Mike Mika likes video games. He's turned his 3-year-old daughter on to them too, including the old-school classic Donkey Kong. Then one day she asked, "How can I play as the girl? I want to save Mario!"
So Mika tells us Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter:
Mario is made up of four eight- by eight-pixel tiles. So each frame of animation is created with four tiles, each having three colors from the same palette. Two nights after my daughter’s request, I was knee deep in the Donkey Kong ROM, trying to make sense of the graphics. If I was going to replace the sprites, I needed to go all in. I needed to reduce Pauline’s height – she is three tiles tall to Mario’s two, a throwback to when Donkey Kong was going to be a Popeye game. I managed to reduce her height by taking some liberty with her design. I kept the head and hair pretty much intact. But, without any sort of onion-skin animation tools, I was animating blind with only the Mario sprites as reference.
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Meanwhile, a couple of my friends decided to tweet about it and post some of the work-in-progress to Reddit. By the time I started to catch up with all my social feeds, something insane had happened. This little mod exploded. I didn’t follow the whole Tropes vs. Women thing, but I saw a lot of references to it. In my wildest dreams, I just expected a bunch of fellow coders to chat about the merits of the mod. I never expected it to ignite a gender-role debate.
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Having kids is incredible. And having a daughter is something special. I get the opportunity to see the world through her eyes. And if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that the world could be just a bit more accommodating. And that if something as innocuous as having Mario be saved by Pauline brings out the crazy, maybe we aren’t as mature in our view of gender roles as we should be.