EDMONTON – He has been labelled the ‘Best Dad Ever’ after hacking Nintendo’s Donkey Kong game so that his 3-year-old daughter could ‘play as the girl and save Mario.’
Mike Mika is the chief creative officer at Other Ocean Interactive. In an article for Wired magazine, he explained how he enjoys playing old video games with his daughter.
“As a gamer dad, there’s nothing better than when your child asks you to play a videogame.”
Mika explained she liked the puzzle adventure game The Cave, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Donkey Kong.
He says she had been become used to playing as Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 on Nintendo 8-bit (NES) games. Then, when they switched back to Donkey Kong, she wanted to play as a female character.
“One day after work, she asked to play Donkey Kong, only this time she raised a pretty innocent and simple question: ‘How can I play as a girl? I want to save Mario!’,” he told the magazine.
“I explained to her that Donkey Kong, while similar, is not the same game. On this occasion, I really could tell that she was disappointed.”
Mika said his daughter’s question kept nagging at him. So, he approached his work partner and asked for help recreating the game with a female character by using the tool Tile Layer Pro.
Then, he shared his efforts online.

“I’m up at midnight hacking the ROM, replacing Mario with Pauline,” he explained in the post.
His efforts quickly caught the attention of the digital world. Readers on Reddit named him the ‘Best Dad Ever.’
Mika posted a video of his altered game – called “Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition” – on YouTube March 9. As of Wednesday afternoon, the video had more than 1.2 million views.
When he showed his daughter the final product, Mika says she was very excited.
“Just like clockwork, she woke up and sat on my lap asking to play Donkey Kong,” Mika explained in Wired. “Only this time, she could play as Pauline. She was excited! But for all she knew, I just figured out how to get Pauline to work. And that was fine. I wasn’t expecting it to change her life. We played for a bit. And some more. And again later. You know what? She really did seem to enjoy the game more. For whatever reason, she was more motivated to play as Pauline than as Mario. I can’t read into that too much, because it does feel a bit like a new game to her still. So we’ll see how she does after a week with it.”
While his daughter’s reaction didn’t come as a surprise, the huge online reaction did.
“Meanwhile, a couple of my friends decided to tweet about it and post some of the work-in-progress to Reddit. By the time I started to catch up with all my social feeds, something insane had happened. This little mod exploded. I didn’t follow the whole Tropes vs. Women thing, but I saw a lot of references to it. In my wildest dreams, I just expected a bunch of fellow coders to chat about the merits of the mod. I never expected it to ignite a gender-role debate.”
With files from WIRED magazine
© Global News. A division of Shaw Media Inc., 2013.