Donkey Kong: The Most Misunderstood Gorilla of the ’80s

Donkey Kong: Was It Really a Story About an Evil Gorilla?

Have you ever stopped to wonder whether the classic Donkey Kong story is actually the simple tale of an evil gorilla and a brave hero—or perhaps a pixelated social drama that spent decades cleverly disguised as an innocent platformer? Because the longer you think about it, the more you start to suspect that this isn’t a kidnapping story at all. It’s a tale of systemic oppression, cages, chains, and a plumber with a suspiciously dark past.

Let’s imagine a young Jumpman—later known as Mario—who one day decides that something is missing from his life. A normal person might choose a hamster, a parakeet, or at most a cat with emotional issues. Our hero, however, decides to go several tons further and somehow acquires a full-sized gorilla, a creature weighing more than the entire construction site he works on. At this point alone, the first warning light should already be flashing, because it’s difficult to describe this as a spontaneous yet responsible life choice.

Instead of providing Donkey Kong with a proper habitat, care, and perhaps therapy for primates with a difficult childhood, Mario—according to the available evidence—keeps him locked in a cage and even restrains him with shackles. That sounds less like a wholesome pet adoption and more like the plot of a medieval drama about a cruel dungeon overseer. And if we add the suggestion that the plumber may have also had a whip in hand, the entire situation starts to resemble one of those intervention TV programs where a narrator with a serious voice says: “What you are about to witness may be disturbing.”

In that reality, Donkey Kong is not the villain but a gorilla burdened by years of accumulated emotions, sitting in a cage and reflecting on the injustice of the world, wondering whether he truly deserved life in a pixelated prison with an inadequate banana supply.

Pauline’s kidnapping suddenly stops looking like an act of mindless aggression and starts resembling a desperate cry for attention—a disastrously planned therapy session in which barrels happen to be the only available form of communication.

And the barrels themselves begin to take on an entirely new meaning. Are they really weapons of mass destruction, or are they emotional letters sent in Mario’s direction, each one saying: “Look what you’ve turned me into.”

Mario, meanwhile, instead of taking a moment to reflect on his life choices, charges forward with superhuman determination, jumping over everything in his path: fire, architectural absurdities, and—most importantly—moral responsibility.

It’s also impossible not to notice that Mario possesses multiple lives, which in the context of this story starts to look like a metaphor for privilege, while Donkey Kong only gets one—and that one life is put on the line when the entire structure begins to collapse.

The ending, where the terrified gorilla falls from a great height, can be interpreted not as the triumph of good over evil, but as a symbolic moment where the system once again defeats the individual trying to escape the cage.

So perhaps next time we see a flying barrel, we shouldn’t treat it merely as another obstacle to jump over. Maybe we should see it as a dramatic question thrown at the world:

Was Donkey Kong really a monster... or merely the victim of a plumbing regime that never once bothered to listen to its gorilla?