Theme park rides. Fruit snacks. T-shirts. Bibs. These days, if there’s a surface available, Mario and other familiar Nintendo mascots are probably on it. But for much of the company’s existence, Nintendo occupied a much smaller footprint in the public eye. Its biggest moments didn’t come about overnight. They required years to build, and without one amazing arcade game, they might never have happened at all.

Founded in 1889 as a company that manufactured hanafuda playing cards in Japan, Nintendo enjoyed a string of successes across various enterprises that kept it in business, but sometimes not much more. True breakout success didn’t come until Shigeru Miyamoto, one of its newer employees at the time, created the original arcade version of Donkey Kong in 1981.

From that moment, one might say, it was on like Donkey Kong.

As Donkey Kong became an undeniable hit, Nintendo pushed the game harder and even created its own console, the Family Computer (also known as the Famicom), as the ideal way to bring the........

© Polygon