Universal Sued Nintendo Over Donkey Kong. And It Backfired. (Video)

Picture the year 1983. You walk into a video arcade during its absolute golden era, the air thick with cheap pizza and ozone, that wild geometric carpet under your feet, the whole room a chaotic symphony of beeps and bloops. Arcades were printing money. But behind all that noise, a genuinely bizarre legal brawl was brewing, and it pitted a Hollywood titan, Universal Studios, against an underdog Japanese company that got its start back in 1889 making playing cards.

That company was Nintendo, the game was Donkey Kong, and Universal was convinced Nintendo's smash hit infringed on its trademark for King Kong. It's a David-versus-Goliath story played out in federal court, and it did not end the way Universal expected.

Here's the part most people don't know: Nintendo wasn't the first target.

In 1982, the toymaker Coleco secured the rights to port Donkey Kong to ColecoVision and bet a huge chunk of its business on the launch. Universal president Sidney Sheinberg saw a giant ape on a building in Coleco's marketing, decided Universal was owed a cut, and fired off aggressive cease-and-desist telexes demanding all the profits. Coleco panicked and quietly folded, signing a secret deal to pay a 3% royalty that ultimately cost them more than $4.5 million.

Nintendo did the opposite. They refused to pay a dime and instead asked Universal for a legal chain of title, actual paperwork proving Universal owned King Kong. Universal arrogantly brushed them off, and that refusal is what tipped Nintendo's lawyers off to start digging.

The distinction that matters is copyright versus trademark. Universal wasn't claiming Nintendo copied the 1933 film's footage, because you can't, it's a pixelated game. They were claiming Nintendo used the King Kong brand to trick consumers.

In the 1983 courtroom, Universal's attorney Douglas Fairhurst tried to sell Judge Robert Sweet on King Kong as a "congenial symbol" that draws people in, but Sweet pushed back hard, calling King Kong "ideational," a concept, an idea, and asking at what point a famous idea just belongs to the public.

Then the ownership history falls apart. Universal only bought narrow book-and-character rights from creator Merian C. Cooper's son for $200,000 in 1976, and internal memos from staff attorney Joseph Di Muro showed they knew RKO still owned the visual rights to the ape. Universal even told its own theme park designers not to screen the King Kong films and to sketch generic zoo apes to avoid getting sued. So they were threatening Nintendo over a visual identity they knew they didn't own.

Nintendo's defense is one of the most brilliant legal maneuvers I've ever seen. Their lawyers found the 1975 lawsuit where Universal itself successfully argued King Kong was public domain, then walked into court with a stack of dictionaries, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Slang, and Roget's Thesaurus defining "King Kong" as slang for cheap whiskey and a synonym for any big brute. If the term is generic, the trademark evaporates. The same Universal lawyer had literally argued both sides seven years apart.

Judge Sweet found Universal acted in bad faith, annihilated the trademark claim, and ordered damages. Nintendo then helped Coleco claw back its entire $4.5 million. The kicker: in December 2024, Universal opened Donkey Kong Country at Super Nintendo World, with Shigeru Miyamoto standing beside Universal execs at the ceremony. Forty years after trying to destroy Nintendo over a giant ape, Universal is paying them to put that same ape in its parks.