Great Game Stories, No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong)

The Characters

Every good fairy tale needs a hero who is smaller than his troubles, and this one gives us Mario. In 1994, long before he was the plump plumber of a thousand kingdoms, he was simply a stubborn little man in a red cap who could jump, climb and, above all, never give up. Beside him stands the whole reason he runs at all: Pauline, a bright and kind-hearted young woman who has the great misfortune of being very easy to admire.

One hundred and one rooms, one very determined moustache.

That admirer is Donkey Kong, the great ape of the title. He is not truly wicked, only lonely, jealous and far too strong for his own good. When he decides he wants Pauline all to himself, he simply scoops her up and climbs away, and the entire adventure comes tumbling out behind him like a spilled basket of fruit. Keep an eye out, too, for a small shadow near the very end of the tale: a tiny ape with an enormous heart, who reminds everyone that even a monster can be somebody’s family.

The World

This story unfolds across nine wondrous lands, and the clever little Game Boy tucks every one of them into the palm of your hand. It begins, as the oldest legends always do, on a construction site of red girders, tall ladders and rolling barrels. But once the chase truly begins, the world opens up like a picture book: a bustling Big City of rooftops and elevators, a shadowy Forest, a rocking Ship out at sea, a steaming Jungle, a blazing Desert, a great Airplane high in the clouds, a glittering Iceberg and a Rocky Valley of cliffs and caverns.

Each of these lands is stitched together from dozens of tiny single-screen rooms, more than a hundred of them in all, and every little room is its own clever riddle. Nothing is wasted. A ladder here, a locked door there, a single switch that changes everything: the whole kingdom is really one enormous puzzle box, patiently waiting to be solved one screen at a time.

Donkey Kong: 900 pounds of misunderstood loneliness and excellent barrel-throwing form.

The Adventure

The tale opens with a scene every grandparent will recognise. Donkey Kong stands at the top of a tower of girders, Pauline waits helplessly above him, and barrels come thundering down like an angry storm. Mario climbs, he leaps, he dodges, and after four familiar stages he reaches the summit and takes his lady’s hand. The victory music swells. The story seems, for one lovely moment, to be over.

And then comes the cheekiest twist the Game Boy ever pulled. Donkey Kong simply wakes up, snatches Pauline all over again, and bounds clean off the screen. The real adventure has barely begun. What follows is not the old barrel-dodging game at all, but something new and marvellous: ninety-seven more stages, each a tiny puzzle in its own right. In every room a key waits somewhere behind gaps, spikes, ladders and switches, and a matching locked door waits patiently on the far side. Mario must carry that heavy key across the room without dropping it into a pit or a puddle.

To manage it, our little hero learns a whole circus of new tricks. He can stand on his hands and walk upside down, spring high off a nimble backflip to reach impossible ledges, balance objects on his head, stack crates and platforms into staircases, ride moving lifts and flip switches that raise ladders and lower bridges out of thin air. And at the end of each of the nine lands, Donkey Kong himself is waiting for a proper showdown, hurling barrels and fruit until Mario, with perfect timing, sends him scrambling off to the next land with Pauline tucked under one great arm.

Spoiler Alert: How It Ends

The chase ends exactly where it was always going to end: at the very top of the world, on the roof of a towering city building, with nowhere left to climb. Cornered at last, Donkey Kong does the only thing a cornered giant can think to do. He grows. He swells into an enormous, mountainous version of himself and throws everything he has at the tiny plumber below.

But Mario has not crossed nine lands to stumble on the final rooftop. With well-judged jumps and well-aimed barrels he wears the giant down, and at last the great ape topples and shrinks back to his ordinary size. And here the fairy tale shows its soft heart. There is no cage, no punishment, no cruel revenge. Mario offers Donkey Kong a hand, Pauline is safe and sound, and the two old rivals part as something much closer to friends. The lonely ape learns that a lady cannot simply be carried off and kept, and the little hero learns that even the biggest brute deserves a hand back up. And so, with a wave and a grin, the longest chase on the Game Boy comes gently to rest.

Would you like to hold this pocket-sized legend for yourself? Step into the Game Boy Museum and wander the full catalogue of cartridges, curiosities and stories that we lovingly preserve.