Microsoft Didn’t Think They Owned Donkey Kong

Did you hear the one about Microsoft thinking they owned Donkey Kong? 

It’s a fun time to bash Microsoft, and some of the time they bring it on themselves. Still, the internet went mad this week because an Examiner reporter wrote an article claiming that Microsoft were under the impression that they owned Donkey Kong when they bought Rare back at the start of this generation.

We wrote the other day about how difficult it was for Rare to assimilate themselves into the Microsoft machine, and it’s fair to think that mistakes might have been made, but you’d have to be completely out of touch with gaming to think that Nintendo would ever part with the character that propelled Mario into popularity.

And that’s actually the case. The person interviewed for the Examiner piece has taken to Twitter to clarify that Microsoft in no way thought they owned Donkey Kong – someone at Microsoft did.

@FangzWithaZ To be fair, it was actually a bland , grey exec out for a free jolly to UK who said it, rather than MS as a whole.

— Christopher Seavor (@conkerhimself) June 30, 2013

This story has displayed two major problems with gaming journalism and gaming as a whole. The first is that we have a habit of attributing a single person’s comments to the whole company, whether that’s valid or not. The second is that we’ll believe any old story and then ignore the clarification regardless of what’s true. I’m still seeing people say “Microsoft are stupid,” which is an odd thing to say about one of the biggest companies in the world.

The important thing is that an Examiner reporter has again proven themselves happy to do whatever it takes to actually get people reading their channel.