was Miyamoto’s idea from the start, and he planned out every last detail
of what would become Donkey Kong. But there’s another side to the story. Those
six developers from Ikegami Tsushinki, the company that Nintendo betrayed. And
I think those six developers deserve to be remembered for their part in creating
the world’s most influential arcade game. Hey, thanks for watching to the end! This was a
really interesting story to research - some of the details are really hard to find information
about. Anyway, I will see you next week! Adios!
