Donkey Kong

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Heath, and I'll be leading this Kong expedition.

And I'm joined by the usual cast of characters.

Nobody wants Diddy.

I get it.

I totally get it.

So we have funky kong swanky kong cranky kong and captain scurvy cecil tom no and y i feel like funky kong isn't a you're so cool reference and more of like a put your shoes away reference yeah

it is true i am swanky i prefer a tie with no pants that is my signature look

yep and to be clear canonically cranky kong is donkey kong so that's actually a compliment you might not know and i have a surprising amount of single genre erotica based on me.

So, yeah, correct.

Either nailed it.

Great.

All right.

Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

Well, at this point, it would be really weird if it wasn't Donkey Kong.

And I'm assuming you have vintage Donkey Kong theme bed sheets or something very similar to that.

So, Noah, is it safe to say that it's

on like Donkey Kong?

Indeed, it is safe to say so, sir.

Excellent.

So, what is Donkey Kong?

I would argue that it is the single most influential video game of all time.

It was the inaugural effort of the most influential video game designer of all time.

It introduced the most influential video game character of all time.

And it created an entire video game genre that, one could argue, is the only truly unique video game genre.

And yes, I do own a copy of it for Atari and ColecoVision and then Television and NES and Super Nintendo.

And I have the Game and Watch.

Feel free to pause the podcast to put on a pair of dry underwear podcast listeners.

Speed loosh.

Agree.

Okay, just to be clear, though, we're talking about Donkey Kong because of its historical significance.

Yes, it's historical.

And because they're doing major repairs on my house this week, and I had to write an essay on the same week that I had to put most of my belongings in storage and relocate my home and office to an Airbnb, so I didn't have time to read a whole Wikipedia article this time.

So I had to go with one I knew.

Yeah, Only No Illusions defines writing an essay without source material as the easy way to do essays.

Well, I'm out of shit I know about.

So this is the last one I'm going to be able to do that with, I think.

All right.

So not a lot of motherfuckers can pull off starting a story about a video game in the late 1800s, but I am one of those motherfuckers.

So in 1889, a craftsman by the name of Fusajiro Yamuuchi decided that he wanted to get into the playing card business.

So he started a company called Nintendo Kopai.

Now, like so much Japanese, it's apparently really hard to translate the exact meaning of Nintendo into English, but it's something like, leave luck to heaven.

Kopai is way easier.

It just means playing cards.

Stop.

You're onto that inside straight like a fucking donkey.

Maybe when you die, you'll get it in heaven.

Yeah, right, exactly.

It's that.

So Yamiuchi sets out making cards for this game called Hanafuda, which was derived from poker after poker was outlawed in Japan in an effort to eradicate Western influences on their culture.

It was also one of the few types of gambling that the Japanese government allowed in the late 19th century.

And that, along with the fact that high-stakes players demanded a fresh set of cards for every game, made it a steady business.

But not necessarily a lucrative one, though, since the cards were really expensive to produce.

So from the very beginning, the company was looking for ways to branch out.

Now, of course, for most of the company's history, branching out meant manufacturing other kinds of cards, right?

They eventually did Western cards once those were legal.

They did novelty cards.

They got a lot of Western licenses.

So they do cartoons, Disney, that kind of stuff.

But the company's passed down through the family from one generation to another until eventually it winds up in the hands of Hiroshi Yamiuchi, Fusajiro's great-grandson.

And he took new ventures to the extreme.

Under his leadership, the company dropped the kau-pai from its name altogether, and

they got into the business of practically everything.

This includes toys, games, instant noodles, sneezy pay-by-the-hour fuck motels.

It was a very interesting time for the company.

Okay, it's like Airbnb, Grubhub, and Rubhub all at the same time.

It's just good business right there.

You're leveraging core competencies.

You're discovering demand.

Don't boil the ocean.

I fucking love that.

Synergy is winergy.

This feels like the Menards business model.

Let's say we'll be a hardware store that also sells kayaks, kayaks, ramen noodles, jean jackets, three random mattresses, and some miter saws.

And we'll arrange the story in a series of perpendicular aisles designed by the rats who failed every maze test.

Also the biggest thing of cheese balls you've ever seen in your entire life.

I fucking love Menards so much.

It's fucking insane there.

They blast their theme music at you every 40 seconds.

You save more money there, too.

You do

Menards.

That's what they say.

it's a they say again and again and again i really wish nintendo get back into the fuck motels though now that they have all the themes to do with it yeah

we go yeah right yeah exactly but okay so among the buckshot efforts at diversification one of them hit big and that was of course the company's foray into video games now that started in 1977 in the golden age of pong clones and they did pretty well with their color tv game series because it told the customers what it was i guess But they really hit it big when a designer by the name of Gunpei Yokoi came up with the idea for the Game and Watch.

Now, basically, he saw somebody playing with a pocket calculator and he was like, wow, that's not even a game, and he's already playing with it.

So they used calculator technology to make a series of simple games, and they made a fortune.

All right, guys, spelling boobies upside down is absolutely hilarious every time,

but it only works in English, really.

I think we can do more.

So this is late 70s, early 80s.

And as weird as this seems from the modern perspective, the real money in the video game industry at this point, it's not in this home console and handheld bullshit, it's in the arcades.

And this is somewhere Nintendo already had experience.

Even in the pre-video game era, they already made light gun-based clay pigeon shooting games for arcades.

And even before they came out with their first home console, they had a racing game in arcades called EVR Racing.

That was in 1975, and it was eventually followed in 1979 with a shooting game called Sheriff, which they would follow up the next year with a very ambitious game called

Radar Scope.

Now, Radar Scope combined the scintillating feel of watching a line trace a circular path, along with the existential anxiety of living during a time when a flock of birds or perhaps even the sunrise might and has been mistaken for an incoming nuclear attack.

Hey, put your quarters in, kids.

Well, you know, it's funny because the whole video game thing starts, Tom, from people doing radar operating and going like, this would actually be really fun if we weren't killing people with it.

Yeah.

All right.

So if you're old enough to remember Space Invaders.

And let's face it, if you aren't, you already stopped this thing to the end of the day.

Unfortunately, yes, right, right.

So Radar Scope was basically like Space Invaders or Galaxian, except that they used this cutting-edge technology to give the game a depth of field that made it feel kind of three-dimensional.

And the game was pretty awesome.

It was technologically ahead of everything else out there, did pretty well in Japan.

So they made a bajillion of them.

They threw them on a boat and they sent them to Nintendo of America, which was headquartered in New York City at the time.

Now, these days they're headquartered in Seattle, and much of the reason for that is because it's way the fuck quicker to ship shit from Japan to Seattle than it is to go through the Panama Canal and all the way up to New York City, which they learned all about when their cutting-edge game showed up nine months later and weren't cutting edge anymore.

All right, we can steal that canal and make like a 48th Prefecture.

We can just move the August.

I guess we can move the Abbas.

That's fine.

So, okay, so Nintendo of America has a huge problem.

They've got a fuck ton of games that are kind of meh compared to similar games that Atari is making at this point, and American gamers just are not feeding them quarters.

Radar Scope is a dud, and it's such a big dud that it threatens to.

Yeah, right.

It threatens to sink the still nascent Nintendo of America altogether.

But luckily, they have a savior in the form of a sloppy-haired folk musician whose dad made him get a real job.

Enter Shigeru Miyamoto, the greatest video game designer of all time.

Also known as the only video game designer you've possibly even kind of heard of.

And I've definitely not heard of him.

Yeah, you've heard Sid Meyers, though, haven't you?

You were to gunpay Yokoi earlier in this essay.

I wasn't listening.

No one was.

Metroid?

Read a Metroid.

Now, of course, Miyamoto didn't grow up wanting to be a video game designer because that didn't exist yet as a job.

He wanted to be a musician.

Specifically, he wanted to be a banjo player.

But his dad told him he had to get a real job.

So he looked in the watt ants and he saw an opening at a toy company and he was like, oh, well, that at least looks fun.

Okay, if he learns to juggle next and then becomes a podcaster, no, he's just making this up.

This is his biology.

So he goes in there, he impresses the hard ass that's running the place, and he gets a job in the fledgling video game department.

And for some reason that defies all explanation, given what he had done for the company up to this point, when the radar scope thing goes bad, they give him the job of designing a new game that they can retrofit into the old game's hardware.

Okay, and that's how Banjo Hero was born.

It went badly.

It went badly.

Nobody likes that.

It's worth noting here that Miyamoto is not a computer programmer, and that's very unusual at this point in the history of video game design, at least in comparison to America, which is where most video game design was happening at that point.

At Atari, like one person designed the game, programmed the game, did all the sound effects, did all the graphical design, did everything.

It wasn't until the packaging that somebody else got involved, right?

This was suboptimal, right?

Because the thing that makes you good at coding doesn't necessarily make you good at designing games.

Well, I think transistor amplification quiz is a fun way.

Exactly, though.

It was exactly that.

So Miyamoto looked at things differently from the very beginning.

The first thing that he wanted to do was to tell a story.

And by that, I don't mean just present a premise on which you can write your own story, which is what other games gave you, right?

He wanted a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

He wanted the player to be able to win, right?

To like to defeat the crazed monkey at the top of the screen.

And he made the first game that ever actually had that aspect.

In every other game, you just play until you die, right?

Pac-Man has little interstitial scenes where he gets chased around and shit, but the story never ends.

Yeah, later on, those interstitials get dark, though.

In one of them, Blinky just asks you to say goodbye to his wife.

I'll see you in the afterlife, my dear.

Oh, wait.

Yeah, there you are.

Yeah, right.

Cool, we're ghosts.

All right.

So, to tell you how important the storytelling aspects were.

Can you just go left and be right?

All of a sudden, it's so weird.

What's happening here?

So, to tell you how important the storytelling aspects were to Miyamoto, I want to emphasize here just how much of the game's capacity is used to render a giant monkey at the top of the screen that doesn't actually do anything.

Right?

Like, you don't fight Donkey Kong in the game.

All he does is throw barrels and distress the damsel.

The big limitation of video games at the time was how many moving objects you could put on the screen at one time.

And Donkey Kong was so big that they had to use four of those moving objects to build him.

And two for said damsel.

An extra one just for her speech bubble yelling help to like.

inject some urgency in the situation.

It's because the test players were like, I don't know.

How do we know this isn't just a interspecies couple that Jumpman's trying to break?

Wait a second.

Speech bubble.

She's asked for help.

Now I've been invited.

Yeah.

Intercession necessary.

Now, it wasn't always going to be a giant monkey.

For a little while at the beginning, it looked like Nintendo was going to have the licensing for Popeye, which was still a pretty popular IP back in the early 80s.

So originally, the idea was that Bluto was going to be throwing barrels at Popeye while olive oil yelled for help.

That was not to be.

Instead, he changed the villain to Donkey Kong, a name that his team got by looking up synonyms for stubborn and ape in a Japanese English dictionary.

The hero, on the other hand, he would name, of course, Jumpman.

He would take on a different name eventually, but when the game debuted, the mustachioed protagonist is just named Jumpman.

And he's not a plumber either.

He's a carpenter.

And the damsel was not a mushroom princess either.

She was just a lady named Pauline.

I just, I like how the words mushroom princess have become a phrase that sounds like it means something.

Right, yeah.

Oh, oh, she's not a mushroom princess.

That's what's weird.

Yeah, right, right.

I should also note that canonically, Donkey Kong was Mario's pet ape.

And the story that appeared on the original artwork in the game cabinet strongly suggests that Mario abused Donkey Kong in some way.

What?

And that, yeah, and that kidnapping Pauline was revenge for that once he escaped from his cage.

What?

Yeah, now the storyline's been cleaned up in the intervening years, but it was very important to Miyamoto.

That's crazy, the video game.

That's

what it was.

Yeah, exactly.

But it was apparently very important to Miyamoto that his game have an empathetic villain.

Okay.

I mean, I'm getting a hateable good guy.

Right?

Like, he's a shitty carpenter who shows up at the work site with a giant ape who's just like throwing barrels everywhere where people are trying to work.

And then that guy's mean to the ape?

Like, fuck that guy.

Come on.

We're lucky the tech wasn't further along.

Donkey Kong would have been named, you know, Brayden Dark and voiced by Noam Jenkins.

Really missed a bullet here.

Three nerds loved that job.

Yeah, I know.

Three nerds.

Three and a half.

Now, so, but Donkey Kong had a fuck ton of firsts, right?

It's not technically the first platformer game because there were a few games before where you moved from one platform to another on ladders, but it was the first game with a fucking jump button, which is a pretty big deal.

And I feel like most people define platforms as games where you jump between platforms.

Sorry, I'm getting too nerdy.

Getting.

Yeah, getting.

But it is also the first game to use the damsel in distress narrative, which is kind of huge.

And I believe it was also the first game to get sued for intellectual property infringement.

Okay.

And it gave us the King of Kong, a fistful of quarters, which was a delightful movie.

All right, plenty more to learn for the noobs, but first, some apropos of nothing.

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We heard you the first time, man.

Oh, we heard it

before.

Aha, you'll never get back, Pauline.

Oh, no!

Save me, jump man!

You'll never rape my girlfriend, Donkey Kong!

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Dude, what?

That's right!

Get your filthy hands off her, you big ape!

Sorry, just want to clarify.

I have no intention to sexually assault Pauline.

Oh!

You don't?

No.

Did you think that, Pauline?

No, of of course not.

Why would I think that?

Oh.

Okay, well then I'm gonna...

Sorry, not really ready to move forward with this.

You thought I was gonna sexually assault your girlfriend?

I don't- hey, man, I don't know.

You stole her.

There's a lot of problematic assumptions built into that sentence.

Holy shit.

Thank you.

I was just trying to get her back.

Were you?

You're like...

Jumping around grabbing bonus barrels.

I watched you stop to grab a magic hammer multiple times.

It was all part of the plan.

Right.

Sure.

Look, I'm not comfortable in this space right now.

I'm gonna go.

And I feel like this communication should go through other channels moving forward.

Honestly, same.

I feel this.

Come on, guys.

We don't need to get HR involved here.

I think we very much do.

Guys, guys,

don't.

I mean, why else would a monkey want to kidnap a lady?

Heard that.

Fuck.

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And we're back.

When we left off, video games were like porn without character development and everybody hates that.

But the story of an abusive carpenter might be the missing link.

What's next?

Okay, so for those of you who don't remember the game, let me, I'm going to walk you through a quick round of Donkey Kong.

So, the first thing you're going to see when you throw your quarter in is a big monkey ass climbing a six-story tower of girders on a double ladder that's disappearing behind him.

And under his right arm, you see the feet of helpless Pauline, who was originally just named Lady, by the way.

So, this actually could be and was more sexist.

Donkey Kong reaches the top just to show off, he jumps the last few steps, and then he places Pauline on a weird half-story girder above him, and he jumps around somehow angling the girders below him with every leap.

At this point, he bares his teeth, a wildly unpleasant sound barks at you, and the screen blacks out.

The last part happens to you when you try to take Tom's bacon.

Okay, if you wanted your own bacon, you know to cook it outside the 300-yard perimeter we discussed, Cecil.

It's true.

He was very stop making me black out, Tommy.

So here.

So you see this black screen, then you see Donkey Kong standing against it with the words that first attracted a young Noah who somehow must have known what he was going to become.

Those words, of course, were, how high can you get?

A pleasant little tune plays, and we return to our angled girders, but now they're populated by a series of staggered ladders, some broken, some whole, few gravity-defying hammers, an oil drum at the structure's base, and a stack of infinity barrels next to Donkey Kong, cleverly disguised as just four of them.

Yeah, and Donkey Kong at the top being like, fuck, there's just barely a path up again for a guy who jumps just barely far enough.

And I think this guy, this keeps happening.

I feel like he's going to get up.

Next time I'm breaking all the ladders rather than worrying about the tilt of the girders, this is a priority.

So, okay, so then our hero appears.

He's rocking overalls, a mustache, and a baseball cap.

So he looks like a guy at Olymp Biscuit Show.

No, I should say, too, like, that's a shocking amount of detail for a video game character of the day.

Compare him to like fucking Pac-Man or the station in Space Invaders or the fucking square from Adventure.

Anyway, Jumpman come Mario starts at the bottom left of the screen, and now he's got to make his way up to the top where Pauline is helplessly walking back and forth.

All the while, Donkey Kong will be throwing barrels at him, which he must either jump over, dodge by climbing a ladder, or smash with one of those hammers.

All right, I got to climb something without super hammers just floating there.

This keeps happening.

He's going to get me again.

I always liked that Pauline got to watch you without any duress duress of her own she's just swearing at the monkey in cecil's boston lady voice the whole time yeah obviously yeah but if and when mario reaches the top his tribulations aren't over when he reaches pauline a heart appears between them then donkey kong grabs her the heart breaks in half and he climbs to a still higher level of this rickety ass structure after a stack of two donkey kongs once again ask how high we can get we find ourselves on a refreshingly level set of floors held in place by a series of pegs mario must now remove those pegs by jumping over them and thereby drop Donkey Kong off the top of the tower and defeat him.

And since Pauline would probably appreciate a few new accessories at the end of this ordeal, there's an umbrella, hat, and purse scattered around for him to pick up along the way for bonus points.

Oh, these aren't yours?

I just climbed a ladder holding like three things and dodging barrels.

And no, I don't know if they have a different size in the back.

There's no back.

You know what?

I'm keeping the umbrella.

And of course, once you remove those pins, Donkey Kong falls.

Mario and Pauline are reunited and you win.

First complete story in video game history.

But the game does not end there.

You loop back to the start and the whole thing begins again.

But it's not just a harder version of the levels you just played.

If you're good enough to get through the next version of the opening stage, you get to see a whole new level.

This one has like elevators and bouncing spring monsters and all kind of weird shit, which, if you think about it, is fucking nuts.

When you consider that more than 90% of players are never going to reach this stage.

Even weirder is the stage with conveyor belts and pies and shit that many of our listeners who played this game in the arcade are probably hearing about for the first time.

To get to that one, you've got to beat the elevator level and then the peg level again and the first level for a third time.

Or you could just stand next to the really good guy at the arcade and watch him get to that level because the amount of quarters you need to do that is a down payment on a house.

Right, right.

I don't believe your childhood home costs a whole quarter, Cecil.

I don't want to know a joke.

But Cecil, that was the point, right?

The point was that like after playing that game a hundred times, you would walk in and somebody was really good at it would be on that level.

You'd look up and you'd be like, wow, I never saw that before.

And that would give you more inspiration to put more quarters in it, right?

It's a brilliant idea by Miyamoto, but something that nobody else was doing at this point.

And look, so I want to step back for a second and acknowledge how fucking weird it is to make a video game about an abused ape stealing a dude's girlfriend and throwing barrels down a construction site in an attempt to kill him.

Right?

It's weird that that is the first story that video games were used to tell.

And we sort of accept it now because we're used to video game stories being weird and Japanese video game stories being weird, even in comparison to those.

But this was a new phenomenon at the time.

And when the higher-ups at Nintendo saw it, they were, to put it mildly, skeptical.

Sure.

You know, to this point, most games were about shooting aliens or killing robots or bouncing balls around.

Giant barrel throwing felonious monkeys were quite a departure.

Okay, so a giant monkey throws infinite barrels at a carpenter.

Great stuff, Miyamoto.

Tale is old as time.

But I don't understand why the monkey kidnaps the lady.

Animal abuse.

Sorry.

You say animal abuse?

That is what I said out loud, apparently.

I love it.

Lunch.

Can I bring my banjo?

Absolutely.

So like it or not, Nintendo might pull the trigger.

Well, yeah, but Banjali.

But like it or not, Nintendo had to be able to do it.

There it is.

There it is.

But like it or not, Nintendo had to pull the trigger or risk folding up their American division.

So they sent out these kits to refit the warehouse full of unsold radar scope games.

And this is not a simple matter like swapping out a fucking cartridge, right?

The game was made to use the same processor and screen and cabinet and shit, but they had to replace a substantial amount of the game's gut.

The point is, the company's investing a pretty big chunk of money and labor into something that's already failed.

They needed this to be a big hit to salvage all of it.

Now, of course, Donkey Kong did hit big.

It allowed Nintendo of America to recoup the huge cost that it incurred holding on to all of those useless radar scope games, and it let them pay off their increasingly angry Italian mustachioed landlord named Mario, who they could not help but name their new mustachioed savior after.

Yeah, and apparently the landlord was dating Tom's mom at this point.

Okay.

A bunch of drinking, arguments with monkeys.

Donkey Kong's cirrhosis adventure was not the hate you'd expect.

But it should have been.

Well, it's got a niche audience today, but yeah.

So, okay, but Mario the landlord isn't the only guy who's going to get a video game character named after him in this story.

And that gets us to the legal battle part of it, because you might have noticed a few similarities between Donkey Kong and King Kong.

And if you saw the graphics that were painted on the side of the cabinet, you'd notice a lot more, right?

Pauline is shown all disheveled and in high heels.

Kong is shown scaling a building.

It's clearly trying to evoke King Kong imagery, which very much came to the attention of Universal Studios who sued Nintendo.

Godzilla's looking around all nervous.

Oh, they're suing people over that stuff.

So, okay, so the guy running Universal Studios at the time is a fellow by the name of Sid Scheinberg.

Chew.

Okay, now my next line is, and he loves to sue.

And my next line is, they hurt me the first time.

Yeah, so you made it really awkward.

So, okay, so Scheinberg was an attorney.

He was president of MCA and Universal City

Studios.

And he was desperately trying to muscle his way into the suddenly billion-dollar video game industry.

So Donkey Kong was an irresistible opportunity.

He was the kind of guy that looked at the legal department as a revenue source.

And what he wanted wasn't to sue him and make a bunch of money.

He wanted to scare Nintendo into handing over some amount of their American operation to Universal in exchange for dropping the suit.

Can you sue for your company is us now?

Yes, you can.

It's actually all of your apes belong to us.

That's a surprisingly sophisticated video game reference coming from Tom.

I know.

I don't even know what it refers to.

There's a video.

But Nintendo refused to play ball here.

And look, Nintendo has a reputation of being overly litigious today, and it's a well-earned reputation, to be clear.

And not that this justifies any of it, but you can kind of see where it comes from when you consider that this is their introduction to doing business in america right they finally succeed at literally anything and boom they get sued oh okay you guys want to play it this way if any of your grandchildren ever say wario on twitch we're going to murder them with a bat all right now we're even

now we're even

so okay so nintendo goes out and they get this awesome lawyer by the name of john kirby who could inhale other companies general counsel and spit them out he could so john kirby thinks this case is winnable.

So he attacks it on two different fronts.

The obvious one is that he argues that Donkey Kong isn't similar enough to King Kong to count as copyright infringement.

The idea of a giant ape kidnapping a lady was too widespread in fiction at this point for anybody to lay a reasonable claim to it.

Sure.

Beauty and the beasts.

Yeah.

The story of Ivana Trump.

It's a tale as old as time.

So that's step one.

And that included a day where they brought in a Donkey Kong game, set to free play, and let the jury play a few routes, which had to to be the greatest day in the history of jury duty because, A, you got to play fucking Donkey Kong, which is a great fucking game.

And B, you get to watch a bunch of random people from 1982 try to play Donkey Kong.

Don't jump too early.

Oh, come on.

Objection, Your Honor.

Objection.

You have to let me take over.

Jury number nine is butchering the first level.

This is unbearable.

Overruled.

Mom said you have to let him play.

Come on.

But like I said, though, Kirby was fighting on two fronts because at the same time he's arguing that, he's also digging into the chain of custody on the King Kong story.

Of course, the original movie wasn't made by Universal Pictures.

It was made by a company called RKO Radio Pictures, which no longer existed at this point.

And Kirby pieced together the fact that Universal had never actually purchased the rights.

In fact, They'd argued their use in court to defend their use of the King Kong property.

In other words, they had admitted in court in the past that nobody could own the story of King Kong.

So Nintendo wins the lawsuit, and John Kirby is immortalized in the annals of video game history in a manner not unlike having his image written in the stars.

He's the inspiration for the lovable pink vacuum cleaner character Kirby from such classics as Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Kirby Superstar Ultra, and Kirby Planet Robobot, the three best of the Kirby games.

Now, so Kirby's power is to suck, which might not seem complimentary, but Nintendo promises they meant it as a compliment, and John Kirby seems to have taken it as one as well.

The game's creator, Miyamoto, would go on to have the most legendary imaginable career in the video game industry.

He would design a bunch more hit games, including a Popeye game that he made the following year.

But far more memorably, he would go on to create the Super Mario Bros.

and Legend of Zelda franchises.

I get it.

I used to have a blog.

As for Donkey Kong, well, he would go on to have a lucrative career in the video game game industry.

He's appeared in scores of video games since, including the upcoming Donkey Kong Bonanza, which will be anchoring the lineup for the Switch 2 when it releases next month.

And yes,

Bonanza is spelled like banana because they don't miss a fucking thing at Nintendo.

Donkey Kong's gamography, though, is nothing compared to his rival.

Of course, Mario has appeared in well over 200 games in his career, and proving that the video game industry shares a lot of Hollywood's worst traits, the same is not true for Pauline, whose career ended when she was replaced by a younger love interest in 1985's Super Mario Bros.

All right.

If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

You got to go for the It's On Like Donkey Kong reference early if you want it on an episode.

And are you ready for the quiz?

Oh, yeah.

All right, Noah, you know too much off the top of your head about video game history.

A,

for real,

B, no, no, no, seriously.

See, I mean, this is a lot.

D.

I'm pretty sure I remember most of my own kids' names.

E, you would be amazed at how much shit I had to leave out.

Did you know that the Nintendo Gaming Watch was the first

introduction of the D-pad, the little plus pad that the Nintendo has is on their controllers?

I didn't think it was a Nintendo Gaming Watch until then.

So many things you didn't know about Wi-Fi.

I had to leave so much.

The jump button, they were originally, like the game design didn't require a jump button, but because Radar Scope had a button, they had to to do some fucking thing with it.

And so they created the most important button in video game history.

It's fucking awesome.

Okay, Noah.

This guy named a bunch of characters after people in his life.

Which one was the most famous?

A service person who drove with a truck to drag his broken down car back home.

His name was Toad.

B,

his debate teacher, Princess Speech.

C, his local shipwright, Bowser, or D, his good friend who threw pretty wild parties, Diddy Kong.

Oh, God.

Secret answer E, A threw C, but definitely not D.

Definitely not D.

You don't want to get the D from Diddy Kong.

You don't want to get the D.

All right, Noah.

If Universal had managed to snatch Donkey Kong away from Nintendo, what would they have renamed it?

A.

Honkey Kong.

Oh, is that it?

So I'll go with A.

I'll go with A.

No,

wrong.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

What are the odds?

Apparently, you got it wrong.

That's weird.

I guess Eli wins, though.

I win.

I want a Heath essay next week.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Eli, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and I will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, The No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dad's God Awful Movies, The Scathing Atheist, Skeptocrat, and DD Minus.

And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

So, in the future, if you're worried about sexual assault in the workplace, it's very important you report it right away.

Otherwise, who is the problem?

It's a me.

Exactly.

Now, if you'll turn to module two in your training,

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