Comments 3

Re: Feature: Shining A Light On Ikegami Tsushinki, The Company That Developed Donkey Kong

Amsterdamsters

I'm not sure that I agree here... "Without Ikegami there would be no Donkey Kong, and without Donkey Kong, Nintendo – and video games in general – would have been very different today." If the overall design was that of Shigeru Miyamoto working for Nintendo, then Donkey Kong would belong to Nintendo. Now since there wasn't a contract between the two companies (stupid even for the early 80's) I could see where Ikegami would have the rights to the code, but Nintendo could have brought their designs to one of hundreds of other companies that could have done the coding. If Nintendo believed in the Donkey Kong design, they would just have had someone else code it. Maybe the game would have been slightly different, but no one will ever know to what degree.