| The Deeper Side of Donkey-Kong
In the "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments,"
a fictional author evaluates the games of his youth for their
ultimate historical and philosophical significance.
CATALOGUE OF OBSOLETE ENTERTAINMENTS
GAME: Donkey-Kong
Format: Coin-Op Arcade Machine
Manufacturer: Nintendo of America
CPU: Z80 3.072000 MHz 18035 400KHz
Sound: 1 x DAC + samples
Screen resolution: 256 x 224 pixels
The brainchild of Nintendo Corporation's Shigeru Miyamoto that finally knocked Pac-Man from its throne, Donkey Kong spread like a virus, with more than 65,000 machines appearing in the USA its first year alone - an excellent showing for a company that got its start making playing cards for fin de siecle Yakuza gangsters, a group from which Nintendo would borrow many business tactics a century later. Notable for his ability to get gamers excited about something besides killing things or blowing them up, Miyamoto would go on to innovate further, from the hidden treasures of Super Mario Brothers to the cinematic camera angles of the Zelda games (after the author's time, it must be said), but whatever the sales figures, none of these have ever matched his maiden effort in cultural ubiquity.
Donkey Kong's phenomenal success can be attributed in large part to is concessions to realism relative to the megahits like Pac-Man and Defender that ushered in the Golden Age, swinging back toward the concreteness of the driving/sports/war games so prominent in the Antediluvian Age that preceded it. Donkey Kong moves away from abstract or space opera locales to a more recognizable setting: a variegated construction site. Its antagonist, protagonist and victim are all recognizable representations of creatures more prosaic than Pac-Men or space ships: Man, Woman, Monkey.
The first Girders board first appears with its six maroon-purple horizontal girders in perfect parallel. The cosmos of the screen is in order. Then Kong comes, the girl under his arm, a comic menace; the xs representing his teeth reminded many Original Gamers or their own braces, leading them to sympathize with him for the second following his arrival. Donkey Kong then destroys the order, shattering the geometric tranquility of the clean right angles, skewing the once-straight girders with six forceful stomps, and closing with a grimace, lest anyone doubt the mayhem was intentional.
Enter Mario, an after-the-fact name borrowed from the Seattle man who rented warehouse space to the Nintendo Corporation of America and given to the original Japanese "Jumpman." He appears at the bottom of the screen next to a blue "OIL" drum. Kong has deposited Mario's girl, Pauline, on a platform at the top of the screen, where he holds her captive. The game was programmed in Japan, so naturally Pauline is Caucasian with long red braids, an iconic embodiment of chaste womanhood in her floor-length dress. She waits helplessly, dancing a little two-step of despair and silently crying for Mario's "HELP" with comic-book words that hang above her head. So the player starts Mario running.
It is difficult to ignore the similarities between Donkey Kong (the creature) and the demiurge of the Gnostic heresies. The Gnostic sects - pre-Christian, early Christian, Jewish Kabbalist - shared a belief in the fundamentally corrupt nature of this physical world and the despotic God or demiurge who ruled over it, the one they knew, as laltabaoth and we know as Jehovah. In a power grab, this demiurge usurped the purely spiritual creation of the true God, as we learn in the Apocryphon of John from the second century A.D.:
It took great power from [its mother; the female principle of the true God], retreated from her, and moved out of the place where it had been born. Taking possession of another place, it made for itself other eternal realms . . . and it became stupefied in its madness, which still is with it.
After imprisoning the true creator and occupying her harmonious creation, Donkey Kong defiles it, knocking it out of whack, making it as imperfect as the material world we are compelled to live in. But this is not enough; he must also fill the usurped creation with emanations of his own malice. The fourth-century Hypostosis of the Archons tells us that the demiurge "contemplated creating offspring of itself" after seeing its new dominion, and did so shortly thereafter: "It engendered for itself authorities . . . the second is called Harmas, the eye of fire . . . " (Apocryphon). And so Donkey Kong sends down a spark of his evil in the form of a blue barrel that ignites the fuel drum behind Mario, giving birth to sprites of living flame that will continue to scourge Mario throughout all four levels of the game. As in the Gnostic cosmology, a Lone Chosen One is sent forth to put things right. He is not one of the "angelic beings about whom one of the races of humankind knows anything" mentioned in The Revelation of Adam, but like Jesus Christ, he is a carpenter, and as in all twentieth-century popular expressions of the Gnostic cosmology (The Matrix, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, et al.), this Savior figure is our own point of identification. We jump a barrel in his shoes. We become "Sha'ar Elohim" or "portals of God," that we might foil the Great Ape ourselves, and deliver the embodiment of (female) innocence into a better world where the girders are straight and the Factories produce something other than deadly mudpies. As in the Lurianic school of Kabbalistic mysticism, we will participate in tikkun, the healing of the divine vessels. We will fix what has been broken.
The problem with Donkey Kong: You can never fix what has been broken. You can never make the crooked girders go straight. On August 20, 2000, when Tim Sczerby scored 879,200 points on Donkey Kong (thought to be the highest score theoretically possible), the game killed him off on Level 22 without explanation or apology, and he still did not make the crooked girders go straight. And you can never maintain your grasp on Pauline. When you succeed in reaching the top of the screen and climb the platform to free her from the Monkey God's prison, he takes her away, and on the Rivets screen, even after you send him plummeting to the ground level headfirst, the reunion with Pauline doesn't last. Why?
Because she is not a girl at all. She is the idea of a girl, pretending to be a girl, distorting impressionable Mario's reality with the old bait and switch, and inasmuch as the Monkey God is also a distorter of the straight and real, she and the ape are in cahoots. Even more: The ape is a part of the girl, and the girl is a part of the ape. They are facets of the same deception - which is to say, the fallen world, the one we live in. - excerpt
from Lucky
Wander Boy by
d. b. weiss
Talk about it:
info@LiveReal.com
See also by d. b. weiss:
The Deeper Side of
Pac-Man
Double Dragon
and
Frogger
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