As we spend a whole week celebrating Mario's super-ness, it seems only fair to take a closer look at his earliest adversary. Friends and enemies for more than 30 years, Donkey Kong is arguably Nintendo's second most famous character, though don't tell Link we said that. His name is known the world over and he’s starred in some of the most popular games ever made. What's the reactionary gorilla been up to all these years and what are the strangest parts of his history? Click next and you'll see where it all began...

In 1981 toymaker Nintendo had barely dipped its toe into the emerging Japanese gaming market but was ready to head to America. As the legend goes, the publisher repurposed some unpopular arcade cabinets to house a game created by a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto and overseen by the man that would eventually build the Game Boy, Gumpei Yokoi. Introducing an actual plot to gaming, the game told the silly but simple tale of of carpenter's pet gorilla freaking out and stealing the workman's girlfriend. Thus Donkey Kong was born.

Despite the odd concept the game became a monster hit all around the world. Today it’s praised because the game basically invented the platformer, but back then arcade titles were inventing genres left and right. The real reason it's forever lodged in the minds of the world for is the compelling story hook, memorable music, and colorful, cartoonish graphics that have all aged gracefully. But even though his name was on the marquee, it was Jumpman (soon to be renamed Mario) that became the real star, pushing DK into the background.

Still argued about to this day, no one can be totally sure why a huge gorilla is named Donkey. Some allege that it is a mistranslation of Monkey Kong, but that doesn’t sound right to us and we’d rather go with the source on this. According to Miyamoto the "Donkey" name was intentional, meant to reference the stubborn nature of the ape, which we're more inclined to believe since he was there. No matter what the source of his first name, it was DK's last name that gave Nintendo much more trouble early on.

Universal Studios believed the game infringed on its King Kong copyright, with both the plot and last name. Seemingly the big movie studio thought it could intimidate the smaller company into settling, but Nintendo's legal team had different ideas. After proving that Universal didn't even possess the rights to King Kong, the court sided with Nintendo, a big victory on its road to US expansion. The N was so impressed with the legal win that the lawyer heading up the case, Howard Lincoln, soon became an exec in the US offices.

When it was finally time for the ape’s big sequel, in a strange turn of events Donkey Kong didn't return the conquering hero in his second adventure. Now the damsel in distress, DK was caged by Mario and needed to be saved by his son, the titular Donkey Kong Junior. To this date we've yet to meet Junior's mother, but at the time we were too busy trying to save papa to notice.

Perhaps intended to play against player expectations at the time, seeing Mario as whip-wielding jailer out to kill a baby gorilla is a little jarring today. It's a risk that Nintendo would not take again with its mascot. In fact, Donkey Kong and his nemesis would part ways for a little while after this game.

After he was finally freed by his son, Donkey Kong's third arcade title had him returning to his destructive ways. This time the imposing beast avoided Mario – he was off to separate success in Mario Bros – instead wreaking havoc in a stranger’s green house. The only person to come to the aid of the defenseless plants was the now-forgotten Stanley the Bugman.

Ditching the platforming to become a Galaga-styled shooter, Donkey Kong 3 is a strange asterisk in the ape's career. For as cool as he is, Stanley is an unneeded Mario replacement, though we do love the little dance he does after winning. Mostly it was strange mood swing for players. After they pitied DK in Junior now we were expected to shoot him in the crotch with bug spray. We wanted to be his friend!

Following DK3, Donkey was mostly limited to appearing in arcade ports and oddly DK Jr was on the roster of Super Mario Kart instead of him, something that wouldn’t be repeated in future Kart games. Then 1994 saw him return in a huge way with his newly added red necktie. Fans first saw DK at his most villainous in the stupendous Game Boy remake of the arcade original. Then he got a console series all his own thanks to some tech wizards in Northern England.

Donkey Kong Country made DK the hero for the first time as he chased down his stolen bananas. It gave DK a new personality and heroic identity, forgoing his unpredictable nature, bestowing voice and purpose. Featuring then-stunning CG graphics, DKC convinced many that a next generation of consoles wasn't needed yet as long the SNES could create such dazzling games.

Originally designed as a new take on DK Jr, Nintendo rejected that redesign for the character, causing Rare to make Diddy Kong an entirely new sidekick. The little monkey stuck close to his elder throughout every underwater and mine cart stage, ultimately earning a fan base of his own. By the time the sequel to the blockbuster title rolled out, Diddy had usurped DK's leading role.

Despite having his name in the title, Donkey Kong was shoved to background once again, getting captured in both sequels with Diddy and his girlfriend Dixie taking over as the leads. But even if he wasn't always playable, Country successfully elevated DK back into Nintendo's pantheon. Soon he was joining Mario in his spin-offs, including Mario Kart, while Diddy went to headline his own titles.

Donkey Kong Country may have put DK in the center stage again, but it also created a strange question of identity that Nintendo still hasn't fully cleared up. DKC introduced a whole family of new Kongs, including the crotchety Cranky Kong, an aged ape that claimed to be the original Donkey Kong that kidnapped Pauline. If that's true, who's the Donkey Kong in DKC and what happened to DK Jr?

When Rare was in charge of the DK mythology Cranky sometimes said he was DK's father and other times claimed to be his grandfather, while Nintendo at first ignored the backstory when Donkey Kong appeared in other games. Cranky being DK's father makes more sense, since that would mean DK is an adult version of Junior, but in his most recent appearance overseen by Nintendo, Cranky is clearly identified as DK's grandfather. So what happened to Junior? He hasn't been seen in years and if his dad is approximately 97 in ape years, how old can he be? And for that matter, why Mario hasn't aged at all in the intervening years? Perhaps these are answers the world isn’t meant to have.

After ruling the sales charts near the end of the SNES's lifecycle, Rare moved on to the N64 and became one of, if not the dominant developer for the system. Rare used the console to introduce multiple new stars, including Banjo-Kazooie and Jet Force Gemini, before returning to DK in Donkey Kong 64. Sadly, even though the game was well made, it was proof that the series had past its prime.

Aside from the so-bad-it's-good rap that starts the game, the real problem with DK64 was that it buried players in collectibles. After unlocking the five different playable characters, each had different colored coins to collect along with Golden Bananas, Crystal Coconuts, keys, rolls of film, headphones, and medals that were hidden in every single stage. Rare was famous for using tons of hidden collectibles to extend playtime, but DK64 took it to such ludicrous extremes that numerous players rejected it. After DK64, many gamers needed to take a break from the ape's world.

DK64 ended up being Rare's last hurrah with the primate, despite having several games prepared for Nintendo GameCube. Pictured above is Donkey Kong Racing, one of the first titles shown for GC and was even advertised on the North American packaging for the system. That and two other games were cancelled when Rare was purchased by an unlikely corporate suitor.

Following the success of Country, Nintendo became part owner of Rare, but when the N64 went to pasture, Nintendo chose to sell off its stake in Rare to Microsoft. Once MS owned the company and got Rare working on titles for the Xbox and its successor, Nintendo cancelled multiple DK titles that were in different stages of development. At first it was unclear who owned what after the sale, but when the dust finally settled, all the Country characters belonged to Nintendo and the publisher took the ape back into the first party fold.

Overseen by Nintendo once more, Donkey Kong entered a transition period during the GameCube years. He continued to appear alongside Mario in sports and racing games, but his solo releases were pretty scattershot. While appearing in a couple portable adventures, DK was tethered to a clunky peripheral on the GameCube, starring in a series of games that were only playable using a bongo drum controller.

The three Donkey Konga games – one of which was only released in Japan – were cute, but the pop-heavy track list was too shallow, barely cracking 30 songs and failing to take advantage of the huge backlog of classic Nintendo music at its disposal. Even weirder was Jungle Beat, a standard platformer that you controlled only with the bongos. It was a physically taxing game, but if you were in good enough shape to keep up with the beat it was pretty fun. Still, the bongo years will mostly be remembered as one of the oddest chapters in DK’s history.

After all that time as a leading man, it seemed like DK had left behind his kidnapping ways, but when Pauline returned to Mario’s side, so too did DK’s dark side. In each of the Mario vs Donkey Kong games DK ends up flying into a type of jealous rage and steals something, either new toys or Pauline herself. Early in the series Mario chased DK himself, but by the later entries he let his toys do most of the work for him in the Lemmings-inspired games.

DK’s actions in this series make us wonder just how smart he really is. In the Country games he’s smart enough to talk with other characters and is a pretty good guy, but in Mario vs Donkey Kong he acts so erratic, stealing things and creating traps for Mario and his Minis. Perhaps simply seeing Mario brings out the worst in DK, causing some wild reaction in him that he can’t control. Of course, by the end of each MVDK title, Mario and Pauline ultimately forgive Donkey Kong, all becoming friends once more until the next time DK loses his mind.

For much of its lifetime the Wii years were a quieter time for Donkey Kong. 2007 saw the release of the quickly forgotten Barrel Blast and most of his other appearances were limited to supporting roles in Mario sports games. That changed following DK’s surprise appearance as the final boss in the Punch-Out!! remake, and DK’s momentum continued into a comeback that many had desired for a long time. Picking up where Rare had left off with DK64, Metroid Prime devs Retro Studios released Donkey Kong Country Returns in 2010.

A striking and proudly 2D throwback, DKCR was a fitting tribute to what was so great about the series, using much of the music and other sly winks to previous games. However, Nintendo held back on the greater Kong family, only having the indispensable Cranky Kong make an appearance. Clearly fans loved to see Donkey and Diddy back together again, since the game ultimately sold more than five million copies globally. With sales like that, we doubt it’ll take another decade to see Donkey Kong Island again.

Whether we see DK return to his country once more on the Wii U or see him pop up on the 3DS, Donkey Kong’s legacy at Nintendo seems more secure than ever. After all these years, what are you favorite memories of the primate? Tell us in the comments.

Need to know more about Mario? Read the top 7 most disturbing things about the Mushroom Kingdom and see the history of gaming’s favorite brother in Luigi: A life in shadow.