Level 1: Donkey Kong (1981) - The Popeye Game That Changed Nintendo Forever

<v Speaker 1>Here we are for level one Donkey Kong.
<v Speaker 2>All right, everybody take out a quarter, insert it, press
<v Speaker 2>one player, and here we go.
<v Speaker 1>All right.
<v Speaker 2>So all these games that we're going to talk about
<v Speaker 2>came out in nineteen eighty one. Yes, where do you
<v Speaker 2>want to start?
<v Speaker 1>How about November seventh, nineteen twenty seven. Wow? Okay, So
<v Speaker 1>that is when a gentleman named Hiroshi Yamuchi was born.
<v Speaker 1>His dad abandoned him. His mother realized she couldn't raise him,
<v Speaker 1>and so she gave him to her parents. His grandfather
<v Speaker 1>ran this little playing card company named Nintendo. Wow.
<v Speaker 2>Nintendo was created in September of eighteen eighty nine as
<v Speaker 2>a card playing company.
<v Speaker 1>Yes. So, Hiroshi grew up with his grandparents, ended up
<v Speaker 1>getting married, going to study law. But while he was
<v Speaker 1>studying law, his grandfather, president of Nintendo, has a stroke,
<v Speaker 1>so he leaves school comes over to run the company
<v Speaker 1>at the behest of his grandfather. He doesn't want to
<v Speaker 1>do it because I don't want to do it. His
<v Speaker 1>grandfather's like, you have to do it. I'm not gonna
<v Speaker 1>make it. You neither run the He's like, okay, but
<v Speaker 1>I won't do it unless we agree that no one
<v Speaker 1>else in the family can be a part of the
<v Speaker 1>company because he doesn't want the competition, right, So his
<v Speaker 1>grandfather's like, okay, your cousin fired, and he starts running
<v Speaker 1>this company. And so the cards back in Japan were
<v Speaker 1>just card cards. They weren't the plastic cards that we're
<v Speaker 1>familiar with. And so he decides, I'm going to make
<v Speaker 1>cards like they make in the West. I want to
<v Speaker 1>make these plastic cards. And he starts doing that and
<v Speaker 1>reaches a hit number one by having an agreement with Disney,
<v Speaker 1>Walt Disney to create the Walt Disney playing cards that
<v Speaker 1>end up blowing up because Walt Disney is huge and
<v Speaker 1>makes the company a bazillion dollars, right, Okay, okay, And
<v Speaker 1>so he's like, okay, time for us to diversify. I'm
<v Speaker 1>going to start a taxi company. I'm going to start
<v Speaker 1>a love hotel. You know, love hotel is I think
<v Speaker 1>I do? Yes, you could probably get it. It's rentable
<v Speaker 1>by the hour. And apparently he would frequent those kind
<v Speaker 1>of hotels that he started, okay, and an instant rice company,
<v Speaker 1>well sure, why not? And so as it turns out
<v Speaker 1>all of those failed, Yeah, and so they're at the
<v Speaker 1>brink of bankruptcy. He's fretting. He sees this guy that's
<v Speaker 1>an engineer of his in the factory named gun Pay Yochi,
<v Speaker 1>and he's playing with a claw and I mean you
<v Speaker 1>imagine the claw in the in the cartoons where it's
<v Speaker 1>like you squeeze it and the little arms go back
<v Speaker 1>and forth. You know, it stretches out to grab some
<v Speaker 1>That's the thing that this guy is invented. And he's
<v Speaker 1>like that, that's awesome. Figure out how the factory can
<v Speaker 1>make it. And that's what he does. And it's called
<v Speaker 1>the Ultra Hand ultrahnd and it makes him another bazillion dollars.
<v Speaker 1>It's hit number two. Okay. So he realizes at that point, hey,
<v Speaker 1>what am I doing with taxis and love hotels and
<v Speaker 1>instant rice. We're a game company. We made playing cards,
<v Speaker 1>We've got the Ultra Hand. And so they start toy making,
<v Speaker 1>which leads to game making. Yes, and he sees the
<v Speaker 1>potential video games and he says, I want to break
<v Speaker 1>into that world, okay, And so they invent a few games.
<v Speaker 1>And one of the games that they start is called
<v Speaker 1>Radar Scope. Okay, and Radar Scope becomes a hit in Japan.
<v Speaker 1>It's huge. It is second only to Pac Man okay
<v Speaker 1>that we just mentioned. So he's like, okay, ship three
<v Speaker 1>thousand of these over to the American coast. We are
<v Speaker 1>going to break into the North American video gaming world.
<v Speaker 1>And they sell one thousand out of three thousand, one
<v Speaker 1>thousand out of three thousand, and then nobody orders anymore.
<v Speaker 2>And the other two thousand are sitting in this warehouse, Yes,
<v Speaker 2>this crappy, little dusty Nintendo.
<v Speaker 1>Warehouse, Yes, the Nintendo America, the newly formed Nintendo America warehouse.
<v Speaker 2>And they start to panic.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they're like, holy crap, we've got all these games.
<v Speaker 1>The Nintendo America is going down already. I mean they've
<v Speaker 1>they've gotten excited about things and are completely devastated by
<v Speaker 1>the lack of sales. And so they say, what are
<v Speaker 1>we going to do? And so Hiroshi Yamuchi says, I'm
<v Speaker 1>going to find a guy to make us a game
<v Speaker 1>that's going to be a hit. And who does he find.
<v Speaker 2>He finds this guy called Saguerro Miyamato.
<v Speaker 1>So, Sagiro Miyamato, forgive us, we're stupid Americans. Yes, we
<v Speaker 1>have no Japanese education whatsoever. So we're probably mispronouncing these names.
<v Speaker 2>The most Japanese we know how to say, we learned
<v Speaker 2>from a stick song in nineteen eighty three.
<v Speaker 1>No more, I got them. Hey.
<v Speaker 2>For my part, though, I did look at Radar Scope.
<v Speaker 2>I checked it out. Yeah, and when I when I
<v Speaker 2>got online and looked at it, yeah, I did not
<v Speaker 2>recognize the game as one that I had played. Right,
<v Speaker 2>But the gameplay is very similar to Space Invaders or Gallaga, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>except it's kind of tilted. It's it's a tilted shoot
<v Speaker 2>him up.
<v Speaker 1>Game, right, It's almost like Space Invaders if you were
<v Speaker 1>about three feet tall on a regular game and you're
<v Speaker 1>like looking at an angle. It's not It's very odd. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I can see why it did not overwhelm the United States.
<v Speaker 1>And so he hits up Shagiro Miyamato and says, I
<v Speaker 1>want you to come up with a game. And Shagiru
<v Speaker 1>Miyomtu was not an engineer, Okay, he was an artist. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>He had wanted to be a magna artist. You know
<v Speaker 1>magna is yeah, Okay, so he had wanted to do that,
<v Speaker 1>but had gotten this job with Nintendo instead and had
<v Speaker 1>done he had done work on one of Nintendo's other games.
<v Speaker 1>Called Sheriff, and he had done work on radar scope,
<v Speaker 1>but it was all kind of artistic development as opposed
<v Speaker 1>to the engineering side of things. Okay, but he does
<v Speaker 1>something unprecedented. He develops a story before any of the
<v Speaker 1>programming is done.
<v Speaker 2>First story. Yeah, involved in a video game?
<v Speaker 1>Yes? And do you know who is supervising the development
<v Speaker 1>of this game?
<v Speaker 2>Who's that?
<v Speaker 1>Gun pay Yoki, the guy who had invented the ultra hand,
<v Speaker 1>All right, yeah, mister Altrahan. Mister Alterrahan, who, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>also went on later on to invent this thing you
<v Speaker 1>might have heard of called the game boy, the game boy, Yes, ultrahand,
<v Speaker 1>the game Boy, not a bad resume. And our guy
<v Speaker 1>Segeru Miamato. He invents another game down the road you
<v Speaker 1>may have heard of, called Zelda. Yes again, and he
<v Speaker 1>develops the story of a character. But talk about the
<v Speaker 1>two three really biggest icons of video games in the
<v Speaker 1>mid eighties. He started Mario, he started Donkey Kong, and
<v Speaker 1>he started Legend of Zelda.
<v Speaker 2>This guy's a he's a legend.
<v Speaker 1>He is. So when he starts developing this game, he
<v Speaker 1>wants to do a Popeye love triangle. He wants Popeye
<v Speaker 1>Olive Oil and Blue Dump.
<v Speaker 2>You know I heard this in researching Donkey Kong. I
<v Speaker 2>read this and I would I almost fell out of
<v Speaker 2>my chair because I can now every time I play
<v Speaker 2>this game, I will see Blueto grabbing Olive Oil and
<v Speaker 2>Popeye rushing to save her.
<v Speaker 1>Yep. If you look at the outside of the cabinet, Pauline,
<v Speaker 1>the woman looks like somebody out of King Kong, like
<v Speaker 1>her dress is torn. She's blonde, she's buxom, kind of gorgeous.
<v Speaker 1>If you look at her in the game, she looks
<v Speaker 1>like Olive Oil's got the the skirt down to her ankles,
<v Speaker 1>she's got the hair and a ponytail. She does not
<v Speaker 1>look like the one on the side of the game cabinet. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so they say, hey, Popeye, people who make Popeye license
<v Speaker 1>it to us, and they say no, right, So Miamatto
<v Speaker 1>comes up with a different set of characters that are
<v Speaker 1>still in this love triangle. Blueto becomes this gorilla, Olive
<v Speaker 1>Oil becomes this pretty woman instead of this gangly woman.
<v Speaker 1>I guess her name is Pauline. We'll get there. Sorry, No,
<v Speaker 1>that's all right, No, that's good. Pauline is her name? Okay,
<v Speaker 1>and jump a man, jumpman? Who is a carpenter? Yes
<v Speaker 1>he is?
<v Speaker 2>So is he a carpenter or a plumber? That's so
<v Speaker 2>if you'll notice.
<v Speaker 1>In Donkey Kong the game takes place on a construction site, right,
<v Speaker 1>oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, So Mario Matt started off
<v Speaker 1>as carpenter. Okay. They only changed him into a plumber
<v Speaker 1>later on when they developed Mario Brothers, which was him
<v Speaker 1>and his brother Luigi working in pipes and doing plumbing stuff.
<v Speaker 1>They both had the same look. You got overalls, you
<v Speaker 1>got a hat. He could be a carpenter or a plumber.
<v Speaker 1>But in the original Donkey Kong there's no plumbing going on,
<v Speaker 1>but he is swinging a hammer around. So they create
<v Speaker 1>the game, they send it to the United States. The
<v Speaker 1>guys in the United States are like, I really don't
<v Speaker 1>know about this. This is kind of weird. Yes, and
<v Speaker 1>they're like, do you have a name for the game,
<v Speaker 1>And so that he had tried to come up with
<v Speaker 1>an American name for this game, since it was the
<v Speaker 1>objective was to be a hit in North America. Right,
<v Speaker 1>you know how it came about? I think, so go
<v Speaker 1>for it. Okay.
<v Speaker 2>So in Japan, a common term for a gorilla is Kong, yes,
<v Speaker 2>which that works in America too, right, you have King
<v Speaker 2>Kong in Japan gorilla. And so I always heard the
<v Speaker 2>urban legend that it was a mistranslation, that Donkey Kong
<v Speaker 2>should have been monkey Kong, and that it was a misspelling.
<v Speaker 2>And by the time they figured it out, it had
<v Speaker 2>already been printed a million times and it was too much,
<v Speaker 2>and so they just became Donkey Kong. But based on
<v Speaker 2>what I have read, and according to Miamato, what he
<v Speaker 2>wanted to do was he wanted to translate stubborn gorilla.
<v Speaker 2>He used a posaurus to come up with the term
<v Speaker 2>for stubborn, and when he looked up the term stubborn,
<v Speaker 2>one of the things he found was the term donkey,
<v Speaker 2>and that's how he came up with the name donkey Kong.
<v Speaker 1>Right, the idea is simply stupid or stubborn. Eight. So
<v Speaker 1>now onto the names of the other characters. We know
<v Speaker 1>how Donkey Kong got his name. He, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>was supposed to be a pet of jump Man who
<v Speaker 1>had escaped and taken Jumpman's woman with him.
<v Speaker 2>Now, because people have pet gorillas in Japan.
<v Speaker 1>Sure they do, right, or America right or whatever. Yeah, okay,
<v Speaker 1>so how did we get the name Pauline? You know
<v Speaker 1>this one?
<v Speaker 2>No?
<v Speaker 1>I don't, all right, So they ship it to America.
<v Speaker 1>It goes to the going to the warehouse where they
<v Speaker 1>have those two thousand radar scope games sitting right right.
<v Speaker 1>The manager of the warehouse is this guy named Don James.
<v Speaker 1>His wife is named Paulie, and so for her they
<v Speaker 1>say Paulie James. We're gonna call her Pauline as the
<v Speaker 1>character nice. The guy who owns the warehouse, their landlord
<v Speaker 1>who's angry at them because they're going broke and they're
<v Speaker 1>not paying their rent, is a guy called Mario Cigale,
<v Speaker 1>and so they name Jumpman after Mario. Those people all
<v Speaker 1>become very wealthy in a short amount of time. I
<v Speaker 1>bet they do. Don James is still the executive vice
<v Speaker 1>president of Operations for Nintendo America.
<v Speaker 2>Fantastic.
<v Speaker 1>He's been with them for what forty years? Almost? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>forty years now. Yeah, that's the thing. All of these
<v Speaker 1>games are forty years old this year.
<v Speaker 2>It's incredible.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy. So he went from being a warehouse manager
<v Speaker 1>to executive vice president of operations for Nintendo for a
<v Speaker 1>Nintendo of America yes wow, which he was also, by
<v Speaker 1>the way, involved in developing the Nintendo Entertainment System.
<v Speaker 2>The n E S.
<v Speaker 1>Harry Christ. So they get the first game in to
<v Speaker 1>North America. The guys who are the Nintendo distributors are
<v Speaker 1>guys named Ron Judy and Alstone. And they look at
<v Speaker 1>this and they're like, this sucks. There's no way that
<v Speaker 1>this is going to be a hit in the US.
<v Speaker 1>We need to start looking for other jobs. Wow. And
<v Speaker 1>so should say Ron Stone, No, Ron Judy and al Stone? Okay, yes, yes, I.
<v Speaker 2>Was gonna say Ron Stone quit van Halen and bailed
<v Speaker 2>on Donkey Kong Jr. It was Mark Stone Okay, Sorry,
<v Speaker 2>Oh my gosh, that guy was done looking again in
<v Speaker 2>the Little World.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. So the way that they did it, they realized
<v Speaker 1>that they could restructure the circuit boards on the Radar
<v Speaker 1>Scope games in order to make it into this new
<v Speaker 1>game Donkey Kong. Okay. But these guys looking at saying this,
<v Speaker 1>this is a waste of time. This is not gonna
<v Speaker 1>be a success. But they give it a try, you
<v Speaker 1>know why not. They're in Washington, go to a couple
<v Speaker 1>of bars in Washington and say, hey, can we put
<v Speaker 1>this game in here.
<v Speaker 2>You know the names of those two bars, go for it.
<v Speaker 2>The names of those two bars Seattle Washington Goldies and
<v Speaker 2>Spot Tavern.
<v Speaker 1>Right, and so At Goldies and Spot Tavern. People start
<v Speaker 1>playing the game, and they keep playing the game, and
<v Speaker 1>they keep playing the game, and the game is making
<v Speaker 1>thirty dollars a day in Quarters and we're talking about quarters. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>thirty dollars worth of quarters is a lot for a
<v Speaker 1>bar that's not open twenty four hours a day, right, right,
<v Speaker 1>it's not an arcade, right, And so suddenly they realize,
<v Speaker 1>holy crap, people love this game, right, And so Ron Judy, Alstone,
<v Speaker 1>Don James, all of those guys go to work at
<v Speaker 1>the two thousand left over Radar Scope games that they
<v Speaker 1>have in there, and they start gutting them and converting
<v Speaker 1>them all into Donkey Kong games and sell them all immediately,
<v Speaker 1>and within a couple of months are selling four thousand
<v Speaker 1>Donkey Kong games a month. They end up selling sixty
<v Speaker 1>thousand within their first year, and Ron, Judy and else Stone,
<v Speaker 1>who had been thinking they should go look for other jobs,
<v Speaker 1>become millionaires. That is awesome. Let's talk about the music
<v Speaker 1>on this real quick. Okay. Music is composed by a
<v Speaker 1>guy named Yuki oh Ken. It's a variation of the
<v Speaker 1>Dragnet theme. What, Yeah, you're gonna hear the Dragnet theme.
<v Speaker 2>Now you're blowing my mind.
<v Speaker 1>There we go. Yep, you got it.
<v Speaker 2>Hey, I want to talk about gameplay for just a second.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, yeah, okay.
<v Speaker 2>So the interesting thing about Donkey Kong is it's a
<v Speaker 2>level up game, right, which was unusual. I think it's
<v Speaker 2>maybe the first of its kind where you start at
<v Speaker 2>the bottom to the top. Yes, along the way, you
<v Speaker 2>have Donkey Kong throwing barrels at you. Yes, you have
<v Speaker 2>fireballs that will change direction and sort of random. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>But the real thing that was really hard on gameplay
<v Speaker 2>was the crazy barrels. Yes, okay, so normal barrels would
<v Speaker 2>roll down the level and you'd see them coming. Occasionally
<v Speaker 2>they'd take a ladder down. But the crazy barrels, you
<v Speaker 2>had no idea where they're going. They're random, and you.
<v Speaker 1>They were falling down without any rolls at all. Mean,
<v Speaker 1>all the way to the bottom.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, you know how many words those crazy barrels.
<v Speaker 1>Caused me in my life. Donkey Kong is an incredibly
<v Speaker 1>difficult game. It's very difficult it is arguably the most
<v Speaker 1>difficult video game of nineteen eighty one.
<v Speaker 2>Well, you have all those random movements that it's hard
<v Speaker 2>to figure out what to do.
<v Speaker 1>And we're just talking about level one. I mean, when
<v Speaker 1>you get to the elevator level, holy crap, that thing
<v Speaker 1>is impossible. But I shovel my quarters in Hey, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you dude.
<v Speaker 2>I like the beginning. It shows screen one twenty five
<v Speaker 2>meters and it always asks you how high can you get?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? That has been pretty high. Yeah, I bet you
<v Speaker 1>would read.
<v Speaker 2>It's like taunting you.
<v Speaker 1>It also had cut scenes in it where it would
<v Speaker 1>give you a little bit of a storyline in between
<v Speaker 1>each of your competitions, each of your levels, yep, which
<v Speaker 1>was nice. You get to figure out what's going on
<v Speaker 1>with the gorilla and the lady and you, which was
<v Speaker 1>something we would we would see also again in mis
<v Speaker 1>pac Man.
<v Speaker 2>All right, I got something for you, Yes, all right,
<v Speaker 2>I had to dig deep on this. Here are a
<v Speaker 2>few celebrities that are good Donkey Kong players.
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, all right, yeah, all right.
<v Speaker 2>Three celebrities that I found are reasonably good to excellent
<v Speaker 2>Donkey Kong players.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 2>Number one Michael Jackson, Okay, the Moonwalker himself, all right,
<v Speaker 2>Like Donkey Kong played it a lot. I couldn't find
<v Speaker 2>any solid info on how good he actually was.
<v Speaker 1>You don't know his high score.
<v Speaker 2>I do not know his high score, okay, Okay. Number
<v Speaker 2>two Steven Spielberg had a Donkey Kong cabinet in his
<v Speaker 2>office and is said to be a very good Donkey
<v Speaker 2>Kong player.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 2>Number three Eminem, Okay, he actually tweeted out his high
<v Speaker 2>score and I saw it on Twitter today. It's something
<v Speaker 2>like four hundred and sixty five thousand. Wow, fantastic score, right,
<v Speaker 2>Like that's really good. It's like halfway to world record status.
<v Speaker 1>Right, and world record status. I mean yeah, it's like
<v Speaker 1>one point one. Yeah. I mean when they made when
<v Speaker 1>they made King of Kong, and we looked at Billy
<v Speaker 1>Mitchell's score, he was top with eight hundred and something thousand,
<v Speaker 1>and next below him was five hundred and something thousand.
<v Speaker 1>So Eminem was within one hundred thousand points of second place. Yeah. Wow, yep,
<v Speaker 1>there you aggressive. Okay.
<v Speaker 2>So, as I understand it, there was a lawsuit involving
<v Speaker 2>Universal Studios and Nintendo Donkey Kong.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, So this started the year after it came out
<v Speaker 1>not even a full year after it came out. It
<v Speaker 1>started in April of eighty two, when Sid.
<v Speaker 2>Sheinberg flashed back to our Jaws episode.
<v Speaker 1>YEP, learned about the game success and thought it might
<v Speaker 1>be a trademark infringement on Universal's King Kong.
<v Speaker 2>Is there a possibility that Sid Sheinberg saw this game
<v Speaker 2>in Steven Spielberg's office.
<v Speaker 1>Could be so they filed a lawsuit against Donkey Kong, claiming,
<v Speaker 1>among other things, trademark infringement, copyright.
<v Speaker 2>Infringement on their King Kong title.
<v Speaker 1>On there, Yeah, from King Kong, Donkey Kong. They're saying, no,
<v Speaker 1>this is they have obviously stolen this. Howard Lincoln was
<v Speaker 1>Nintendo's lawyer. He was not a litigator. He was the
<v Speaker 1>guy they were calling about trademarking Donkey Kong. And when
<v Speaker 1>they asked him, he's like, I'm sorry, what did you say? Donkey?
<v Speaker 1>Can you spell that? He was expecting them to be
<v Speaker 1>calling them about bankruptcy. He didn't realize how much the
<v Speaker 1>success Donkey Kong had, and so Universal sues Nintendo America.
<v Speaker 1>Now this is going to be a huge deal because
<v Speaker 1>they're just they're literally just coming up. They're just becoming big,
<v Speaker 1>and Universal is already gigantic and can decimate them. Right,
<v Speaker 1>But Howard Lincoln knows another lawyer named John Kirby and
<v Speaker 1>gives him a call. He says, here's our problem, and
<v Speaker 1>John Kirby is just this humorless aggressive, meticulous, bad a
<v Speaker 1>cross examining lawyer. He's like, all right, let's go do
<v Speaker 1>some research. And so where they go to do research
<v Speaker 1>but Japan. So John Kirby goes out there and he
<v Speaker 1>finds Kong in use for car washes and sandwiches and
<v Speaker 1>about one hundred other different things, and it's always in
<v Speaker 1>reference to some sort of ape. It's not have anything
<v Speaker 1>to do with King Kong the movie, right, And so
<v Speaker 1>he's looking at this and he's like, these lawyers a
<v Speaker 1>Universal have got to be crazy to file this lawsuit.
<v Speaker 1>They're just looking to bullyus. And as he does more research,
<v Speaker 1>he realizes, wait a minute, Universal got sued before about
<v Speaker 1>King Kong being a copyright infringement of somebody else's story,
<v Speaker 1>and at that time they argued that it was public domain.
<v Speaker 1>So not only should they know better, they have to
<v Speaker 1>know that their argument is crap and that they're just
<v Speaker 1>trying to bully us, and so not only does he
<v Speaker 1>win the case for them, but they have to pay
<v Speaker 1>all the legal fees one point eight million dollars to
<v Speaker 1>Nintendo America. Nice. So after that, John Kirby, the bulldog lawyer,
<v Speaker 1>gets boats that are all called Donkey Kong. Yes, and
<v Speaker 1>there's a character that you might have heard of. As
<v Speaker 1>a matter of fact, I sent you a picture of it.
<v Speaker 1>He's round and pink and one of Nintendo's big characters.
<v Speaker 1>And his name is Kirby.
<v Speaker 2>How about that. Yeah, that's fantastic. That blows my mind. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>I owe Kirby.
<v Speaker 1>I was hoping to blow your mind. Yes, they created
<v Speaker 1>the character Kirby from the attorney that won the Donkey
<v Speaker 1>Kong loss. Wow. And when asked about that, he was like,
<v Speaker 1>I don't really think I gave them permission to use.
<v Speaker 2>My That is fantastic, all right. That Mario character from
<v Speaker 2>Donkey Kong has appeared in over two hundred video games.
<v Speaker 1>I've played a lot of the Super Mario Brothers is
<v Speaker 1>without question, my favorite game of all times. Played it
<v Speaker 1>in the arcade. I can remember with absolute clarity, sitting
<v Speaker 1>in front of the TV in nineteen eighty five and
<v Speaker 1>that first advertisement for the Nintendo Gaming System comes on
<v Speaker 1>and I see the robot, see the gun. I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>this is pretty cool. And for about three quarters of
<v Speaker 1>a second, I see Mario jump up and hit a coin,
<v Speaker 1>and I said, oh my gosh, this is the only
<v Speaker 1>thing that I want for Christmas. I don't care if
<v Speaker 1>you get me anything else. I have to have in
<v Speaker 1>a Nintendo game. Wow, that's awesome. And I got it
<v Speaker 1>and I spent hours. Yeah, my dad said he used
<v Speaker 1>to have dreams where the Super Mario Brothers music was
<v Speaker 1>playing in his grips because I was up so lately
<v Speaker 1>playing that game.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, which I know, yea, all my kids for Yeah, okay,
<v Speaker 2>it's twenty twenty. That came out in nineteen eighty five.
<v Speaker 2>Then Dune Dun du.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I could do that.
<v Speaker 2>It's ingrained in our childhood.
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely.
<v Speaker 2>Well, that's gonna wrap it up for Donkey Kong YEP.
<v Speaker 2>Come back next week as we dive into another title
<v Speaker 2>from nineteen eighty one.
<v Speaker 1>It's been fun.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's gonna play some names. Yes, Doom Doo doo
<v Speaker 2>do do do Doom now