When his three year old daughter wanted to save Mario instead of Pauline, Mike Mika decided to make that happen.
Mike Mika, a game developer and a dad hacked the ROM on the 2010 Nintendo Donkey Kong game his daughter loves so she could play as Pauline and save Mario, instead of the other way around, which is how the game was originally designed. Mike posted a video of his “Pauline Edition” on YouTube that has generated over 183,000 views, and more than 3,000 “likes.” In the description of the video Mike wrote,
My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games together. Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked me if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She’s played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn’t in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that.
So Mike decided to fix that for his daughter, and now the “damsel in distress” has become the hero.
As one YouTube commenter said, “being a dad like a boss.”
Thank you @HannelePhoto for sharing this with us!
I think this is awesome. I’ve got a pair of nearly 4 yr. old daughters who ask me every day to play Mario and get stars. Some of the modern Mario variants like Mario Kart offer a lot of flexibility in which characters to play, but I think they’d get a kick out of “save Mario” or playing as girl characters in the versions that don’t have that. It doesn’t change the coolness of what the dad did, but I think some details got mixed up or embellished in the telling, because unless his 3 yr. old is an amazing… Read more »