"Donkey Kong is an arcade game released by Nintendo in Japan on July 9, 1981."
That was 40 years ago today.
"Its gameplay maneuvers Mario across platforms to ascend a construction site and rescue Pauline from the giant gorilla named Donkey Kong, all while avoiding or jumping over obstacles. Donkey Kong is the product of Nintendo's increasingly desperate efforts to develop a hit to rival Pac-Man (1980) and break into the North American market.... The game debuts Mario, who became Nintendo's mascot and one of the world's most recognizable characters" — Wikipedia.
Newborn, Mario looked like this:
And as long as I'm talking about Mario, let me once again show you this clip, from the movie "Putney Slope," containing what was for me one of the top-10 funniest things I ever heard in a movie, "How many syllables, Mario?":
The director of that movie, Robert Downey Sr., died 2 days ago. From the NYT obituary:
“Putney Swope,” a 1969 comedy about a Black man who is accidentally elected chairman of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, was perhaps Mr. Downey’s best-known film.
“To be as precise as is possible about such a movie,” Vincent Canby wrote in a rave review in The New York Times, “it is funny, sophomoric, brilliant, obscene, disjointed, marvelous, unintelligible and relevant.”... “They’re uneven,” [Downey] said of the films. “But I was uneven.”
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3 comments:
Temujin writes:
"Years ago I used to be on the opening crew for a national full-service restaurant chain. We'd go into a town a month before opening, get the equipment in place, set things up, train the staff, etc. We operated the restaurant for the first 2-3 weeks, then handed it off to the actual local management team. Our one request pre-arrival was to have a tabletop version of both Donkey Kong and Pac-Man on hand in the lounge of each restaurant. We would spend hours on Donkey Kong in between and after hours of work. Corporate Chef vs Corporate Beverage Director. Regional Director vs. Head Waiter. It got very serious.
"I later moved on to in-home Nintendo and Zelda and all-nighters before finally finding my way to a rehab center. I can't even look at a video game anymore out of fear of relapse."
Mark writes:
"Over a lunch hour in the early ‘80s, I saw a friend playing an arcade game in the mall. It was Donkey Kong.
He gave me some tips and I started to play the game.
I can’t really explain the attraction, but eventually I found myself indoors, on a Hawaiian vacation, putting money into the DK machine and playing for hours.
Obviously, I needed an intervention.
I would play the arcade game again even today if I could find one.
I need a dealer."
Kay writes:
"I’ve heard that if you stop gaming for 3 months and then go back to it, you’ll have a psychedelic experience."
And:
"Looks like Timothy Leary might have agreed with this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/2013-09-30-timothy-leary-video-game-archive-drugs-are-bad-mmkay.html"
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