Some people call holding on to old things hoarding. But ask Donna Darbous, a former employee of Nintendo, and she would disagree. This lucky employee may have rescued a Donkey Kong painting from the trash forty years ago, out of sheer appreciation of art, but it has brought her an immense fortune in 2026. The 1981 artwork, created for Nintendo’s North American Donkey Kong arcade promotional flyer, has become the most expensive game art ever sold at auction. The piece, which was discarded during an office expansion in the late 1980s, sold for $329,400, more than double its high estimate.
Darbous must be thanking her stars and her supervisor who granted permission to take several pieces home. It was only decades later, when Darbous was taking a trip down memory lane and sorting through Nintendo keepsakes, that she came face to face with the rescued artwork. All this time it lay flat inside the drawers of a coffee table, out of sight and out of mind, only to become one of the most prized possessions for the former Nintendo employee.
According to Gamerant, the artwork is acrylic on acetate over ink and airbrush on cardstock. It features the characters and barrels painted on a transparent acetate layer above the background, somewhat like an animation cel. Donkey Kong threatens the hero with barrels while Pauline waits above and Jumpman climbs toward her. The art is still in remarkable condition, especially considering its age, with only minor wear, rubbing, and small tears on the archival paper.
Painted by illustrator Leslie Cabarga, the artwork was sold at Landry Pop Auctions on October 28, 2026. The previous benchmark was far lower at $63,000, paid at Heritage Auctions in January 2023 for Robert Florczak’s original Prince of Persia box artwork. The Donkey Kong painting has shattered that record by fetching five times that price. As for the craze for the Donkey Kong game, it rapidly became the best-selling individual coin-operated machine in the U.S. market, with nearly 60,000 arcade machines sold by June 1982. These machines generated an income of $180 million.
