Defeating King K. Rool, and New Life: Donkey Kong Country
My niece was born an hour after I finished Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System(SNES) on my Nintendo Switch. Three months later she would be sitting in my lap, grabbing the joystick on my Xbox one controller while I played Super Mario Sunshine on my PC, her eyes fixed on the bright colors on the screen, and my fingers moving across the surface of my controller. My mother, sister, and girlfriend were all present and took several photographs of the event, and I can only hope when she grows up to be a multi-million dollar streamer (or whatever will be the future equivalent of streamers 20 years from now) she’ll remember this videogame session, or at least post one of these photos with the caption #family #lookatunclejammershair #cringe.
I’m assuming of course that hashtags will be relevant in the future, the way I’m assuming they’re still relevant today.
I was sitting in a corner of an excruciatingly white waiting room because it had an outlet, and also provided enough space away from a group of people (my father and brother-in-law’s family to be specific) who were busy discussing politics, a topic I avoid the way I avoid cotton-mouths and cow-killers. For clarification for those who weren’t raised in the southwestern United States those are colloquial names for Agkistrodon piscivorus (the water moccasin snake) and Dasymutilla occidentalis (also known as velvet ants(which fun fact are not actually ants, they’re wingless wasps that walk on the ground)). I stay out of political conversations on general principle, and it should be noted by then it was the second night in a row that my sister was in labor and I had spent well over six hours in the waiting room by that point with the same group of people in the hospital. Hospitals, like discussing politics, leave me annoyed and frustrated and nauseated. The fact that this was a Catholic and therefore religious institution and contained numerous biblical paintings and even a five-foot tall statue of Jesus behind glass was pushing me to my philosophical and psychological limits.
I’m an atheist, for further clarification.
There’s a lot of clarification so far in this essay. More than I intended. Perhaps a better writer would have found a way to avoid that.
Well, management will work on trying to find a better writer; in the meantime I’ll keep going.
Cover images provided by MobyGames.com.
These collected external factors were all exacerbated by my brain which is, putting it colloquially, busted. I have difficulty processing reality even when I’m not emotionally and intellectually exhausted, and the liminal space of the endless white halls was cresting me to the point of some kind of breakdown. Seriously, that hospital was becoming The Backrooms or the Overlook Hotel, and any moment I was about to turn the corner and there would have been a man in a dog suit screaming at me. Also the Jesus statue vaguely resembled a Weeping Angel from Doctor Who and was making me afraid to blink. Hyperbole aside, my brain was steadily losing its ability to keep my feet grounded so I reached into my backpack, grabbed my Nintendo Switch(and my headphones), and started to play Donkey Kong Country.
I had, up to that moment, been actively avoiding the game because I only had one level left. Specifically it was Gang Plank Galleon which is the final level in the first Donkey Kong Country game and, narratively speaking, is the conclusion where Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong face off against their rival, the plump, bulbous wad that is King K. Rool.
The setup for Donkey Kong Country is that King K. Rool has stolen all of Donkey Kong’s precious bananas in the cavern below his house where he keeps them. The implications of the health nightmare of that storage space aside, Donkey begins his quest to find his bananas and defeat King K. Rool and his minions who have invaded, and I promise I ain’t making this up, Kongo Bongo Island.
To any Fallout fans reading, you know EXACTLY what song I almost started singing as I wrote that last sentence.
Donkey Kong Country is a side scrolling platformer videogame, much like Super Mario World (a contemporary game for the SNES). Donkey Kong Country was structured and marketed as a sequel to the original Donkey Kong games which had been released originally in arcades and were designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. The story of how the games became the economic and cultural milestones that they would eventually become is for another essay. What’s important for this essay is that Donkey Kong Country became a game about the next generation. Donkey Kong in the game is actually Donkey Kong Jr. and the original Donkey Kong is now Cranky Kong. The opening cutscene which precedes the actual game, apart from being (according to the teenagers these days) iconic, is also a rhetorical structure to demonstrate the changing of the guard.
The scene begins with Cranky Kong turning a record player in a dark room with red scaffolding in the foreground. The music is soft and steady and Cranky taps his ancient foot to it before out of nowhere a large black boombox (that was what we called them big radios what runned on them D batteries you youngsters) drops from the ceiling playing the 90s equivalent of the previous song while Donkey Kong jumps from from the ceiling knocking Cranky off the platform. The world shifts to a jungle and Donkey Kong offers up some slick dance moves before Cranky throws a barrel of TNT at him.
This opening was, to quote the teenagers of yesteryear, aka the 90s, totally rad dude.
Donkey Kong was now for the next generation of kids who got IT.
And IT was…well I can’t remember what IT actually was, but Donkey Kong Country definitely had IT.
And IT was rad.
I’ve noted in a few essays for this website that when it came to my earliest experience with videogames, it was primarily playing on my parents' SNES, and my favorite game of all time was Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The hierarchy of favorite games after that was my copy of Super Mario All Stars, followed by Donkey Kong Country. Those three games encapsulate what videogames were to my young mind, and I remember them the most because I played them more than any other game. I remember playing it with my friends (who for the record were way, way better at playing it than I ever was), I remember playing it with my Dad (who was also way better at it than I was), and I remember playing it with my babysitter Rachel (spoiler alert, she kicked that game’s butt). The social connections aside I loved Donkey Kong Country for its soundtrack, I loved the surreal quality of it’s anthropomorphic creatures, I loved the pre-rendered backgrounds, I had…complicated feelings about Candy Kong, and most importantly I loved Funky Kong because his theme was rad.
In fact, here's a link to Funky’s theme music because you deserve it.
Nostalgia plays a crucial role in explaining why I think about this game as much as I do, but there’s still enough critical lens (and intellectual obsession) to understand why this game mattered so much to me. It was a solid platformer with surreal visuals and music that created a powerful aesthetic impression. It didn’t matter to me that I never beat the final level Gang Plank Galleon, because I could always watch my friends beat King K. Rool…then again I didn’t have many friends, but that’s immaterial.
It was, and is an admission of incompetence to say I wasn’t good enough to defeat King K. Rool on the SNES. And in fact, even 35 years later I only beat the game because the Switch offers a rewind function that lets me go back and “correct” a poorly timed jump or roll. I recognise a purist mindset immediately springing into my brain, and a kind of imposter syndrome screams, “That’s not really beating the game because that’s cheating.”
My response to this thought is, “Dude I’m 35. I’m literally older than this game, I don’t care.”
This thought, apart from being therapeutic in its catharsis, is also the reason why I decided to sit down and finally beat the game while my niece was taking her sweet time being born.
Gang Plank Galleon as a level is structured, like most of the boss fights in Donkey Kong Country. The player has a flat surface(platform), however the space is wide enough that they will have to move Donkey Kong to the right until King. K. Rool is revealed. Once the bulbous glutton that is King K. Rool spots you (or more accurately once the character’s AI recognises the Donkey Kong sprite in its vicinity) the character will begin his attack and throw his crown directly at Donkey Kong. This is the first test of the final battle and as the level continues these throws will quicken testing the player’s ability to anticipate their trajectory and jump in time to avoid it as well as time a jump on King K. Rool’s now vulnerable head.
The crown is the first test, and the one I was able to beat.
The second test is what always stopped me.
Once King K. Rool is attacked the crown will reappear on his head and he will charge Donkey Kong (and Diddy Kong) to the opposite side of the stage, out of sight. Sometimes these bull-rush charges will happen multiple times before his next attack and the player will have to jump to avoid him. The challenge of course is that, because Gang Plank Galleon has spaces out of sight, sometimes it’s difficult to know when they will be attacked. Likewise, once King. K. Rool stops moving and is(usually) out of sight, he will throw his crown again.
But running and throwing are not the only challenges because in later portions of this fight King K. Rool will begin leaping across the boat’s top deck. The trajectory of each jump has to be quickly calculated by the player, and to make matters worse no two jumps are the same distance. The AI will generate different lengths of each jump meaning that there is not a regular pattern to anticipate. Likewise as King K. Rool jumps out of sight, the player will have to follow and hope that they do not accidentally land right in the pathway of the fleshy boulder.
Where’s Chris Redfield when you need him?
Finally, there’s one more challenge to this boss fight and that’s King K. Rool’s balls…cannon balls.
Just so we’re clear.
Once King K. Rool has stopped moving, hopping, or throwing his crown he will jump up and down triggering cannonballs to fall from…the ceiling? To be honest it isn’t entirely clear. The point is King K. Rool is a pirate, the player is on a pirate ship; it’s just best not to overthink it. The point is once again the game is challenging the player to move Donkey Kong within the space to avoid physical obstacles, and this cannonball barrage is as much a quick time event(QTE) as much as it is a general platformer challenge. I admit freely and with full honesty I was regularly and consistently crushed under King K. Rolls balls.
His…cannon balls.
All of these obstacles are a challenge, not just because they’re legitimately difficult, but because they show the player how far they have progressed since the beginning of the game. At this point the player has had to learn how best to dodge and navigate around every obstacle that Donkey Kong Country has to offer. Whether it’s rolling right through a Gnawty beaver, making sure to hop onto a Klaptrap rather than rolling through it, or just plain avoiding Zingers, the player has been taught through sheer repetition how to encounter enemy npcs and obstacles to determine what is the best strategy. These physical puzzles have established enough pattern recognition that, by the time a player sets foot onto the deck of Gang Plank Galleon, they will have enough knowledge and skill to settle into the rhythm of the final boss.
Thinking about this game afforded me a chance to reflect on Platformers.
Platforming videogames have fallen in popularity as the medium began to develop into 3-dimensional representation, and genres such as the role playing game(RPG) and First person shooter(FPS) surged in popular appeal and began to dominate the market. Let me be clear, this is not a declaration that the platformer is dead as a genre. That kind of statement is made by, honestly, idiots who are usually trying to generate clicks, views, or just a bit of quick cultural capital. The success of games like Spelunky, Cuphead, and Shovel Knight are proof alone that such statements are not only misguided, they’re just not true. Platforming videogames are still being made, and a number of them are just as brilliant as the early efforts of the videogame industry.
Donkey Kong Country is a great platformer, probably one of the greatest platformer games ever made. And, it’s a game I spent a lot of time with as a child.
When contemplating how to approach this essay I realized this would be less an intellectual effort on my part, and something far more reflective. Completing a videogame I had been playing as long as I could remember anything that was also about the next generation of platformers seemed appropriate as I was about to be introduced to a new life. Or at least, the closest I would ever get to new life.
I had a vasectomy in June of 2022 because, I have to be honest, I don’t like children. I didn’t enjoy being a child because there was so much I didn’t understand, other children weren’t particularly nice, and adults always seemed to find something wrong with me even though they were usually professing how “lovely” I was to my parents. As I’ve reached adulthood I recognize how much I still don’t like children very much, and my fondness for babies is, mathematically speaking, below absolute zero. I didn’t want to be a father and so I took steps to make sure I never will be one. The reality that I am, scientifically speaking, a biological dead-end is its own emotional and psychological exploration. I can say with full conviction that I’m glad I won’t have a child of my own. But I’m glad my sister was finally able to.
I defeated King K. Rool on the evening of January 30th around 11:45 P.M.
My niece was born January 31st around 12:13 AM. She came out 9 lbs 7 ounces.
In the space of an hour I became an uncle at the same time I became a person who has completed Donkey Kong Country.
Three months later I neglected to show my niece the game I had been playing the same time she was coming into the world. But if her energy to grab the controller in my hand was proof of anything it’s that infants are highly susceptible to external stimulation, AND, there will still be a chance for the next generation of players to discover and create experiences with games that are older than they are.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
10.7.2024
Like what you’re reading? Buy me a coffee & support my Patreon. Please and thank you.