The original game
July 9, 1981: Video game maker Nintendo releases the arcade game Donkey Kong. Nobody knew it at the time, but they had just launched the Mario franchise.
In the original game, Mario must climb up a building under construction to rescue a woman named Pauline, who has been kidnapped by a giant gorilla, similar to King Kong. Known as Donkey Kong, he hurls obstructions in Mario's path. Shigeru Miyamoto, who designed the original game, used "donkey" as a synonym for "stubborn."
This game was followed the next year by Donkey Kong Jr., in which the script is flipped: Mario has imprisoned Donkey Kong, and his son, an ape wearing a diaper like a baby, must rescue him.
In 1983, Mario Bros. (abbreviation for "brothers") debuted. Now, Mario has a younger brother, named Luigi. Both are plumbers with stereotypical Italian mustaches, and the only apparent difference between them is that Mario wears red, while Luigi wears green. This was the 1st in a series of games, both in arcades and for home video game systems, where they battled a dragon named Bowzer to rescue a woman named Princess Peach. Neither Donkey Kong, Sr. or Jr., appeared. There were television shows, and a live-action movie that got badly panned.
The Mario franchise was so successful, it allowed Nintendo to pretty much knock the original participants out of the home video game business: Atari, Magnavox, Mattel, and Coleco. When the dust had settled, there were pretty much only 2 such companies: Nintendo and Xbox.
In a 2012 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Mario, and "Nice" Peter Shukoff played Luigi, against YouTube personalities Rhett McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln "Link" Neal played Wilbur and Orville Wright, respectively.
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July 9, 1981 was a Thursday. The only major league sport in season at the time was baseball, and the Strike of '81 was on. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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