game officially went on sale in July 1981. Release Makers of video game consoles were interested. Taito offered a considerable fee for all rights to Donkey Kong, but Nintendo declined after three days of internal discussion. Rivals Coleco and Atari approached Nintendo in Japan and the United States respectively. In the end, Yamauchi granted Coleco exclusive console and tabletop rights to Donkey Kong because he believed that "it [was] the hungriest company". In addition, Arakawa believed that as a more established company in the U.S., Coleco could better handle marketing. In return, Nintendo received an undisclosed lump sum plus $1.40 per game cartridge sold and $1 per tabletop unit. On December 24, 1981, Howard Lincoln drafted the contract. He included language that Coleco would be held liable for anything on the game cartridge, an unusual clause for a licensing agreement. Arakawa signed the document the next day, and, on February 1, 1982, Yamauchi persuaded the Coleco representative in Japan to sign without review by the company's lawyers. Coleco did not offer the game cartridge stand-alone; instead, it was bundled with the ColecoVision console, which went on sale in August 1982. Coleco offered Atari 2600 and Intellivision versions as well. Coleco's Atari 2600 port was programmed by Garry Kitchen. Coleco's sales doubled to $500 million and its earnings quadrupled to $40 million. Coleco also released stand-alone Mini-Arcade tabletop versions of Donkey Kong, along with Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Frogger in 1982. Coleco also bundled a copy of Donkey Kong with its Atari VCS clone, the Coleco Gemini, in 1983. Atari obtained the license for home computer versions of Donkey Kong and released it for the Atari 8-bit family. When Coleco unveiled the Adam Computer, running a port of Donkey Kong at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Illinois, Atari protested that it was in violation of the licensing agreement. Yamauchi demanded that Arnold Greenberg, Coleco's president, withdraw his Adam port. Greenberg complied, and the game was not published. Nintendo Entertainment System The game was ported by Nintendo Research & Development 2 to Nintendo's Family Computer (Famicom) console and released in Japan on July 15, 1983, as one of the system's three launch games. Masayuki Uemura, the Famicom's lead architect, designed the console specifically to faithfully recreate Donkey Kong. It is an early Nintendo Entertainment System game in the Arcade Classics Series, released on June 1, 1986, in North America and October