The basic origin of the phrase "It's on like Donkey Kong" is clear enough: the 1981 video game, in which said large ape somewhat inexplicably terrorizes a construction site. What's less clear, though, is how that ape went from mindlessly slinging 8-bit barrels at Mario to an icon for getting it on everywhere, hero of a rallying cry and symbol of interpersonal challenges that inevitably end with one man victorious and the other taken down to China Town. We don't have nearly enough to do with our time, so we set about the task of figuring it out -- and the answer, it seems, involves a surprising amount of Ice Cube.
The phrase “It’s on like Donkey Kong” has been part of the pop-culture vernacular for decades, but now Nintendo is attempting to claim ownership of the nostalgic idiom by filing a trademark request with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
It’s all part of Nintendo’s preparation for the November 21 release of its upcoming Wii title Donkey Kong Country Returns
I find it strange that Nintendo didn’t do this sooner. I mean, the phrase has been around forever, and it’s not like Nintendo was ever going to abandon Kong, so the big guy’s never really going to be out of the public consciousness anyway. I guess better late than never, right?
This awesome new Donkey Kong Country Returns screenshot gallery shows the game's two-player co-operative mode, with Diddy and Donkey teaming up as they advance through the detailed levels in the gorgeous Wii game.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is out on November 21st in North America and in Europe on December 3rd.
You can check more screenshots in our gallery below:
With the iControlPad seemingly slipping further and further from reality, iPhone gamers with an affinity for buttons have fewer reasons to get out of bed in the morning and face the world. If that's you then it's time to wake up, Sunshine, because the iPhone Game Pad is here to bring a little light to your life. It's a somewhat chubby slip-on case that, as of now, works only with the original model iPhone. (There's a 3G/3GS model to come.) On the face it offers four primary control buttons plus a D-pad, what appears to be Select and Start buttons, plus a pair of shoulder buttons atop. This combination should make it perfect for emulation hounds or any 'ol heathen who values tactility over design purity. As of now it's just a prototype, but if you have the resources to bring this thing to production the folks at CP Design who crafted it would surely love to hear from you.
New York City's own Hank Chien, a 35-year-old plastic surgeon based in Queens has just been crowned the Lord of the Barrels -- having just set a new world record in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.
Chien's score, 1,061,700 points racked up in just 2 hours and 35 minutes was verified by Twin Galaxies, the official keepers of DK records since 1981.
Chien surpassed the men who inspired him: rabid gamers Steve Wiebe and Billy, whose rivalry was chronicled in the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong."
Donkey Kong champ Doctor Hank Chien
Hank Chien plays Donkey Kong at his home.
"Well basically, after I saw the documentary, started playing just for fun," Chien told NBCNewYork.com from his offices at Vogue Plastic Surgery in Flushing. "For a little over a year, maybe a year and three or four months."
Chien, a native of Forest Hills who know lives on the East Side of Manhattan said he started practicing in Barcade, Brooklyn's finest arcade-bar, sometimes playing three hours at a time.
"I improved very quickly," said Chien. "I collaborated with a lot of very good players -- now with the Internet you can talk to good players and share tips."
Eventually though, he had to move beyond Barcade's machine -- which isn't "official" because it plays both Donkey Kong and the less-popular Donkey Kong Jr.
"When things started getting serious I said enough is enough, I gotta buy my own machine."
After scouring eBay and Craigslist for about two months Chien found a DK machine in good quality for only about $400 (the surgeon said had to put in another $200 worth of "cosmetic" improvements after buying).
For his official run the dexterous doctor played on his own machine and ended the game on the famed "kill screen" glitch that does not allow play to continue. Officials from Twin Galaxies came to his house to make sure everything was on the up and up.
Chien's new scoring mark beats the 1,050,200 point record score set by Mitchell at the live event in Florida in July 2007 that was featured in the "King of Kong" movie.
The good doctor believes that there is a correlation between surgeons and video game players -- and was even part of a study in 2004 proving it.
"[But] I don't think that practicing video games will make you a good surgeon," he said. "It's more likely that people who have good hand eye coordination are good at both."
In 1983, the arcade smash hit Donkey Kong was ported to the Atari 400/800 home computer systems by Landon Dyer. It was at the time the best home computer/console port for this game.
Mr. Dyer, in between pulling his hair out while working on this game, included what is known as an "Easter Egg" in the game's code. If a certain sequence of moves or scores were done correctly, the designer's initials would appear somewhere on the screen. He writes on his blog, "There’s an easter egg, but it’s totally not worth it, and I don’t remember how to bring it up anyway (something like: Die on the ’sandpile’ level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000)."
The Digital Press web site has a whole section dedicated to Easter eggs, and they are even offering cash rewards to those who can find out how to trigger them. Even Landon Dyer himself did not remember how to trigger this Easter egg in Donkey Kong for the Atari home computers. It was suggested on the Digital Press site that the initials would appear in the bonus score box.
26 years later, I am pleased to announce that I have discovered the way to trigger this long lost Easter egg. Here is how to do it:
1. Play a game and get a score of 33,000 through 33,900. This score must become the new high score. [Some other scores will work as well, see below.]
2. Kill off all of your remaining lives. However, your last life must be killed off by falling too far - by walking or jumping off a girder that is too high to land safely. If the last life is killed any other way, the egg will not appear.
3. Set the game difficulty to 4 by pressing the Option button 3 times. The icon for this difficulty is a firefox.
4. Wait a few minutes, and the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen will appear.
5. The title screen will then appear, and Landon Dyer's initials [LMD] will be at the bottom center of the screen:
Other base scores that will work are 37,000 ; 73,000 ; and 77,000. The hundreds digit can be anything, as can the hundred thousands digit.
It doesn't matter what difficulty the game is played on to set the high score. But to see the egg, the current difficulty must be set to 4 (firefox).
Technical Details
How on Earth did I figure this out?
I started by getting a very good emulator for the Atari system - MESS [Multiple Emulator Super System]. Once in to the game, I activated the game's debugger and did a complete disassembly of the entire 64K RAM bank. This file is over 25,000 lines long.
I faced a few false starts - I first believed the initials were to appear in the bonus score box. So I looked there but found nothing. I also closely observed the input routines, so see if a special sequence of joystick moves were required. This search came up empty as well.
I kept digging around and eventually discovered the subroutine for drawing text to the screen. Right after the data for the "GAME OVER" text data , I found the following:
8D3E: FE ; location code to follow 8D4F: 50 BC ; screen location #50, #BC 8D41: 16 17 0E ; "L M D" [designer's initials!] 8D44: FF ; end code
It was quickly after this that I traced back to the command which would display this line. It was preceded by a test based on several factors, which were all then discovered. Each of the factors are logically ANDed to each other, and the end result has to be equal to 3 to trigger the egg.
861C: A5 D2 lda $D2 ; load number of lives 861E: 2D 01 0E and $0E01 ; mix with high score, ten thousands 8621: 2D 02 0E and $0E02 ; mix with high score, thousands 8624: 25 CB and $CB ; mix with difficulty 8626: 2D 31 0E and $0E31 ; mix with Mario's last state 8629: C9 03 cmp #$03 ; result == 3 ? 862B: D0 07 bne $8634 ; no, skip Easter egg ; Easter egg 862D: A0 3E ldy #$3E 862F: A9 8D lda #$8D ; Easter egg text location at #8D3E 8631: 20 B8 AB jsr $ABB8 ; print Easter egg to screen ; resume program 8634: ...
It turns out that the number of lives is set to #FF (255 decimal, or 11111111 binary) after a game is over. This provides a starting point with all of the bits turned on. Most of the bits turn to zero with the first AND at line #861E. For the high score, since the numbers 3 and 7 both have the same lower 2 bits turned on, they both work as far as this routine is concerned. [3 = 0011 binary and 7 = 0111 binary].
The game's difficulty is counted starting at zero, so level 4 has an internal value of 3 which is needed for the correct answer.
Finally, line #8626 mixes in Mario's last state. The memory location referenced (#0E31) changes based on how Mario is moving. It is set to 3 when Mario falls and dies.
Comments & Conclusions
Of all the game hacking that I have done, this has to be one of the most rewarding and enjoyable. I played quite a bit of this game back in the day at a friend's house. It really was the best port of Donkey Kong that could be played at home.
Another puzzle solved. What will I do next with all of my spare time?
- end original article -
Updates
7/5/2009 - There has been some speculation about this Easter egg "not being worth it". Maybe for some people, but for me, it was worth $75 in reward money from the Digital Press web site and their Easter Egg Contest. This contest, by the way, still has many bounties waiting to be claimed.
Someone even put a how-to video up on Youtube: [not very well made, IMO; to save time you might want to skip ahead to the last 10 seconds after watching the beginning.]
Anyone of a certain age riding an F-Line trolley or bus on Market toward Van Ness can be forgiven for wondering if they've hallucinated, projecting a vestige of their childhood onto a passing wall. Many riders probably conclude that's the case; blink and it's gone.
But those walking past Market and Brady know it's true: There's a professional-grade graffiti mural composed of Donkey Kong Jr., Q-Bert, and, a treat for the careful onlooker (again, of a certain age) Ghost Monsters from Pac Man.
The San Francisco 1980s nostalgia wall was tagged on the videogame-centric Web site Pixelated Geek in a feature highlighting worldwide videogame-related graffiti. We are self-admitted San Francisco chauvinists, but we couldn't help but chuckle at the following, spotted in Halifax, Canada:
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
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