Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [13]
Billy wasn’t the only one addicted to Donkey Kong. Those initial two thousand units were long gone from the Tukwila warehouse by the fall of 1981. Just about every unit that came off a boat from Japan was immediately put onto a truck to somewhere in Middle America. Why? Pop psychology would say that while most every other game offered a way to destroy, and Pac-Man offered a way to escape, Donkey Kong offered a way to rescue. That didn’t affect the mimetics of the game play, but it certainly changed the motivation of the players: a girl’s life was at stake here! Some desperate arcades had even started to buy a blatant clone, Falcon’s Crazy Kong. Others bought expensive counterfeits.
Minowa Arakawa had Don James, his new head of operations (after having lured James away from Segale), hire some Washingtonians to manufacture the parts in Redmond. That way, the finished machines wouldn’t have to ride the slow boat from next-to-China to get there. Plus, Seattle had tech-savvy workers and one of the world’s great reserves of lumber for the cabinets. This reduced production cycle allowed Nintendo to manufacture more DKs while it was still popular with arcade-goers. Up to fifty units a day of the big ape were made in 1982, more than a thousand a month, more than Radar Scope ever sold in its lifetime.
Nintendo’s distributors Ron Judy and Al Stone were two of the six people who piece by piece converted every one of the original Radar Scope games to Donkey Kong. They were being paid on straight commission, which had nearly bankrupted them in the early days. Now Judy and Stone were millionaires. Arakawa—whose wife, Yoko, had been another one of the six crawling inside machines with soldering irons—found himself responsible for a global property that brought in $180 million in its first year in the United States alone. That was more than any film released in 1982, save for E.T.
Amazingly, DK brought in $100 million in its second year, well beyond any other sophomore game other than Pac-Man and Space Invaders. “Video Games Are Blitzing the World,” read a Time magazine cover in January 1982. Miyamoto’s originality of concept contributed to Donkey Kong’s long-lasting success. There were tons of shooter games and maze games, but no other “ape-throwing-barrels” game. (Atari’s Kangaroo that year was closest, with its evil monkeys and a high-jumping hero.) If Nintendo was just another flash-in-the-pan toy company, this was quite a long flash.
Arakawa had a new challenge: how to spend the money. The original plan of marketing the Japanese product overseas for an additional slice of profit was becoming inverted: America ate up the games like cheeseburgers. Nintendo needed an American hub, not just a rented warehouse. (Mr. Segale, presumably, was all squared away by this point.) Arakawa purchased twenty-seven acres of land in Redmond in July 1982. Nintendo could have paid in rolls of quarters.
Arakawa may have needed a proper headquarters just to hold back the people knocking on his door, cash in hand. Licensing companies left and right were eager to have Nintendo sign deals for the likeness of Donkey Kong’s hero and villain. Pajamas, breakfast cereal, Saturday morning cartoons, plush stuffed animals, Topps trading cards, Fleer candy. The B-side of the Buckner and Garcia novelty song “Pac-Man Fever” was “Do the Donkey Kong.” Arakawa’s worries now weren’t that he’d go out of business, but that he’d leave money on the table.
Milton Bradley even adapted Donkey Kong as a board game: Kong himself was a toy that could throw small