One Sheet: Donkey Kong, 1982

One Sheet is a series about single objects from the boxes.

The game that saved a company

In 1981 Nintendo’s American arm was sitting on thousands of unsold arcade cabinets of a failed game called Radar Scope. The company needed something to put in them. A young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto was handed the job.

What he produced was Donkey Kong — a barrel-throwing gorilla, a captured woman, and a carpenter called Jumpman who would shortly be renamed Mario.

It worked. Nintendo survived. Everything that followed — the NES, the Game Boy, forty years of it — runs through that cabinet.

And the transfer wall caught it

Within a year or so there were sheets. At $120 this is among the dearest things we hold, and it’s the same reason as the Cabbage Patch: by 1982 the iron-on rack was running down.

A late sheet from a format in decline, of a game that turned out to matter enormously. Very few of those exist.

What it says about the trade

Nobody printing this in 1982 knew they were documenting the beginning of the modern games industry. They knew children were queuing at a cabinet in a shopping centre.

That’s the whole method of the transfer wall, and the reason it works as a record: it never tried to decide what mattered. It printed what moved. The sorting-out is our job, forty years later.

See the sheet · Why the wall caught things early