In 1981 Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa imported 3,000 Radar Scope arcade cabinets and sold barely a thousand of them, leaving 2,000 heavy wooden machines gathering dust in a Seattle warehouse. To salvage them, Hiroshi Yamauchi handed the rescue project to a young industrial designer and artist named Shigeru Miyamoto who had no programming experience. This episode tells how that desperate conversion kit became Donkey Kong, invented the platforming genre, and introduced the world to Mario.

We trace the collapsed Popeye license that forced Miyamoto to invent original characters, the deliberate dictionary search that produced the name Donkey Kong, and how an angry landlord named Mario Segale gave the carpenter his name. We also break down why Mario's hat, mustache, and overalls were dictated by a 16 by 16 pixel grid, how hardware  ...