Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Viral Video: Dad Hacks Donkey Kong So Daughter Can Have Female Hero

There are bad hacks, and there are good hacks.

What Mike Mika did was come up with an awesome hack.

His 3-year-old daughter was perplexed at why she couldn’t play Donkey Kong as a female character and rescue Mario. So Mika hacked the game so she could do just that.

“She’s played as Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong,” Mika wrote on YouTube, where he posted a video of his exploits. “I told her we couldn’t in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that. So what else am I supposed to do?”

So, grab a copy of the game, redraw some frames and, presto, now the princess in Donkey Kong is the rescuer.

Here’s the video he posted of his effort:

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik