True or false: Was Donkey Kong's name a mistranslation?
It's amazing to think that we might not have some of the beloved Nintendo characters we do today if it weren't for Popeye.
In an effort to quickly put something together that would help get rid of some unsold arcade cabinets, Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the idea for a game featuring a love triangle of sorts between Bluto, Popeye, and Olive Oyl. But Nintendo couldn't get their hands on the license.
So Bluto evolved into a big ape named Donkey Kong, Popeye became Mario, and Olive Oyl became Pauline (sorry, not Peach, which would have been too easy, even for Miyamoto). The first Donkey Kong video game came out in 1981 and was a wild success — despite the fact that no one really understood the name.
You may have heard that it came from a mistranslation from Japanese to English. Any truth to that?
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Correct Answer: False
The answer is: False. Maybe because it's just such a weird name, at some point someone started a rumor that "Donkey Kong" was a mistranslation of "King Kong" — but there's zero evidence to support this claim, even if would help make sense out of chaos.Turns out Shigeru Miyamoto used "donkey" to convey stubbornness and "Kong" was used to simply invoke the idea of a large ape. One of those names that's silly when you first hear it, but you just kind of stop thinking about after enough time. I guess it worked.Source
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