A former Nintendo employee is auctioning a wealth of classic items, including the original Donkey Kong art
The art, one of 49 pieces up for auction, has an estimated value of up to $150,000
A former Nintendo employee is auctioning a number of items from her personal collection, including the original arcade flyer artwork for Donkey Kong.
Donna Darbous was an advertising manager at Nintendo and says she retrieved the artwork from a dumpster when a storage room was emptied out.
The art consists of two pieces – a background image created with ink and airbrush on cardstock board, and an acetate sheet (similar to an animation cel) with Mario / Jumpman, Donkey Kong, Pauline and the barrels painted on it with ink and acrylic.
It’s currently up for auction at Landry Pop, with an estimated value of $100,000 – $150,000. At the time of writing, the current highest bid is $80,000.
In an interview with the New York Times, Darbous said that the artwork – which was painted by artist Leslie Cabarga and depicts the first ever public illustration of Mario when he was known as Jumpman – ended up in a dumpster after Nintendo cleared out a storage room to turn it into more office space, to accommodate the company’s continued growth.
Darbous said she took envelopes containing the art from the dumpster and was given permission from her boss to take them home. She said she’d since forgotten about it until recently, when she was clearing her garage and came across a bin containing other keepsakes from her time at Nintendo.
A number of these other items are all being auctioned at Landry Pop as part of a collection called Jumpman: The Beginning of an Icon. This consists of 49 pieces – 36 items from Darbous’s collection, plus a selection of graded black-box NES games.
Other items from Darbous’s collection up for auction include original artwork for the Mickey Mouse and Mickey & Donald Game & Watch handhelds (valued at $8,000 – $12,000) each, original Nintendo of America Christmas card art from 1985, original Super Mario Bros production art and a collection of employee jackets, shirts and commemorative gifts.
The auction will run until October 28.
