By late March 1981, Nintendo was also pursuing a license to make a game based on the Popeye comic strip, tentatively titled Popeye’s Beer Barrel Attack Game. In this iteration of the game, the player, as Popeye, would attempt to rescue Olive Oyl from Bluto in a similar manner to the final game, with the first level being completed by having the player use a jack to bend the top girder upwards, causing the barrels to roll back towards Bluto. After experiencing difficulty portraying the Popeye characters within the limits of the game hardware, Nintendo elected to replace Bluto with a newly created gorilla character before ultimately deciding to make the rest of the game’s cast original. Miyamoto came up with many characters and plot concepts, but he settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter with a large hammer, and a girlfriend, mirroring the original rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl. The ape that had originally replaced Bluto would evolve into the titular Donkey Kong, which Miyamoto said was “nothing too evil or repulsive.” He would be the pet of the main character, “a funny, hang-loose kind of guy.”
TIL
Funny this about this, if they had stuck with the Popeye IP this game would likely be forgotten now. Instead they created two of the most indelible characters in videogame history.
Did you know there’s a 3d open world remake of that game? It’s apparently awful.
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The end result is also vaguely similar to King Kong with the woman on the skyscraper, which I assume is the source of the Donkey Kong name.
Ok, but when did the shrooms come in?
Super Mushrooms were originally believed to have been inspired by the cake that Alice eats in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that makes her grow after having been shrunk by a potion. However, Shigeru Miyamoto later corrected himself, saying that this was a misunderstanding; the mushrooms were actually inspired by the concept of mushrooms being associated with magical worlds in general, like the wonderland of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Mushroom Kingdom.
1985
Interesting, I was wondering why they chose Amanita muscaria rather than one of the psilocybin shrooms. Maybe bc Amanita is prettier?
He would be the pet
Donkey Kong is into petplay confirmed.
*carpenter
He wasn’t a plumber until Mario Brothers.
I first met them as factory workers trying to make cakes on the cake factory line.
Yeah, I’m never quite sure how I feel about Mario. It’s cool that it isn’t some bog-standard fantasy setting and it’s cool that it doesn’t take itself too serious, but it’s also really weird at times.
Someone will immediately correct me on this, but I don’t think there’s been cats in the Mario universe, when they suddenly introduced Mario in a furry cat suit, for example.
Does Mario even know what cats look like? Or does he canonically live in the real world and only occasionally takes trips into the land of shrooms?Mario lives in this world actually, the video games are just dramatizations
It’s because he’s stubborn and they couldn’t outright call him “ass”…
It’s the Gordan Ramsey version of “donkey”:
Yep, it’s a poor translation of essentially “stubborn ape”
I want to live in the timeline where we got Ass Kong though.
I’m reading that Shigeru Miyamoto purposefully named it “Donkey Kong” in English to imply “stubborn ape” and that it was not a mistranslation
Oh not a mis translation at all, just one that the audience didn’t really understand at the time, I don’t think. At least I know I didn’t, until 20 years later when I read this somewhere on the internet. It makes sense once you know, but we all just kind of took the name at face value in the 80’s and 90’s and didn’t really question it. “Kong” was recognizable enough but the “Donkey” part definitely just slid right off me.
To be honest I’m not sure what I would have called him instead to convey the same idea better, so fair enough, Mr. Miyamoto.
It’s not even a poor translation…
King Kong already existed, so they made him a “Kong” and he’s stubborn so he’s a donkey. 100% logical just more British English than American English.
I want to live in the timeline where we got Ass Kong though
Be the change you want to see in the world
I’ve never made the connection between the Donkey name in Donkey Kong and donkey the animal. I feel a bit silly
