How Donkey Kong Smashed King Kong (Universal v Nintendo) – Gaming Alexandria

Skip to content

Main Menu

Norman Caruso (Gaming Historian) announced his retirement recently, and as a parting gift he uploaded the files from the Universal v. Nintendo case over Donkey Kong. This had been in the works for many years but now we can finally look at this seminal lawsuit that helped define Nintendo’s future!

While many have been digging into the files after the launch, I was originally working with Norm on a summary of the whole case for his next video. The case is often misreported and slightly misunderstood, so this is a summary of the events as they happened: According to the original files (which I have reuploaded and organized on my Archive page as individual files). Though many files from the original case were destroyed as part of regular court cleaning procedures, we still have a relatively complete view of the narrative of the lawsuit and all its drama!

Universal v. Nintendo

Donkey Kong played in a small arcade, circa June 1982.<br>We’ll start after the release of Donkey Kong , first shipped to coin-op game distributors in July or August 1981. The game quickly became incredibly popular in both the United States and Japan – a vital part of the video game boom that flourished in 1982. But even being part of this growing industry, the game would not have been part of anything dramatic had it not been for a routine check done by a lawyer.

MCA/Universal (hereafter, Universal), the major motion picture studio, had been involved in a dispute around the rights to the classic 1933 film King Kong a few years earlier. RKO Pictures – the original distributor of the film – had all but collapsed as a film studio but there was ample interest in the King Kong intellectual property. Universal sought those rights, but RKO granted them to Dino De Laurentiis Corp to create a remake with Paramount Pictures instead. In the subsequent court case, Universal assumed several rights to King Kong from the estate of the original creator and in December 1980 started exploring those license rights more affirmatively.

When Donkey Kong first released, it garnered no notice from Universal. Video games may have been big, but not yet a threat to movie studio cultural dominance. However, with the increasing need for companies to stand out in the market, the potential of attaching a license video games was being explored – which was the spark that brought the two gorillas into conflict.

Logo for Tiger Electronic Toys, circa 1982. Source<br>In August 1981, Universal’s legal department received a letter from Randy Rissman , co-founder of Tiger Electronic Toys . Tiger (later Tiger Electronics) was an Illinois-based company primarily creating handheld electronic games and they were seeking a license for King Kong. As it turned out, Rissman had been early to see Donkey Kong when he was visiting Japan. Predicting its success, he arranged for Tiger to create clones of the game: Both an electronic handheld game as well as an Atari VCS game cartridge.

Universal were a little befuddled at this sudden question about King Kong rights – which had little perceived value. The only current project with the IP was a proposed section of the Universal Studios Tour. With the remake by Paramount some years in the past, there was little reason to license the property. Nevertheless, on September 18, 1981 Universal signed a fairly generous licensing agreement with Tiger for electronic and cartridge games.

In late September 1981, Universal conducted a routine trademark search for King Kong to see if there were any conflicting businesses using the name. While there were a few take-offs on the wording of the name, they did not turn up Donkey Kong, which had been filed in July that year. In December, anticipating the need to establish trademark protection for the Tiger game, Universal licensing expert Loretta Sifuentes procured a Parker Brothers electronic game from the Universal Studios Tour that could be temporarily rebranded with the "King Kong" name for purposes of trademark filing. However, when the lawyers did their search this time in January 1982, they turned up a conflict: Donkey Kong.

Immediately suspecting something, Sifuentes and fellow licensing department employee Steven Adler went to check out Donkey Kong in a nearby arcade. They put two and two together: Tiger was clearly intending to copy Donkey Kong for their King Kong game. Sifuentes later claimed that she alerted Universal’s law department to this forthcoming issue.

A few weeks later in mid-February 1982, Adler and Sifuentes attended the New York Toy Fair to be on the lookout for licensing opportunities. They were approached by a man representing an electronics company who sought permission to create an electronic wrist watch game (a rising category at the time) with the King Kong license. As part of their inquiry, they asked if Universal would shield them from potential litigation by Nintendo....