Rare was later bought out by Microsoft, leaving the franchise in a state of limbo. It also paved the way for Rare to become one of Nintendo's most acclaimed development studios. These games were massively popular for their highly detailed digitized graphics that took full advantage of the SNES' color rendering capabilities. It was also established that the Donkey Kong of the arcade games was now old and retired, going by the name of Cranky Kong, while the playable Donkey Kong was either his son (and therefore the old Donkey Kong Jr.) or his grandson. The trilogy breathed a new life for the Donkey Kong character, giving him a supporting cast of other Kongs such as Diddy Kong and Dixie Kong as well as giving him an established group of enemies to fight called the Kremlings, an army of anthropomorphic crocodilians lead by a constantly name-changing king called King K.

In this game, Donkey Kong terrorized a gardener named Stanley, and Stanley had to defend his greenhouse from the swarms of bees DK sent at him.ĭonkey Kong was completely reinvented by the British studio Rare with the Donkey Kong Country games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. He once again appeared in Donkey Kong 3, which was very different from either of its predecessors, being more like a 2D shooter instead of a simple Platform Game. Afterwards, he and Luigi starred in the landmark Super Mario Bros., which codified the standards for the Platform Game genre and made Mario the mascot of Nintendo and the centerpiece of their gaming empire.ĭonkey Kong wasn't done yet, though. First, he would star in Mario Bros., where he and his brother Luigi (who made his debut there) had to deal with the creatures in the New York sewers. from rescuing his father.Īfter DK Jr., Mario would later go on to establish his own franchise separate from DK.

DK had to be rescued by his son, Donkey Kong Jr., from Mario, who kept DK in a cage and summoned many creatures to stop DK Jr. In this game, however, DK was made a Distressed Dude by Jumpman, newly rechristened as Mario, in revenge for kidnapping the beautiful girl (later named Pauline). The game was the Breakthrough Hit of Nintendo as a video game company, paving the way for their later success in the industry.ĭK later returned in the game's sequel: Donkey Kong Junior. Donkey Kong was the Ur-Example of the genre known as the Platform Game. Jumpman the carpenter then had to brave the game's four levels, each one with many obstacles, in order to rescue the lady. The premise of the game was that a gorilla named Donkey Kong kidnapped a maiden and escaped into a construction zone. While it is often viewed as a subset of the greater Mario franchise, it is, by technicality, Mario's parent franchise.ĭonkey Kong made his debut in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is a franchise of video games centered around the eponymous necktie-wearing gorilla Donkey Kong.

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