Its gameplay maneuvers Mario across platforms to ascend a construction site and rescue Pauline from the giant gorilla named Donkey Kong, all while avoiding or jumping over obstacles. It is the first game in both the Donkey Kong and Mario franchises. Following 1980's Space Panic, Donkey Kong is one of the earliest examples of the platform game genre:  even prior to the term being coined; the U.S. gaming press used climbing game for games with platforms and ladders. As the first platform game to feature jumping, Donkey Kong requires the player to jump between gaps and over obstacles or approaching enemies, setting the template for the future of the genre. With its four unique stages, Donkey Kong is the most complex arcade game of the time, and one of the first arcade games with multiple stages, following games such as 1980's Phoenix and 1981's Gorf and Scramble. Upon release in arcades, Computer and Video Games compared it favorably with King Kong and predicted that it would likely become a success. In his 1982 book Video Invaders, Steve Bloom described Donkey Kong as "another bizarre cartoon game, courtesy of Japan": 5  and said it was one of the "most exciting variations" on Pac-Man's maze theme along with Sega's Frogger due to how players need to "scale from the bottom of the screen to the top" which make them "more like obstacle courses than mazes" since "you always know where you're going — up." In January 1983, the 1982 Arcade Awards gave it the award for the best single-player video game and the Certificate of Merit as runner-up for Coin-Op Game of the Year.