The original Donkey Kong arcade game was released in 1981.
Nintendo developed Donkey Kong after the company’s Radar Scope arcade hardware failed to achieve the expected success in North America. Shigeru Miyamoto was assigned to create a new game for the unsold cabinets, working with engineer Gunpei Yokoi. The result combined climbing, jumping, obstacles, and a simple cinematic story in a way that was unusual for arcades at the time.
The game debuted in Japan in July 1981 and reached North American arcades later that year. Players controlled a carpenter who climbed a construction site to rescue Pauline from the giant ape Donkey Kong. The player character was not yet consistently called Mario in the earliest presentation; he was known as Jumpman in the original game’s context.
Donkey Kong helped establish the platform-game genre before “platformer” was a standard term. Its four stages introduced mechanics that became foundational to later games, including jumping over hazards, climbing ladders, collecting items, and using a hammer power-up. The dates 1982 and 1983 belong to later Donkey Kong sequels and related releases, not the original arcade debut.