Poll of the Day > Is Mario a Donkey Kong spinoff or is Donkey Kong a Mario spinoff?

(+) Yeah! (+)

What do you think?
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Even though the first game was called donkey Kong, it was still a Mario game.

Neither
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They both sort of split into different series after the original game. They're both spin offs of an older series with neither claiming it as a direct predecessor.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong
1981

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros.
1983

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario#1981%E2%80%931990
Mario debuted as "Jumpman" in the arcade game Donkey Kong on 9 July 1981. He is shown to be a carpenter and has a pet ape called Donkey Kong.
Jumpman was later renamed "Mario" in the 1982 arcade game Donkey Kong Junior.
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Dk is the spinoff

Donkey Kong featured Mario as the protagonist and playable character
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JOExHIGASHI posted...

Donkey Kong featured Mario as the protagonist and playable character

So Mario is the main character in the Donkey Kong series. Does that make the Mario titles direct sequels while the DK titles that don't feature Mario are not?
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honestly, that's a beautiful ambiguity. Donkey Kong is named after the antagonist (or you play as the antagonist?), is in a sense a Mario game (game where you play as Mario), but is canonically a DK game, not a Mario game.

I think Mario must be the spin-off. I almost wanted to say "both or neither", but Mario is definitely descended from the original DK games (Mario Bros. was definitely a "spin-off" of DK), but modern DK is not a spin-off of Mario, it's more like a continuation of the DK games.

I think the issue only arises that in DK, really you're playing as the antagonist, or the titular character is the antagonist. It's a game-where-you-play-as-Mario but it's not really a Mario game, it just has a role-reversal.
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Mario's the spinoff because of his debut game's title alone.
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I want to say both. Because they both just kind of went their own way after the first game. But you can also say neither because of that. If I had to pick one, I would say DK is the spinoff. Even though the game was named after him, it was a Mario game. You played as Mario. I don't think the name matters much. I mean, Zelda games are named after the Princess...
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