Game designer Mike Mika encouraged his kids to play classic arcade games. One evening, in their home arcade they were playing Donkey Kong, when his three-year-old daughter asked, “How can I play as the girl? (Pauline) I want to save Mario.” He told her it wasn’t possible, and she was really disappointed. [1]  The prospect of hacking the internal ROMs to change the game so that his daughter could play as “the girl” was a problem that kept him awake at night.

Donkey Kong was important to them because it was the first game they started playing together, so one evening he sat down and started hacking the code. The biggest problem he encountered was that he had to reduce Pauline’s height, she was three tiles high while Mario was only two.   He had other problems like when he changed colors of target items it shared the code with other items so he had to work through every item rewriting the code until he had worked out all of the bugs. He posted his progress online to entertain his friends unaware of the momentum that had taken off behind the effort.

So when he finished his work and posted the final product he was oblivious to the attention garnered, especially from women gamers and gamers who also wanted to encourage their daughters in the hobby. He turned his attention back to the reason for the project, his own daughter who was ecstatic, she began to play the game much more after it reflected what she looked like. The gamer world took off with the concept, with artists crafting special art for arcade cabinets so that they too could be modified to reflect one simple precept, representation matters. It is with that in mind that PNW Arcadesmith has created this custom Donkey Kong Pauline Edition cabinet complete with the Mike Mika original gameplay and featuring art from the Bobby Jones Game Over collection.

[1]  Mike Mika, 2013, “Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for my Daughter,” Wired Magazine Mar 11 2013, accessed  June 24,2024, www.wired.com/2013/03/donkey-kong-pauline-hack/