Five Things You Never Knew About Donkey Kong
We know how clickbaity that title is, and how usually such headlines almost never measure up to their content. But this time, we’re pretty sure there are at least five new facts about the original Donkey Kong game you don’t know…because Miyamoto just revealed them to Wired Magazine in an article that was published today.
The “stupid monkey” dictionary story is true It’s been dismissed by some as an urban legend, but Miyamoto just confirmed himself that he named the ape “Donkey” because his Japanese-to-English dictionary said it was a synonym for “stupid.” However, he WAS told the dictionary was inaccurate prior to finishing the game….but he kept the name as-is because he liked it.
Miyamoto got his best ideas in the bathtub “At that time, our office was in Tobakaido, which also housed the hanafuda factory.” In 1981 Nintendo still made its original product, hanafuda cards. “There was a water boiler that was used to make the hanafuda, and the water from this boiler was also used for a bathtub. The employees making the hanafuda could wash their sweat away in the bath after work, and at night when nobody was around, you could hang out there for a long time. It totally saved me,” Miyamoto said of the bathtub. “It was really effective at letting me put my ideas in order.”
The game was supposed to have voice samples Pauline was going to talk with two words: “Help!” every now and then (replaced with Donkey Kong’s growl) and “Nice!” whenever Mario jumped over a barrel (replaced with the bonus-points noise, described by Miyamoto as pi-ro-po-pon-pon!) The voices were taken out when a professor they showed the game to couldn’t make out what Pauline was saying. The samples are still in the ROM and can be heard here.
How old Mario is in the game “I didn’t think he was an old man. I thought he was more like 24 to 26 years old. When you think of the story—Mario kept Donkey Kong locked up, so he escaped with his girlfriend—he was a young guy, a bachelor. But of course, now there are people who think he’s around 40 years old.”
Why Mario dies from ridiculously small heights in the game “I was pretty serious when I was making this. For example: If you were to fall from a height equal to your own body height, you’d probably break your foot, right? So in Donkey Kong, if you fall 1.5 times Mario’s height, you die. But later I thought, isn’t it better if you don’t die from such a thing? So in Mario Bros., even if you fall five times Mario’s height, you don’t die.” Miyamoto added that he finds it difficult to return to the stiff play control of this game.