He drops Pauline and stomps his feet, warping the steel beams. He moves to his final perch and sneers. A melody plays, and the level starts. This brief animation sets the scene and adds background to the gameplay, a first for video games. At the stage, a heart appears between Mario and Pauline, but Donkey Kong grabs her and climbs higher, causing the heart to break. The narrative concludes when Mario reaches the end of the rivet stage. He and Pauline are reunited, and a short intermission plays. Development Nintendo of America was founded in 1980 with minor success at importing its parent's arcade cabinets from Japan. In early 1981, its president Minoru Arakawa bet the small startup company on a major order of 3,000 Radar Scope. Its poor reception in America filled a warehouse with 2,000 unsold Radar Scope machines, so Arakawa requested that the parent company president Hiroshi Yamauchi send a conversion kit of new game software. Yamauchi polled the company's entire talent pool for fresh game design concepts to save the distressed startup. This yielded Shigeru Miyamoto's debut as lead game designer of his Donkey Kong concept, and Yamauchi appointed head engineer Gunpei Yokoi as project supervisor with a budget of according to Miyamoto. Ikegami Tsushinki was subcontracted for some of the development, with no role in the game's creation or concept, but to provide "mechanical programming assistance to fix the software created by Nintendo". Nintendo instructed Ikegami to produce a program according to its instructions and put it onto read-only memory (ROM) chips on printed circuit boards (PC boards). This later led to mutual lawsuits in 1983, as Ikegami asserted ownership over Donkey Kong which Nintendo denied as Ikegami was a subcontractor who had already been paid. Game Machine called it "simply a nuisance tactic" on the part of Ikegami. At the time, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the Popeye comic strip. When this license attempt failed, Nintendo took the opportunity to create new characters that could be marketed and used in later games. Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a plumber with a large hammer, and a girlfriend that mirrors the rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl. Bluto became an ape, which Miyamoto said was "nothing too evil or repulsive". He would be