Dad Hacks Donkey Kong So His Daughter Can Play As Pauline

MUCH better than lying to your daughter and saying Link is a she...

To be honest, I thought for a second this was the same guy who did the Wind Waker thing. They even have the same first name.

@Damo Nah, it's not the same dude. And yeah, no problem! (^_^) Thank you guys for the credit.

@MickeytheGreat agreed

Pretty easy to pull off
Just copy pauline graphics and palette to mario.
Graphics hacks like these aplenty in the rom hacking scene (for old games)

@MickeyTheGreat Ya, this is definetely better

Looks good. Also teaches the important message to not climb ladders in a dress.

Sooo cool. This guy should do more of this in games like SMB3.

I wonder what would happen if his daughter wants to play God of War.

Wow. That's pretty cool.

That's way cooler than changing Link's gender.

Look at how tiny her mid waist is. Uhg, his daughter will develop anerxia now.

i don't see why she has any reason to be bummed out. the gender of the protagonist has absolutely nothing to do with the game's gameplay. i don't see how it could effect the story unless it takes place in a period of extreme sexism or something, where women aren't allowed to do half the things men can, but other than that, gender will not make any impact on the game.

Proof that Pauline could've been one of gaming's most famous and iconic mascots.

Is his daughter Verruca Salt or something?
Chrissake.

@Swiket

You technically are using a ROM if you have a cartridge, since the ROM is INSIDE the cartridge

this is an adorable and awesome article

This is pointless, even I could hack the original Legend of Zelda and replaced Link with Zelda or in Metroid by replacing Samus with Ridley. The code is already in a Game Genie or Pro Action Replay so it's pointless to even illegally hacking it.

Sweet. It's especially cool because she asked for it.

@retro_player_22 pointless to who? Also, there are no in-game graphics for Pauline's actions that Action Replay etc. can draw on.

@0LD_SK0OL_PUNK She wanted to play the girl. She relates to her partly because she's a girl. It also seems less about gender and more about why is it the way it is? The idea of a female needing a male to be rescued is only slowly fading. It's everywhere and although a maturing female should easily be able to grasp this, it is different for impressionable children. Plus, sexism is not dead in many societies and cultures and religions across the earth.

I have a wife and a daughter and it always surprises me how easily guys dismiss these things as they were never effected by it growing up, but it's real.

The token change to the game is probably less effective than how the dad showed her how important she was to him.

That is only going to teach her to misbehave, rant, and rave to get her way and become like the rest of the stupid entitlement crowd these days

@Hyperstar96 : I presume Donkey Kong: Original Edition.

@HereticPB Seriously? Because she asked to do something and was disappointed? You can't do that without being labeled as part of the "entitlement crowd"? I think the entitled attitude is a serious problem, but this has nothing to do with it.

they should have made pauline's parasol into a tv remote, and the purse into a beer...

@Gridatttack Yet the COMPLETELY NEW animation he made was pretty nice and fit in, no? Hacking ROMs is not common knowledge either and unless he had done it previously, it took some research.

Eh, I honestly don't know what to make of the whole argument. I do think that this guy was just being a good dad and doing something for his daughter (though she may now think he can do similar things in any game), but why should it have mattered in the first place? And if the roles were to be truly reversed, the villain should have also been turned into a woman, shouldn't he? I mean, is it really okay to have kids play games where they think anybody could be the hero (as if being Mario really leads the other way), but only men can be the villains? Villains are almost always male, just as heroes are almost always male. This way they kind of counter out. If a parent changes only the hero to female, isn't that kind of sending a bad message?

Seems pretty harmless, but yeah was going to say the same thing about replacing the optional item graphics. It's a bit disconcerting to see the "heroine" taking a few moments to go grab her purse and umbrella before saving the victim...

This might be a simple thing to do, but it sure is cool:)

@TrueWiiMaster You know, that is an interesting point.
I can't think of to many main villians who are female.

I love it. I wish Nintendo would get the same idea on it's own, and release a whole series of gender-swapped classics.

@MickeyTheGreat
OMG didn't you even read the Wind Waker one? He had played it with his daughter first, she enjoyed playing it and being part of the game so he gender swapped Link to help her feel even more part of it. He didn't lie to her, she knew Link was a boy when she watched her father play the game.

These stories are exactly the same and I applaud both fathers for doing this. Rom hacking aside of course.

Gender option in games is a great idea and should be implemented in more games.

Beautiful history.

@aaronsullivan

Though there aren't any officially, the code for Pauline's sprite could be hack via Action Replay if a player know how to debug the game.

Dad hacks game for daughter.

Daughter gets bored with game after 5 minutes.

Just have your daughter play Metroid! Samus is the most awesome girl in gaming! And to my knowledge, also the first female protagonist in gaming history.

I'm just proud at this father for raising a daughter on good retro games like DK and Mario.

Hacking NES roms isnt finding the holy grail. NES roms are one of the easier roms to hack (text, graphics or even level layout).

@TrueWiiMaster I have to say, you made some really good points. I never really thought of why the main villain and hero are usually male myself. While I think that was a really nice thing to do for her, it would have been better to use that to teach her how to deal with disappointment. If he makes a habit out of it she could start to think that daddy can fix anything, leading to much more heartache than not being able to play as Pauline.

I gotta say, I'm pleasantly surprised. I was expecting at least one post criticizing people for being ok with this but not the guy who changed Link to a girl.

Honestly, that is just AWESOME.

There are people who seriously think female villains don't exist?

Holy crap.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femme_fatale

You folks should read up on feminism social theory before commenting in topics like this one.

For the record, even when it comes to villains women are portrayed as inferior to men. The man is the hulking ultimate boss, while the women are always subservient, weak, but evilly cunning and use sex as a weapon.

Feminism has a long way to go before society will grow the heck up. Stuff like this is only doing good for the world.

@LordJumpMad shes 3 so that shouldnt be sooon

@Bankai Some were more pointing out how males dominate the villain scene as well and weren't being sexist about it.

This isn't like the AC article, at least not yet.

I don't even get why it has to come to 'why does it matter, the game matters more' in this case, as some are using as an excuse for this being bad. That's not the point. What's bothersome is how next to nobody is willing to develop a legitimate female main character/villainous without using her in an overly sexy way.

The Dark Queen (Battletoads), Metroid Queen (Metroid - though you have to wonder if that really counts), Queen Slug-for-a-butt (Earthworm Jim). That's off the top of my head. I agree that if there is to be true equality, women need to be more represented as antagonists.

And in regards to this story, I see no harm in what the father did, but people must remember that children - of either gender -need both strong female and male role models.

It should really be up to the game developers to cater for children like this, but props to the father all the same.

@Bankai No ones saying that female villains don't exist, just that its rare for them to be the main antagonist. Just as you said even as villains women are usually portrayed as inferior. I'm starting to wonder if it might actually have something to do with developers and publishers being afraid of receiving backlash from portraying women in such a way.

Makes sense and you can exactly blame them when so many people seem ready to play the misogyny card at the drop of a hat.

No one in this discussion has said that, the closest thing, I think, to that would be me saying I can't think of many, main female villains.

And I don't think someone who fails to read the comment he's complaining about is in a position to be telling those people to read something. :/

@Void Unless you've played every game and seen every film I don't think you're in a position to comment about how often females are cast as the primary villain of a game or film.

You're actually more-or-less correct, for the record. But what you missed is that the fact that there are so few female primary villains is precisely because the entertainment industries are still fundamentally sexist.

Women can't be the main bad "guy" because women are physically inferior to men - that is quite literally what it boils down to. The only time a woman can be dangerous is if she is incredibly sexy and able to use that as a weapon against the menfolks.

This is literally ancient history. From the Succubus of Christian mythology to every other ancient religion having a version of the Succubus (say, the Siren), the only time evil women have power is when it involves seducing men.

This is not something we need to replicate in modern art and games. The problem is that villains almost always represent primal fears that we humans have. Male primary villains tend to be physically or mentally elite because we as humans fear those who are superior to us - they have mental and physical abilities beyond our understanding and so it triggers the primal flight response in us.

What we as male human beings fear in women is not their physical poweress, but their sexuality, which does hold power over our core emotions. And so the only EASY way to make a female villain threatening is to make them sexy. Which, again, triggers our flight response.

As long as males continue to dominate these industries, male ideas of what is and isn't threatening will also continue to dominate. There is nothing good that can happen by having female villains in that context.

Or to tl;dr this, it is not coincidence that the only female villain in the games industry worth any real respect, GlaDOS, is a character that was written by a woman.

Glados! How could I forget her!?

Disney seems to like using female villains quite a bit. Just throwing that out there.

@aaronsullivan Its not that hard... The only hard part he had to come with is the new animation (and this is the NES. its limited to only 4 colors per sprite, so its easy to make new graphics in this donkey kong style)

Also you only need a program, the ROM, and then open the game with the program and search for the graphics (which is easy, since DK doesnt have to much graphics space) and edit them

i agree with KenB

while at least the girl already knew mario is themain character now all the sudden she has a prob with it?what next? ''daddy my milk isnt cold so i wont eat my cereal no matter what you say! Dad: oh what am i to do'' that is now stuff you going to have to deal with from now on! next it will be her asking her dad to ask out a guy(yes when shes older) cuz shes too nervous to and he will have to cuz what is a dad suppose to do right?

they should give us the option to play as a female more often. for example, in Paper Mario for the N64, after every chapter Mario finished, you got to play as Peach for a while. It would be fun to play as Peach trying to escape Bowser's Castle inbetween the world in SMB.

@steamhare: You've won my internets for today, fine lad. Congrats.

Also, d'aaawwwwwwww @ all of this.

Here are the female video game villains I can think of:

GLaDOS
Risky Boots

...erm...

That's about all I can think of.

Even though it has a feminine voice, wouldn't GLADoS technically count as gender neutral?

That's cute.

@Bankai
I fail to see the relevance of films here, since we're talking about games. I'm pretty sure it would be hard to hack a movie to change anyone's gender.

When I first brought up the villains point, and of course I know there have been female villains (though few come to mind in gaming), I wasn't talking about the portrayal of female villains, or female characters at all for that matter. I was saying that if people really wanted "equal" gaming they'd have to change both the hero and villain's genders. Otherwise it gives the image that only men can be villains, at least as much as an exclusively male hero gives the idea that only males can be heroes.

@SanderEvers Tomb Raider?! Poppycock! Two words: Super Metroid. Metroid Prime can't be beat, but if we are talking about games little girls can play, Prime might be too scary...

Who cares

@The_Fox

Hmm...

Maybe.

He can pretend all he wants, he just wanted to look under her dress.
But seriously, that's really neat.

@TrueWiiMaster 1) films are relevant because sexism is a social issue that transcends games.

2) Simply 'changing' the gender of characters doesn't resolve the issue of sexism. As I mentioned above the issue is the way characters are portrayed, not whether they are male or female. The applies equally to both heroes and villains.

Anyone who doesn't think feminist theory is still important to analyzing games, films and the social environment these exist within should take a look at some of the comments in here. It's clear that a large percentage of people still, simply, do not get it.

@The_Fox I dunno. I've read some pretty neat deconstructions of glados as a character that cleverly twists the female villain role in parody of expectations.

I'll have to track that reading down.

@Bankai
1) Relevant to the issue of sexism, sure, but not really to this article, which is specifically about games.

2) Actually, "simply 'changing' the gender" resolves it perfectly. It would mean no characteristic is exclusive to either gender. There should be no difference other than the way the character looks, right? Wouldn't that pretty much be the definition of equality? To have a female villain who didn't follow female stereotypes, simply make a male villain and turn him into a woman.

Somehow that seems really ironic. One guy saying everyone else is wrong because they think differently than him... It just reminds me of an old joke. If every car besides yours is going the wrong way, you're probably the one going the wrong way. Not to say majority makes right, I just thought it was funny.

@TrueWiiMaster How much feminist social theory have you done? Do you understand the broader issues at play here? Do you understand how symbolism works, as opposed to direct meaning? Do you understand concepts of subconscious design - where a person's in-built attitudes and worldview will often unintentionally work their way into a creative project?

I suspect I know the answer to all of these, since you seem to think the problem here is exclusively "the way the character looks," and you seem to think that being able to copy and paste gender into games (or films, books, whatever) is the definition of equality.

It's not. Feminist equality never intended for women to be treated exactly the same as men. It argues that women should not be disadvantaged compared to men. There's a world of difference.

But there's little point having this argument as I'm certain your knowledge of feminism is limited to "internet research," and you have no formal knowledege of sociology.

So to continue your metaphor; if every other driver on the road has never done a driving course, is it really your fault for driving on the "wrong" side of the road, when the rules say it's actually the right side of the road? No. The problem lies with all the other drivers who don't listen to the guy who actually knows what he's talking about.

God forbid any kid should be taught about the valid differences between genders, and why they matter. Its far better to make them think that men and women are completely interchangeable on every level...NOT.

@KenB "To each their own, but if he jumps to her beck and call every time she gets upset about something as minor as this - and it IS minor, since it doesn't matter which gender the character is in this game - then he is going to be in for a tough old time of it when she grows up.

The answer to "what else am I supposed to do" would be to teach her to see people, not gender."

So you are telling us that if your 3 year old daughter came to you and asked for something that you could easily provide, at no cost to you besides your time, that would make her happy, even if it was only for a minute, that you wouldn't do it for her? I pray for your future offspring.

Of course, teach her about how the world works, that is what is called being a parent. Sometimes you can get things, sometimes you can't, that is an important lesson. So many people these days drop their kids at kindergartens, nurseries and schools and expect them to emerge as perfect human beings. The result is what you see on the street these days, thugs and jerks. Take the time to educate your children for gods sake. If you don't point them in the right direction they can easily be swayed to the bad ones.

@Moviefan2k4 Besides the obvious sexual differences, what other valid differences are there between men and women? While it is true some things are better suited to either gender, that doesn't mean that it is impossible for the gender.

@Bankai
You're right, I've never taken courses in social theory, nor do I ever intend to. Such courses over complicate what should be common sense. You don't need a special education to understand equality, nor do you need a special education to see sexism in culture (and not just against women). Equality is equality. No one group should receive special treatment due to the way they are. That is equality.

Explain to me then, with your apparently far-superior-to-everyone-else opinions, how men and women should be portrayed. You said before that sexuality should not be a part of the portrayal of women. I believe you also implied, if not said outright, that stereotypes shouldn't be used. What, then, are you left with? A genderless character. If "acting like a woman" is an inappropriate way for a character to act, how then should they act? And without these typical and common differences between men and women, what difference would there be between a male and female character other than image, which you said would not be difference enough?

"But there's little point having this argument as I'm certain your knowledge of feminism is limited to "internet research," and you have no formal knowledege of sociology."
Another funny comment. What good is "knowledge" that can only be shared/discussed with other people who have the same "knowledge"? So you know better than everyone else, and the only people who know as well as you are those who agree with you? Nice.

The problem with your continuation there is that it implies a person must be educated to "think" correctly in order to even discuss a subject. It implies there are some sort of rules to what people can think or say depending on their education, which is of course ridiculous, and bordering on fairly evil intentions. My point was just the humor of one person telling everyone else they're wrong because they themselves are right. I still think it's pretty funny.

Awww. That's supper cool. "The lengths we go for our kids when it comes to video games." "Hee hee."

@TrueWiiMaster Throughout history what is "common sense" to the layperson is simply common sense because they don't know better.

It was common sense that the earth was flat. It was common sense that witches weilded magic powers and would float if thrown into a lake. It was common sense that the earth was the centre of the universe. It was common sense that black people should be slaves, that women should not vote, that communism is a bad thing.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of entire books written about gender roles in entertainment. These don't always agree - there is a lot of debate happening in academia around the theories that these books present to readers.

And here you are telling me that your opinion should be taken seriously compared to all that literature and debate because it's 'common sense' to you? I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no reason for me to debate the topic with someone who themselves admits to not actually knowing anything about the topic.

I suggest you buy a couple of these books and do some reading. I can all-but guarantee you'll find what you think of as "common sense" challenged in a positive manner.

@Bankai
And how does one get to the point of "knowing better"? By learning what other people think is better? By changing the way they think? If I agreed with you, would that mean I "knew better"?

Some of those examples don't apply... Some of them were scientific, and not social at all. As for the others, they were very different from what we're discussing, in that they're levels beyond simple portrayal of gender. If anything, women's right to vote goes along with what I'm saying, equality is equality. Slavery is the same. No one should get special treatment. That's equality.

And communism is bad. That's still common sense. Well, with people who have sense to know it anyway.

So then if I write a book about why academia has far over complicated simple subjects, then all of a sudden I'm extremely credible? Taking classes or reading books on social theory only makes you more credible to people like you. It doesn't make you better, or even more knowledgeable really, than anyone else. It doesn't make your opinions superior, nor does it make them more believable, except to those who agree with you, or who lack the intelligence or interest to think for themselves.

I never admitted to not knowing anything about the topic. I said I haven't formally studied it. In other words, I haven't been taught to think the way you do. That doesn't discredit what I say. Only a legitimate and successful rebuttal would do that. Unlike math or the natural sciences, one doesn't really become better at a topic like gender equality. You can learn various examples or angles, but in the end it's still a matter of opinion.

And if I read those books, and came out exactly as I am now, how would that make what I'm saying more credible? Wouldn't I still be saying the same things? Or would I still be uneducated on the topic if I didn't agree with you?

So where can I get this?

SOMEONE GIVE @MickeyTheGreat AN AWARD
AND ONE BILLION INTERNETS

The hat, parasol, and purse needs to be swapped out for mushroom, star, and fire flower.

I know I'm a decade late to this article and no one is going to see this, but why are so many people upset about this? It seems completely harmless to me, honestly. His daughter wanted to play as a girl, so he just hacked the game to swap Mario and Pauline's places. How is doing something simple like that going to make his daughter misbehaved and spoiled? I guess she is 10 years older now, so I'm asking in a more general sense. Sometimes, I think gamers really need to chill out a bit.