The Super Monkey Ball series is a series of arcade platform games developed by Amusement Vision and distributed by Sega. It features 4 characters (3 in the arcade version): AiAi, MeeMee, Baby and (appearing only in console versions) GonGon. The game debuted in Japan in 2001 as an upright arcade cabinet simply called Monkey Ball (which featured a banana-shaped joystick) and later that year was released as one of the three original Nintendo GameCube games. Since then, many sequels and ports have been created.
