You might know how Donkey Kong got his first name. You might even think you know the real answer. But have you ever thought about how he got that last name?

It doesn’t take much movie knowledge to guess where it comes from, but maybe a more interesting question is how anyone conjured that syllable into existence in the first place. I will tell you, but to get there we need to take a tour of Donkey Kong history, examining the lore you think you know to reveal that the popular telling of it might not actually have all its facts straight.

 

 

At this point, the community of weirdos that works to figure out where things in video games come from should feel proud for more or less closing the case regarding Donkey Kong’s first name. For years, this matter seemed impossibly mysterious to the general public. And as a result, multiple urban legends attempted to explain how the most famous simian in video games ended up with a literally asinine name.

The most widespread folk etymology for Donkey Kong’s name seems to be the one addressed on its Snopes page: that it was a translation error, and that the character’s name was meant to be Monkey Kong. The version I recall hearing was a little more specific than someone intending one English animal name and then picking another, however; it was that Monkey became Donkey not as a result of human error but from a smudged fax. Though that version was almost assuredly circulating long beforehand, the oldest record I can find seems to be a December 23, 1991, article in The Daily Telegraph about the of Super Mario Land for the Game Boy being the hot item for that Christmas season in the United Kingdom. It cites a Mark Smith of a Nintendo Club magazine as explaining Donkey Kong’s name as a result of a misprinting fax machine, but make of that what you will, because the piece goes on to make at least two errors in the following paragraph.

See how many you can count!

 

 

Both these mistranslation stories are technically plausible, I guess, and Japanese companies have come up with brand names that sound even stranger to English-speakers. (The Snopes piece cites Pocari Sweat, and I personally would suggest the Adult Cream Pie menu item that materialized at Japanese McDonald’s restaurants.) However, I think believing either one requires a bit of mean-spirited humor at the idea of a foreign person trying and failing to speak English properly. That particular flavor of xenophobia was likely enhanced by western by suspicion of Japan and its then-booming tech industry, of which Donkey Kong was certainly part. 

What’s especially wild about the belief that Donkey Kong could have only gotten his name as a result of error on the part of his Japanese creators is that it persisted long after we got the real story. It just didn’t come immediately to mainstream attention. So far on this blog, I have brought up David Sheff’s 1993 book Game Over almost specifically for it having propagated the Pac-Man hockey puck myth. It actually asserts a few things that have since been revealed to be untrue, but I have to give credit where credit is due, because Game Over is one of the first places to state that Shigeru Miyamoto picked that first name to give Donkey Kong a specific personality. As far as I know, this may be the first source in the public record to state that Donkey Kong was named intentionally, not as a result of a mistake of a Japanese person having a loose grip on English.

 

 

I’m not sure about the quality of a Japanese-English translation dictionary that would say that donkey means “stupid” or “goofy.” And as far as I know, I don’t think anyone has ever produced said dictionary, showing that the word donkey meant either thing in English. But Miyamoto has stuck with this story in other interviews — and that is notable, because he does not always give the same origins when recalling how he created his various video game characters.

For example, Miyamoto said basically the same thing in a Japan-only Nintendo.com interview from 2000. There happens to be a translation posted by The Mushroom Kingdom, and I’m just going to use that here.

I had always been under the impression that kong meant “gorilla.” So I wanted to name him “something-something” Kong. And so, because I wanted to make a dumb character, I went and looked that word up in an English dictionary. When I did that, I found that the word donkey had that meaning in addition to that of the animal. And so with that, I gave him the name Donkey Kong, but when we brought him to America, it was said over and over, “That’s a weird name. Donkey doesn’t mean dumb.” But I was just like, “Well, whatever,” and left the name that way. Even after all that, Donkey Kong is still loved all over America, right? I think that when something is called weird, there’s a strong negative connotation to it, but on the other hand, by leaving it that way I think it definitely sticks in people’s minds better.

And then there’s a 2016 Nintendo.com interview with Miyamoto in which he basically offers a version of what’s in Sheff’s book, just more plausible-seeming or less inaccurate-seeming, depending on your perspective. That interview is also in Japanese, but Chris Kohler translated it for a post on Wired.com, and I’ll just use that translation.

“At that time, while I was making Donkey Kong, the conversations were all around how ‘globalism is important’ and ‘we should think worldwide,’” he said. “We listened to a lot of Nintendo of America's opinions, but not all of them.”

“For example, for the game’s title, I was trying to convey the idea of ‘stupid monkey,’” he said. “Donkey of course referred to the animal, but the dictionary I used said that it had a secondary meaning of ‘idiot.’ Nintendo of America said that this was not the case, and donkey didn’t mean ‘idiot.’”

“Even though it was in the dictionary,” the interviewer said.

“It’s a mystery,” Miyamoto replied. “But I just liked the sound of it, so I decided to stand my ground on Donkey Kong. And within a year, everyone was saying Donkey Kong with no hesitation.”

So yeah, despite the fact that urban legends spread quickly and without regard for critical thinking, this is one case in which they seem to have lost traction as a result of a more accurate narrative getting out. I don’t know whether to credit Miyamoto, David Sheff or know-it-all video game nerds who tell people “Yeah, it’s actually *not* a translation error” for this, but at the very least, the urban legends are not the only explanations floating around out there if someone puts “donkey kong name origin” in a search engine.

But what if this newer, more accurate narrative is not the real story?

There is a credible claim that Shigeru Miyamoto is not the person who came up with Donkey Kong’s name, despite how he might recall it in interviews. According to the Gaming Historian (a.k.a. Norm Caruso), who in 2020 reviewed the papers related to Universal Studio’s 1983 lawsuit against Nintendo on grounds that Donkey Kong infringed on its trademark on King Kong, the name was actually coined by Shinichi Todori, who worked for the company as an export manager and therefore had an eye and ear for how game titles would be received in non-Japanese markets. The original post has since gone viral in a way that skipped over this particular point, but it was Caruso who first brought to any kind of mainstream awareness that the documents credit Todori and not Miyamoto. 

 

 

In general, the internet seemed more tickled with the list of name alternatives Todori also came up with: Funny Kong, Kong the Kong, Jack Kong, Funky Kong, Bill Kong, Steal Kong, Giant Kong, Big Kong, Kong Down, Kong Dong, Mr. Kong, Custom Kong, Ultra Kong, Kong Chase, Kong Boy, Kong Man, Kong Fighter, Wild Kong, Rookie Kong and Kong Holiday. I get it. Yes, it is very funny that the name Donkey Dong ever came up in a legal context. And yes, it is perhaps notable that Rare would later reuse the name Funky Kong, though I’m guessing it’s a coincidence.

What strikes me most about the document glimpsed in Caruso’s tweet is the concluding sentence in the previous paragraph: “To Mr. Miyamoto, kong means a gorilla since the popular name for a gorilla in Japan is kong.” There are a few ways to interpret this sentence. What I’d guess it means is that even if Miyamoto did not come up with the name Donkey Kong outright, then he at least was on record saying that he felt Kong should be part of it because of the associations he thought it had. That’s relevant for this post later on, but I should also point out that in his video on the origin of various Super Mario character names, Caruso says that the lawsuit documents point to Miyamoto’s boss at the time, Gunpei Yokoi, as being the one who gave Todori instructions for coming up with a name for what had previously gone by the working title Table Kong Game.

 

The Donkey Kong section begins at 12:31, but the whole video is worth watching.

 

As it’s explained in Caruso’s video, it was Yokoi, not Miyamoto, who thought that kong meant or at least signified “gorilla.” But since the two were working closely together on the game, I suppose one could have easily told the other that this was the case and both could have ended up with this idea in their heads. We don’t know which of them came up with the working title Table Kong Game, but clearly it had been important enough almost from the beginning — or at least shortly after Popeye and Olive Oyl were removed from it.

Furthermore, Todori’s deposition offers yet another version of consulting this mythical Japanese-to-English dictionary. As he recalled it to the lawyers, he was looking for a Japanese equivalent of the word とんま or tonma, meaning “fool,” and ended up at donkey. This seems a little more plausible than Miyamoto’s claim of a dictionary giving him the wrong definition for donkey. If Todori was looking for an English synonym for fool, he could have easily found ass or jackass and then ended up at donkey. Per Caruso’s video, the final decision on the matter came down to either Yokoi or then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi; Todori doesn’t recall consulting or being consulted by Miyamoto at all in coming up with the name.

 

 

While the first part of Donkey Kong’s name is historically the one that has gotten all the attention, this particular blog post is actually focused on the second part of his name. As Miyamoto remembers it, at least, the esteemed surname Kong was so central to the equation that it was always a given that it would be part of the character’s name — and the game’s name by extension. 

Even though I basically knew the answer, the impetus for this post was actually just looking into the etymology of Kong. But surprise! The answer is more complicated than I initially expected, and if you follow me down this path, you just might learn something about the reciprocal way video games interact with the larger sphere of popular culture.

Obviously, Donkey Kong’s last name comes from King Kong, the original 1933 movie released by RKO Radio Pictures. It seems weird to explain King Kong this far into the post, but in case you somehow don’t know, it’s a landmark monster movie about a giant ape who runs amok in New York City, ultimately abducting a lady and taking her to the top of the Empire State Building. The film is considered a success by all standards; not only did it make money, but also it spawned sequels, remakes and imitators, and it even helped give rise to Godzilla and the kaiju movie subgenre in Japan. It’s a big deal, you could say, and in fact, I struggle to think of many other films that have impacted pop culture as greatly as King Kong has.

Whole books have been dedicated to telling the story of the 1933 movie’s production. For the purposes of this post, however, it’s notable that one of its two directors, Merian C. Cooper, was so charmed with the 1927 travelogue The Dragon Lizards of Komodo by W. Douglas Burden that he began to dream of making a movie that depicted a gargantuan gorilla battling a large lizard. That movie would of course become King Kong, which does in fact depict the titular beast battling a Tyrannosaurus on his native Skull Island. 

  

According to Mark Cotta Vaz’s 2005 biography of Cooper, the director thought hard “K” sounds in names like Kodiak, Komodo and Congo conveyed the energy he wanted in his film and in its central brute. In a letter Burden wrote to Cooper in 1964, he recalled the creation of King Kong’s name as he remembered it.

I remember, for example, that you were quite intrigued by my description of prehistoric Komodo Island and the dragon lizards that inhabited it. … You especially liked the strength of the words beginning with ‘K.’ It was then, I believe, that you came up with the idea of Kong as a possible title for a gorilla picture. I told you that I liked very much the ring of the word… and I believe that it was the combination of the “King of Komodo” phrase in my book and your invention of the name Kong that led you to the title you used much later on, King Kong.

The facts are stated slightly differently elsewhere, including the 1975 book The Making of King Kong, which credits RKO head David O. Selznick with finalizing the title after a previous version of the script was merely titled Kong. Regardless of which version you chose to believe, they all more or less say that the name Kong wouldn’t appear to mean anything in particular. It was invented — by Cooper, it seems — to convey a sense of exotic mystery but also geographic vagueness. And to that end, it would seem to have been enormously successful both on its own and by extension through Donkey Kong as well.

In the west, King Kong more or less never left public consciousness, and people who have never seen any of the movies would likely still know that he is a giant gorilla, kind of in the same way people just know who Dracula and Frankenstein are. That’s probably true in Japan as well, but the character and the name took on a slightly different life after the original film screened in Japanese theaters. For example, two silent films, both considered lost now, attempted to put a Japanese spin on what had been an American story. In 1952, the 1933 original was re-released in Japan by Daiei Film, which would later produce Gamera in 1965; it was one of the first American films to play in Japanese theaters following World War II. And of course the third Godzilla movie was King Kong vs. Godzilla (キングコング対ゴジラ), and it would have opened in theaters in 1962, when a young Shigeru Miyamoto would have been the exact right age to have pop culture leave an indelible imprint on him, even if he’d known beforehand who King Kong was.

I couldn’t find any interview in which Miyamoto says exactly how he first experienced King Kong, but in many of his recollections about the creation of Donkey Kong, he reveals a specific way in which the character of King Kong seems to have impacted him. For a period of time, at least, he seems to have thought that the term kong meant “gorilla,” either in Japanese or in English or both. Of course, it doesn’t mean that — not really, in the sense that you’d ever find it in a dictionary defined that way. But I can see how someone who did not speak English well might get the idea that the title King Kong is calling the gorilla in question the king of all the kongs, not unlike how the Super Mario series King Boo is the leader of all the ghosts. I could even see how someone might assume that as a result of King Kong, コング or kongu functions as a loanword in Japanese — as a shorthand for all gorillas or all large simians or even all simians.

Unfortunately, none of these seem to be the case. I talked to Fatimah and asked my various Japanese-fluent friends if they’d ever come across kongu being used this way. No one could recall hearing or reading this. This is not to say that Shigeru Miyamoto is the only person in all of Japan who might think this and that he just happened to crystallize his misunderstanding in one of the best-known video game brands of all time — although it would be really funny if this were the case. No, other Japanese-speakers have made this mistake as well, including this person on Twitter, this person on Quora and this person on Yahoo Answers. It just doesn’t seem especially widespread. For all I know, it could be a generational thing, and Miyamoto is the most famous member of his cohort to admit to ever thinking this.

It’s entirely possible that there are likely people who only think this *because of* Shigeru Miyamoto having said so in interviews. That’s certainly the case with the below tweet.

 

 

But even if kong never entered Japanese in the way Miyamoto seemed to think, as a generic noun free from its associations with the movie King Kong, there are some senses in which it did disconnect, even if it remained a proper noun. For one thing, predating even King Kong is the 1932 ethnographic documentary Congorilla. Despite what the title and poster might imply, it’s more remembered today for its depiction of a pygmy tribe living in the Congo Basin, though it does also feature gorillas.

 

 

The film seems to have been released at some point in Japan with the title コンゴリラ (Kongorira), but I’m not sure when. In either English or Japanese, it at the very least implies that kong has some association with gorillas, even if the title is referring to the African nation, which King Kong apparently is not.  

More recently, King Kong’s name has also become associated with professional wrestlers who might be known to Japanese fans of the sport. King Kong Bundy (real name: Christopher Alan Paris), for example, began his career in the U.S. in 1980 but shortly began wrestling in Japan as well. Born in Japan to a Japanese mother and an African-American father, Aja Kong (real name: Erika Shishido), began her career in Japan in 1986 and went on to compete in the U.S. Another female wrestler, The Amazing Kong (real name: Kia Stevens) began her career in the U.S. before competing in Japan. And then there’s Goya Kong (real name: Gloria Alvarado Nava), who began her career in Mexico before moving on to compete in both the U.S. and Japan.

In combination with the DJ Kamasami Kong, American-born but who achieved enough fame in 1980s Japan that he ultimately relocated there, this trend does suggest some awareness in Japanese culture of the name being used independently of either King Kong or Donkey Kong, though clearly in each case it’s meant to connect the person using it to qualities associated with one, the other or both. I feel like it’s too big a stretch to point to this as evidence of the kind of usage Miyamoto was claiming in interviews, but it’s as close as anything I could find. 

What a wild way to find out you were using a word wrong for decades. If the original 1981 Donkey Kong hadn’t ended up becoming such a success, he might not have ever known.

… Surely someone has told him by now, right?

 

 

To answer the question posed in this post’s title directly, Kong comes from King Kong, which essentially anyone could have guessed without researching any of this. Entirely new to me, however, is the idea that Kong was created specifically for King Kong, not meaning any one thing in particular but aiming to evoke a certain sort of gentleman adventurer’s sense of the wild world. It’s strong. It’s dangerous. And while it’s not tied to any real-world geography, exactly, it’s very much aiming to create a sense of the exotic; wherever you are, it’s from some other place that’s strange and unknown.

If the aim of this piece were to just share the etymology of Kong, it literally could have been done in a single sentence, I realize. I wrote all this out because I was intrigued by the unlikely way that Donkey Kong inherited some of the mystery that Merian C. Cooper strove for when he named his giant ape nearly a century ago. I mean, Donkey Kong for sure embodies King Kong’s brawn and his tendency to kidnap ladies. But because someone at Nintendo — allegedly Shigeru Miyamoto but probably Shinichi Todori — gave Donkey Kong a puzzling name, the character also ended up embodying that sense of the exotic that defies geography. 

In short, Donkey Kong doesn’t really sound like he’s from anywhere. 

To the average Japanese arcade-goer back in the day, Donkey Kong’s name would have sounded distinctly western. But if anyone attempted to figure out what his name meant by looking up the components in a Japanese-English translation dictionary, I’m pretty sure they’d be left confused. To the average American arcade-goer, Donkey Kong’s name sounded distinctly like a translation fail — obviously foreign if not Japanese outright — in a way that spawned more than one urban legend in an attempt to make sense of it. Yet the name proved successful in Japan, the U.S. and every other country lucky enough to get a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, maybe not in spite of the fact that it’s a really weird name but instead because of it.

A few years into writing this blog, I figured out that one of its themes is the relationship between video games and culture at large. While it’s easy to think of examples of how they intersect, I think a lot of people silo video games off on their own, away from art but also away from the “lower culture” that sometimes apes art. Obviously, I don’t get that at all, and one of the ways I can fight against that perception is by showing all the ways video games can reflect human culture back at us — sometimes in ways that are so bright and beautiful that we don’t even fully understand what we’re seeing. 

I think a profound example of this relationship is how King Kong, one of the most important movies ever made, interacts with Donkey Kong, one of the most important video games ever made. Yes, Donkey Kong gets his last name from King Kong, but it’s also a more profound inheritance than that, with the movie being this incredibly fertile text that resulted in so much more that likely would never have been imagined had two guys not made a movie about a giant gorilla. Likewise, without this video game with a confounding name becoming an international hit, we wouldn’t have the Nintendo we know today and therefore wouldn’t have the video game industry it helped form. 

That’s a lot.

Not many works, to use the most possible generic term for what I’m describing, can boast all that, but these two about unruly gorillas can.

Miscellaneous Notes

I tried to find a way to incorporate this into the piece, and it just didn’t work but… did Shigeru Miyamoto lie about creating Donkey Kong? I phrase it like that to mirror the title “Did Akira Nishitani Lie in the 1994 Capcom vs. Data East Lawsuit?” That piece was about how the co-designer of Street Fighter II sure seemed like he was not telling the truth when he claimed that the Street Fighter series did not base any of its characters on other pop culture sources. The reality of that matter laid in the way his deposition was translated into English, and it’s an interesting discussion if you want to go read that post. This one is slightly different, but it does seem like Miyamoto was asserting a claim about the creation of Donkey Kong that contradicts what is recorded in the lawsuit documents. What gives?

I don’t have any info on this, really, and that’s probably why I didn’t put this in the main body of this post, but I do have some theories for how to interpret this.

1. He’s misremembering. “People have faulty memories” could also be a major theme of this blog, and I suppose it’s possible that Miyamoto is just incorrectly remembering how Donkey Kong came to be. That said, it seems like a stretch to fully assign something someone else did to yourself.

2. He’s taking credit for someone else’s work. Like, I hate to besmirch and icon, but bosses frequently take credit for the work done by people on their team. I suppose that is technically possible here, even if I much prefer to think that Miyamoto wouldn’t be the kind of person who’d do that.

3. The lawsuit docs don’t fully capture how Donkey Kong got his name. People swear to tell the truth when giving a deposition, but that doesn’t mean that one person’s account of how something went down is necessarily going to be accurate. It’s just what they honestly recall. Given that Shinichi Todori gave his deposition in a relatively short time after Donkey Kong was released and given that his role in the process was relatively minor and extremely specific, it does seem like Todori would be recalling the events accurately, however. I suppose it’s also technically possible that both Todori and Miyamoto independently ended with the same name in very similar ways, although that seems extremely unlikely.

4. Shigeru Miyamoto is taking one for the team. This one might seem like the biggest stretch of the options I’m laying out, but it might fit in better with how we’d all like to imagine Miyamoto to be. The Universal Studios lawsuit against Nintendo ended with Judge Robert Sweet ruling in favor of the latter, citing among other things that a 1975 lawsuit by Universal against RKO proved that the plot of King Kong was public domain. That’s a happy ending, but had Sweet ruled against Nintendo, the company wouldn’t exist today the way we know it. And because the lawsuit opened Nintendo to such a dire financial risk, the people responsible might have experienced some regret for making a video game that hewed so closely to King Kong. The creative leads on Donkey Kong were Miyamoto, who is the public face of Nintendo, and Gunpei Yokoi, who died in 1997. So in taking credit for naming Donkey Kong, Miyamoto could be seen as alleviating anyone else for the decisions that ultimately brought Nintendo to court — especially Todori, who didn’t choose to give the title character the last name Kong. That came from someone else, possibly Yokoi. The Miyamoto version of how Donkey Kong got his name removes the agency of Yokoi, Torodi and others, but also absolves them from any danger they might have put Nintendo in, however inadvertently. 

5. Shigeru Miyamoto is a big stinkypants liar. We’ve venerated the wrong video game creator this whole time. We thought he was Mario but it turned out he was Wario this whole time. Woe is us.

I’m all ears if anyone has their own theories on why Miyamoto seems to think he created a name that official documents say he didn’t.

My friend A. David Lewis posed the following question the other day: "how political should comic books be?" He was asking in earnest, and I liked my reply so I thought I'd repost it here...

I set this aside this morning to give myself time to collect some thoughts about the subject, but it wasn't long after that a news item presented itself that spoke to the topic even better.

A cargo ship with pallets of (among other things) books from Fantagraphics was struck by a missile as it was just trying to deliver some comics from one side of the planet to the other. I haven't found any word about the status of the crew as of this writing; hopefully everyone survived.

These are people who had no political agenda. They were just trying to deliver some comics. The people who were ultimately going to read those comics had no political agenda; they just wanted to read weird monster stories from the 1950s. And yet, everyone involved was impacted by the politics playing out on the world stage. Because one leader wanted to bomb another leader, and didn't care what kind of real-world fallout might result.

All life is politics. We often think of it in terms of a small group of ultra-wealthy men making laws about abortion or health care insurance or who can marry whom or whatever. But it's taxes. It's being taught how to read at school. It's having the trash picked up every week. It's running water and smooth roads and bridges that don't collapse and every other piece of societal infrastructure. It's shipping ports that stay open and cargo containers that can safely make it from Point A to Point B.

All life is politics. And since art -- of which comics is a subset -- is just a reflection of life, how can anything that is considered art being anything but political? Even when they're not trying to be political, they are. As just proven by a boat carrying a shipment of Fantagraphics material. How political should comic books be? However political they are is exactly how political they should be.

Am I a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images by Richard Nadler because I am a fan of Richard Scarry books and Wes Anderson movies or am I a fan of Scarry & Anderson because I’m a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images? (Or is it because I’m aphantasic and require external imagery for this level of detail?)

See also Mark Alan Stamaty’s NYC Illustrations and Infinite Illustrations.

Tags: Richard Nadler

Nuts & Milk
Platform: Famicom
Released July 20, 1984
Designed by Kikuta Masaaki
Developed by Hudson Soft
Never Released Outside of Japan
NO MODERN RELEASE

“What about Nuts & Milk or Road Avenger and stuff… still nothing…? Speed up the update pace, will ya… I’m payin’ decent money for this…”
Hideki Kamiya (March 4, 2026), Director of Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry, on the lackluster Switch Online library updates.

Well, now I have to do one of those, so I flipped a coin and Nuts & Milk won.

You might not have heard of Nuts & Milk, but it’s one of the most historically significant games ever made. Alongside Hudson Soft’s port of Lode Runner, also released on July 20, 1984, it was the very first third party published game released on a Nintendo platform and Hudson Soft’s first console game. Had I not known that fact or anything else about it, I would have sworn this was an unreleased port of an unreleased Nintendo coin-op. It has the look of one. It has the feel of one. It has the personality of one. It even has a similar title screen with A and B games.

Seriously, remove the (c) 1984 Hudson Soft part of that screen and you would swear this is a first party Nintendo game, and one that slots in perfectly next to Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, and Mario Bros. Obviously Hudson Soft knew their target audience, a fact that’s even more apparent when you find out that the original PC Nuts & Milk, released in 1983/84 was an entirely different style game. That original game is a top-down maze chase similar to Mr. Do. You tunnel your way to fruit while avoiding enemies who always walk clockwise around the playfield. Going into this feature, I intended to review both versions of Nuts & Milk. But, that would actually require playing the MSX game for more than a couple minutes, and I didn’t want to. It’s boring.

Instead of porting THAT version of Nuts & Milk, Hudson Soft rebuilt the entire game. They kept the base concept of playing as the heroic Milk who must avoid the villainous Nuts, with the object being to collect all the fruit which will then open up the exit. However, since Nintendo-style 2D arcaders were the main draw of the Famicom in the days before Super Mario, Hudson reworked the entire game to be more like that. Although Nuts & Milk is still a maze chase, it’s now also a platformer played from a side view, with jumping and much more complicated rules that just favor the player. The most valuable advantage is that Milk can move through one side of the screen and come out the other, but the chasers can’t. Also, although there is no official attack method or “turn the tables” gameplay like energizers in Pac-Man, the chasers are dumb as a rock and easy to manipulate to their doom. While the Nuts are capable of SOME platforming, they’re bad at it. Really, really bad at it.

But, just because they’re dumb doesn’t mean they’re not a threat. They respawn very quickly and there could be as many as three of them on a stage. If you play in the B Mode, the game adds an additional threat in the form of blimps that spawn from the left side of the screen and functionally act like fireballs that are lethal to the touch. Which is a weird choice because the bonus rounds actually DO have red and green fireballs similar to the original Mario Bros. There’s also helicopters that spawn from the right side in the B mode, and I had no idea until I was about halfway through my main play session that helicopters are actually points that you’re meant to collect. Well f*ck. And I only found that out after I held my breath and tried to jump over one. Obviously I failed, and thank God for it. Of course, this meant I had to replay the entire f*cking game to recalibrate the difficulty. Read the damn instructions, Cathy. How many times has not doing so bit you in the ass?

I suspect the reason this didn’t get a global release is because of the controls. Nuts & Milk has some brutally tough movement and jumping physics that, even though I finished the game, I never fully got the hang of. If you fall from too great a height, you’re temporarily stunned, which will probably lead to most of your deaths in the game. Nuts & Milk has fixed jumping, and one of the main “puzzle” elements is often just sussing out where you must take off from using a whole lot of trial and error. You can’t move through the bricks and there’s no jumping allowed on the ladders (the logs). The only thing you can do with ladders is fall off them at angles, which the game heavily incorporates into the level design.

But finding the correct jumping angles, let alone actually executing the jumps that get you home, can be quite difficult and a tad bit frustrating. If you had told me before today that a game that leaned so heavily into last-pixel jumps would score a YES! from me, I’d have thought you were nuts. “I am! Nuts AND Milk that is!” I’d say over a third of the levels will come down to taking off at the last possible split second when you jump, but sometimes, it feels unresponsive. You’ll likely need more than one attempt at least a few times for these situations, and shorting a jump means being stunned and vulnerable for a moment. This type of design is so common that it SHOULD be a deal breaker. In most games, it would be. Maybe it’s because this is a maze chase with some of the dumbest chasers in the genre’s history, but it didn’t bother me as much here. It adds tension for sure.

I’m with Mr. Kamiya. Yeah, where the f*ck is Nuts & Milk on the Switch Online library? It’s the rare genre buffet that actually isn’t half bad. What is it? A maze chase? A platformer? A puzzler? It’s all of that blended in equal parts, which is genuinely remarkable given the time period and the fact that this was Hudson’s first console project. It’s not an easy game. There’s a very sharp learning curve to the action even after you learn how easy it is to dupe the Nuts into falling off the ladders or into the water, which shouldn’t take players more than three or four levels to figure out. It never got a global release, though it was apparently well known to American audiences who bought bootleg multicarts, as it was a mainstay of those. Now that a major game designer has publicly called for its re-release, I think there’s a good chance Nintendo will work something out with Hudson. Nuts & Milk isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch, but it’s a damn solid waste of an hour that should have probably been an NES launch game.
Verdict: YES!

BONUS REVIEWS

Nuts & Milk is also a popular mainstay of the ROM hacking scene. Most are just graphical changes, but I found two that completely changed the levels and even made some gameplay adjustments.

Donkey Kong 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August 25, 2016
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Original Concept & Graphics by elbobelo
Designed by Googie
Link to patch at ROMHacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

Donkey Kong 2 is basically a fifty level expansion pack for Nuts & Milk. I imagine the next game will be as well. But hey, I liked Nuts & Milk and the game zips by really quickly so fifty new levels is a-okay with me. There’s some pretty ambitious level design in this one as well and a few new concepts, some that I liked and others I didn’t. In the bonus rounds, instead of simply trying to reach your girlfriend (who in Nuts & Milk is named Yogurt. I kept picturing Mel Brooks), you’re trying to grab an umbrella that continuously floats upward before it becomes out of reach. It’s not so fast that you should miss it, but it’s a nice touch that lends a sense of urgency.

A baffling change that I didn’t like was that, in the normal levels, when you grab the last item, the fireballs (replacing the nuts) die and start to float up to heaven. They’re not lethal at this point and you have a free pass to the end of the stage. I don’t know if this was done because the designer realized that a couple levels might be impossible to finish if they remain active. I started watching for that and I didn’t notice any stage that I thought I wouldn’t be able to avoid the fireballs if they remained active. It’s a strange choice that sucks the tension out of a key portion of the game that should, in theory, be the most tense: the final stretch before beating a stage.

The biggest change is in the level design mentality. Donkey Kong 2 is less puzzle-like and leans much heavier into the platforming part of the game. It utilizes the changing direction off the spring in mid-air technique to great effect and, at times, it makes for a more tense game than Nuts & Milk. But there’s also a sloppiness to Donkey Kong 2. The difficulty curve is all over the place. Some levels were very intense and took me a while to shake my chasers, but those levels might be followed by three or four cinches that took only seconds to beat and posed no challenge at all. Also, for some reason, the victory animation is the same sprite as Mario holding an umbrella. Only there is no umbrella, so instead it looks exactly like Mario is trying to give Pauline a Stone Cold Stunner and missing by a couple feet. Maybe he’s nearsighted?

While I had fun, I preferred Nuts & Milk’ near-perfect blending of three genres to Donkey Kong 2’s focus on platforming. It’s too bad that the “fireballs are defeated” concept wasn’t something used in the A mode that was dropped in the B mode. Nuts & Milk had uneven difficulty too, but it never felt like the game was outright surrendering to players. After a certain point, I wondered if the designer simply got bored with the project because, near the end of the game, there’s a stretch of multiple levels that felt phoned-in. Like this:

Honestly, I thought the first level was harder than a lot of the later stages. On the other hand, Googie did include a lot of stages that felt genuinely inspired. I wasn’t even sure I was going to bother finishing Donkey Kong 2 until I got to level seven. When I saw it, I sat up in my chair and said “yeah, I need to see this one all the way through to the end.” And I’m happy I did.

What’s even more interesting is that, had I never known about Nuts & Milk, I think I could have bought this as a legit unreleased sequel to Donkey Kong. Maybe. I mean if not for the graphical weirdness like the victory pose. I think making this a Donkey Kong Jr. game would have made a lot more sense. The heavy jumping physics and the spring physics feel more like that game than the original Donkey Kong. On a related note, one of the most famous “lost” games is one that never had so much as a single screenshot. In the mid-80s, Nintendo themselves promoted that they were working on a game called Donkey Kong Returns. Not only did nothing come of it, but nothing has been said about it in nearly forty years. I assume that Nintendo was going to re-sprite a Japanese game that never got a US release, perhaps even Konami’s King Kong (which I will be reviewing soon). If not for the fact that contemporary reports mentioned throwing barrels, I’d think a reworking of Nuts & Milk was the potential identity of Donkey Kong Returns. Had that happened, I think consumers would have believed it. That’s what Googie and elbobelo have proven. Good job, guys.
Verdict: YES!

How about one more?

Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released April 20, 2025
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Designed by Aether Knight
Link to patch at ROMhacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

I actually played many more ROM hacks of Nuts & Milk than the two I did for this feature. There’s quite a few, but only Donkey Kong 2 and Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi were really worth mentioning. Of the two, Pochi & Bochi was hands down the best one. It’s really just another fifty-stage level pack with graphics inspired by Legacy of the Wizard (which I reviewed in Namco Museum Archives Volume 2: The Definitive Review), but the quality of level design is not only professional but incredibly clever. Whereas Donkey Kong 2 leaned into the platforming aspect of Nuts & Milk, Pochi opted to focus on the puzzle element. Designer Aether Knight especially utilized the screen-wrap to accomplish this. Most levels require a lot of carefully nabbing one fruit (now an item from Legacy of the Wizard) one at a time, then repeating a series of processes, all while trying to manipulate the Nuts (now clones of Pochi).

The end result is a game that easily outshines the original. Had Nuts & Milk been a more popular game, I have no doubt this would be known as one of the best level pack styles of ROM hacks ever made. It’s so well done. Now, in fairness to Hudson Soft, Mr. Knight had a lifetime of games like this, plus based on his Solomon’s Key hack (that I’ll do one of these days but HOLY F*CK, it’s brutal), he seems to have a knack for complicated puzzle design. In fact, I think he takes things a little too far at times by over-utilizing last-pixel jumps. He’s certainly not guilty of anything Hudson didn’t do themselves, but since his levels are so much more optimized to make the chasers a threat, you likely won’t get a second chance if you short a jump here.

And, like both Hudson Soft and Googie before him, Aether Knight struggled with difficulty scaling. Like the level in the above picture, which took me multiple attempts to work out and then a couple minutes to finish in the run that succeeded. But then, I aced the next level with minimum brain power. Then the level after it was yet another “repeat the same process X amount of times” puzzle. In that level, pictured below, the three items above Pochi’s head (aka the pink one) can only be picked up one at a time, meaning you have to go through this entire gauntlet four full cycles to beat the level. Yes, four times. Don’t forget returning to the house, which is actually what beats the stage. And that’s assuming you don’t screw up a jump along the way.  

No matter how tightly designed a level like this is, backtracking ALWAYS gets old after a while. I would have preferred if this style puzzle design was limited to two passes at most. Luckily for Pochi & Bochi, the maze chase element is there to save the day. Sometimes. Knight might have done TOO good a job engineering these levels in a way designed to prevent the chasers from auditioning for a role in Lemmings. You might have to do quite a lot of shimming to be able to give yourself enough space to operate with the damn enemies. But if you crave the close calls of a maze chase, there’s a LOT more of those moments in Pochi & Bochi than there is in Nuts & Milk.

As repetitive and sometimes frustrating as it can be, I’m SO happy I ditched reviewing the MSX version of Nuts & Milk in favor of NES ROM hacks. I feel lucky that I got to experience Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi. It’s a MAJOR upgrade over Nuts & Milk and one of my favorite ROM hacks ever. It also speaks to the tragedy of Nuts & Milk not getting a global release. Who knows? Maybe the game would have been a major hit and sequels or spin-offs would have resembled this. There’s also a sadness to Knight’s effort. I love reviewing ROM hacks, but even with the really good ones, there’s always this heartbreaking voice in the back of my head saying “hardly anyone will ever play this, no matter how glowing your review.” If Konami ever does want to do something with Nuts & Milk, you don’t need to design another fifty levels in-house. The ones designed for this game are damn good puzzle/maze-chase levels that are every bit as professional as anything you could crank out.
Verdict: YES!

If you ask most people about Darren Aronofsky's drug-fuelled mad 2000 classic movie Requiem for a Dream, they will say the same thing:

Wow, such a great movie. I’m never watching it again.

So much so that it has become shorthand among film fans for ‘A great movie that doesn’t attract repeat viewing’.

When you stop to think about that concept - an objectively great movie that people avoid - it’s quite kinda strange. If you like watching great movies, and you think that Requiem for a Dream is indeed a great movie, why wouldn’t you want to watch it again?

Added to that, there are loads of mediocre and bad movies that we all collectively choose to re-watch, despite knowing (either from experience or their reputation) that better movies are available.

I’m going to tackle the notion of “re-watchability” in a future article, but today I’m going to focus on the following question:

What is the element that, when present in a great movie, means that audiences never want to watch it again?

To do this, I built up a dataset of 19,821 movies which appeared at least once on 530 user-created lists on Letterboxd, centred around the theme of ‘Movies you’ll only watch once’. I then narrowed down to the most oft-cited movies and their ratings.

In doing so, I think I have worked out what it is that is driving the ‘One and Done’ approach to viewing some great movies.

The archetypal one-time gem

Let’s start by studying our principal example to ensure we know what we’re looking for.

Requiem for a Dream was directed by Darren Aronofsky and adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel of the same name. It follows four characters in Brooklyn whose lives gradually unravel through different forms of addiction.

The film is about one’s options narrowing and the inevitability of a bad outcome, even as the characters seek escape. The way it’s shot only adds to this, with lots of repetition, escalation, rapid editing, extreme close-ups, and an insistent score to reinforce the sense of momentum without release.

The movie consistently gets high ratings from people of all types.

• Critics give it an average of 71 out of 100 on Metacritic.

• 80% of the 128 critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it a positive review.

• 43.8% of the cinephiles on Letterboxd who rated it gave it 4.5 or 5 out of five.

• 75.9% of IMDb users gave it a rating of 8 or higher out of 10.

Despite its universal acclaim, when I built a list of Letterboxd user lists along the lines of ‘great films you don’t rewatch’, Requiem for a Dream appeared on 99.2% lists.

That’s right - it seems almost impossible to make a list of one-time masterpieces and not include Requiem for a Dream. The next most frequently mentioned films were way behind, and were:

• Mysterious Skin (2004)

• Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

• Dancer in the Dark (2000)

• Come and See (1985)

• Oldboy (2003)

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

• Funny Games (1997)

• Irreversible (2002)

• Schindler’s List (1993)

• Beautiful Boy (2018)

• Manchester by the Sea (2016)

One theme to ruin them all

I wanted to see if I could deduce a theme running through the long list of movie titles.

My first thought was bleak intensity. Requiem for a Dream is exhausting, bleak, and emotionally punishing.

But when I looked at what made the films on the list stand out, there didn’t seem to be any difference in this regard from many other movies.

Many violent, upsetting, or emotionally heavy films attract repeat viewings, with some even becoming comfort watches for certain audiences.

• The Shining (1980) has sustained dread, violence, and psychological collapse.

• Alien (1979) is claustrophobic, violent, and relentlessly tense.

• Se7en (1995) is so bleak - to the extent I think many people forget just how grim it is until they rewatch it. (Not to mention nihilistic).

• Jaws (1975) has sustained dread, violent deaths, and existential fear.

• Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is all about intense paranoia and violation.

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is relentless and stressful.

So I don’t think that bleak intensity alone reliably indicates whether people come back.

And then I found a thread which ran through many of these one-and-done classics..

Powerlessness.

What Requiem for a Dream does so well is place the viewer in a position where effort and insight offer no protection. The film does not invite you to anticipate improvement, recovery, or escape. Each character moves forward with a sense of inevitability, and we as the audience are carried along.

Unlike bleak, intense films such as The Shining, Alien, Se7en, or Jaws, knowing where the story ends does not make the experience easier. With those films, as we become more familiar with them, we experience an added sense of orientation and control. Our knowledge of the movie helps us turn fear into anticipation, making it manageable.

The opposite applies to films like Irreversible, Come and See, Dancer in the Dark, and Grave of the Fireflies. In each case, knowing what is coming does not provide comfort or control. It removes any remaining distance. The outcome is fixed, the damage is unavoidable, and we are required to sit with that knowledge during the movie.

So that’s my theory - great films that people don’t want to re-watch often elicit an intense feeling of powerlessness in us.

Notes

The user-generated lists I gathered for this research all had two criteria:

1. They claimed to contain films that were good, high quality and/or admired (which I then verified via user ratings); and

2. Were films the author would not want/choose to watch again.

To give you a favour, here are a few:

• Amazing, but never again

• Best movies that I’ll never watch again

• Great films I’ll never watch again

• Movies everyone should watch once that I’m never watching again

• One-Time Masterpieces

The language people use to name and describe these lists is fascinating. They fell into three categories

1. Refusal. This was the “Never again” type, which implied that the author was adamant they were not going back.

2. Once only. This summed up the ‘single viewing’ perspective in a fairly neutral way.

3. Must see. This was the smallest group, but still present. They framed it almost as a duty to watch these movies.

In a new appearance on a talk show, Dave Franco revealed how Adam Driver came up with the idea of

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