GIRL POWER

Game designer Mike Mika’s three-year-old daughter wanted to play Donkey Kong as Pauline, with Mario as the damsel in distress. She couldn’t, of course, because the game wasn’t designed that way. But it nagged at Mika, so he found out how to hack the NES version’s ROM, redrew and replaced the sprites, swapped the ‘M’ on the bonus indicator with a ‘P’, and put a work-inprogress video up on YouTube. The video spread like wildfire across the Internet while Mika was showing his daughter the hack the next morning, his work having been picked up as a feminist symbol and a statement that girls can be the hero, too.