Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario | Ars Technica

When Mike Mika’s daughter was sad to learn she couldn’t play as a girl character in classic Donkey Kong, her father decided a little hacking was in order. Mika modified the ROM of the game so that the damsel/white-knight roles in the game were switched. Now Pauline (Nintendo's precursor to the better known Princess Peach) runs, jumps, and dodges rolling barrels to save the dulcet Mario at the top of the screen, according to a Saturday post on reddit.

Mika posted a video of his modified version of the game, which features Pauline as the playable character. Mika notes in the video description, as well as an anonymized post to Facebook, that his daughter was accustomed to being able to play a girl (Princess Toadstool) in Super Mario Bros. 2. She wanted to be able to do the same in Donkey Kong.

According to a seemingly uninvolved poster on the reddit thread, Mika may have used Tile Layer Pro to redraw Mario’s frames and change the palettes within the ROM. According to another reddit user, it's the ROM drawn from the 2010 Wii virtual console version of the game.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a dad taking a paring knife to a video game to better his daughter’s experience. Earlier this year, Mike Hoye made public his modification of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker where he changed all of the pronouns from male to female in order to more correctly address his daughter as she played the protagonist. Mika has not yet made any indication of whether he will distribute his modified version of Donkey Kong.