"The lady stolen away by Donkey Kong was supposed to yell out, ‘Help, Help!’" Miyamoto recently recalled. "A native English speaker...they said it sounded like she was talking about seaweed: ‘Kelp, Kelp!'"
"The lady stolen away by Donkey Kong was supposed to yell out, ‘Help, Help!’ And when Mario jumped over a barrel, she was supposed to yell, ‘Nice!,’ complimenting him.
But some people within the company said, ‘Doesn’t the pronunciation sound a little weird?’ So we tested it on a native English speaker, a professor. They said it sounded like she was talking about seaweed: ‘Kelp, Kelp!'"
- Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, translated from the original Japanese by Wired.
The history of Nintendo's groundbreaking platformer Donkey Kong is already well-documented, but in a new interview published (in Japanese) on Nintendo's website this week Kong director Shigeru Miyamoto shared some intriguing bits of trivia about how the game was made.
Devs who can't read Japanese should know that Wired has translated some excerpts about Donkey Kong's development from the interview, which actually starts out focusing on Nintendo's now 30-year-old Famicom Disk System (and the self-contained HDTV-ready "Famicom Mini" Nintendo plans to release in Japan next month pre-loaded with a catalog of Famicom games, including Donkey Kong.)
For example, Miyamoto notes at one point that Donkey Kong was originally designed to play brief English voice samples, but (as explained in the quote above) this feature was cut during development because the acting wasn't quite right.
"At that point in development, we couldn’t fix it,” Miyamoto reportedly said. “So we took out all of the voices. 'Help!' was replaced with Donkey Kong’s growl, and 'Nice!' was replaced with the 'pi-ro-po-pon-pon!' sound."
(As video game historian and onetime Gamasutra editor Frank Cifaldi points out, you can hear samples of the original English voice lines on the Donkey Kong page of The Cutting Room Floor wiki. The "help, help!" line was also apparently added back in to the 1994 Game Boy port of Donkey Kong, though it would only be heard when the cartridge was played on a Super Nintendo via the Super Game Boy adapter.)
"It’s really good that we went with 'pi-ro-po-pon-pon,'" he continued. "When you walk past an arcade and hear that sound, it’s really catchy. So even though we took out the voices, it still had great results. From this experience, I learned the importance of having good sound effects.”
For more interesting snippets of the interview -- including Miyamoto's recollection about how he was "pretty serious" about things like realistic fall damage when making Donkey Kong, leading the game to have a "certain stiffness" -- check out the full Wired article.
You May Also Like
.png?width=300&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
