Dad hacks Donkey Kong creating female hero who rescues Mario

Proud Papa Mike Mika, a California-based creative director for video game development company Other Ocean Interactive, loves that his daughter Ellis appears to be following in his footsteps.

“She’s only 3, but she’s always exhibited a keen interest in games,” he writes on his Wired blog.

The toddler has been a big fan of Donkey Kong in particular since she was a wee two-year-old, and plays it fervently.

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So when Ellis was disappointed that she couldn’t play as a female character, only as Mario, her dad jumped into action.

As NBC notes, Mika hacked into the 2010 NES Donkey Kong ROM and reversed the gender roles to create the game’s first unofficial feminist version where Pauline rescues Mario.

Fans of the game know that the original version involves Mario trying to rescue damsel-in-distress Pauline from the mad, bad, and dangerous ape who gives title to the game.

Mika found his labour of love rewarded by one very happy little girl.

"She was very excited. She wanted to play that character pretty bad," he tells NBC, adding that she had no idea how much work he’d put into it for her. "For all she knew I just figured out a way to make the character show up. She didn’t realize I’d spent the time on it."

After consulting with a few fellow experts, Mika spent hours upon hours reworking the popular Nintendo game code. He deconstructed his efforts in full technical detail in this YouTube video and posted the results on Facebook.

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Members of the web-o-sphere were more than a little impressed. His YouTube video and blog explanation soon found their way to Reddit, where Mika was swiftly declared “World’s Best Dad.”

A discussion on the dearth of good female heroines in mainstream video games soon followed, just as it did last year when Mike Hoye performed a little gender switcheroo by changing the pronouns in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker to reflect a female protagonist.

“It harms no one to let Pauline be playable and to let Mario take his turn as the prisoner of the ape who is the game's boss. And the fact that Mika could hack the game to reverse the roles of the characters means that, while inserting playable characters of multiple genders into existing games might involve some extra cost and time, it's far from impossible,” writes Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg.

But while it may harm no one, it certainly has gotten more than a few backs up in the gamer community.

“Cool dad? Illegal dad!” writes one commenter on tech blog Kotaku, echoing the sentiments of many others who believe intellectual property is sacrosanct and should never be manipulated.

Watch the video below showing Mika's hacked version of the game.