#donkey kong

thetriathlegacy:

I’m curious about all my gaming followers: first Pokémon game, first Zelda game, and first Mario game in the tags?

3, 2, 1. go! a smashing party!

I made a 4K render recreation of the Game Over screen in the original Donkey Kong Country in Blender. Here’s the full resolution version:

https://www.deviantart.com/pavlovs-walrus/art/DKC-Game-Over-4K-Render-895782289

Continuing my Kong quest to re-model the 1990s versions of the DK crew: Here’s Diddy!

The audio is taken from a promotional VHS, and the style of the turntable animation is based on one found on that tape as well.

I decided to try my hand at recreating the technical showcase video used by Nintendo for promotional purposes in the early 90s to show off the state-of-the-art silicon graphics technology for Rare’s reboot of their Donkey Kong franchise.

These days it’s not too hard to find the 3D character models from any modern game available for download online, but Super Nintendo games don’t contain the original model-data for their pre-rendered characters, so the only way to get these models is to replicate them yourself from scratch.

Let’s face it: Mario is just as synonymous with video games as Pikachu, Sonic, or ridiculously priced downloadable content. In his panel Plumber’s Log: Through the Years with Mario, Shadow Wolf Z took video game fans on a tour of the life of everyone’s favorite turtle-stomping plumber.

Here are some highlights–and low-lights–of Mario’s history that were covered in the panel.

• The character debuted in 1981 as the protagonist in Donkey Kong. Back then, he wasn’t even Mario; he was just known as “Jumpman” (a name that would be more fitting for Luigi). It wasn’t until the original Mario Bros. game a few years later that he would be named…and given a brother.

• So, where did “Mario” come from? Video game creators definitely didn’t need to look far for their inspiration: he was named after Mario Segale, who was the landlord–not a plumber, but the landlord–renting the Nintendo company a warehouse outside of Seattle in the early 1980s. 

• Super Mario Bros. 3, one of the most beloved games in the entire series, also had the absolute best commercial to promote it (despite it showing absolutely nothing about the game).

• Mario makes cameo appearances in other Nintendo games, perhaps the most well-known being his role as the boxing ring ref in Punch-Out!!! He has also popped up in NES sports games Golf and Pinball and, if you angle it correctly, in a painting in the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

• If you were a child of the 80s, you no doubt remember the cringe-worthy Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which combined cartoons based off of Super Mario Bros. and (the North American version of) Super Mario Bros. 2 with low-budget, live-action segments starring wrestling star Captain Lou Albano as Mario and Canadian actor Danny Wells as Luigi.

This show was Oscar material compared to its replacement series: Club Mario. The (thankfully) short-lived series kept the cartoons intact, but replaced live-action Mario and Luigi with “Tommy Treehugger” and “Co M.C.,” two hip-as-far-as-out-of-touch-TV-executives-are-concerned Mario fanatics who spent their days on a rooftop in some random city.

Mario had countless video games. He had several TV series. He even had a movie (which we will never talk about in public). But did you know that he even had his own line of products? At the peak of his popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nintendo licensed their mascot for everything, from a breakfast cereal to mac and cheese to even shampoo.

–Mike Fenn, AB staff blogger

Dong Doodles