But Donkey Kong is famous. I mean, ask anyone over 20 who Donkey Kong is, and the chances are they'll know, even people who hate computer games would know. That's the thing, it might not a cool sounding name, in fact it daft, but people remember it's the bad monkey throwing the barrels at you.
I'm not sure it was ever supposed to be Donkey Kong, I think maybe it's like a translation error, like the old arcade racer 'Continental Circus' - now that's a very memorable racing game, even though it should have been called 'Continental Circuit', the translaters obviously didn't consider that there were no clowns and plenty international racing circuits around
.
Personally, I've never seen the attraction to Mario as opposed to other stars. I mean, he's a middle aged plumber with a strange relationship with some princess wrench-tease and a obviously envious brother. I think that character design and personality is incredibly important to some gamers, but meaningless to others, I think it's just lucky that Mario got some of the most playable games ever.
I am a big fan of nintendo, but more with games like Pikmin, Animal Crossing, MonkeyBall etc.
As for drug use and computer programming, well coders love dope, it's a proven fact that a massive percentage of coders use marijuana. Like an american software firm introduced drug testing, for about a week until it realised it was loosing all it's programmers, so the drug testing was shelved and the coders given their jobs back
. Marijuana is a harmful substance with lots of negative effects, but we don't know everything about it or internal workings of the human brain, who's to say in future EA won't be pumping the smoke through the air-conditioning!.
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