As a gamer dad, there’s nothing better than when your child asks you to play a videogame. I remember when my son asked if I wanted to play Atari with him. It was the day after I hooked up an Atari 2600 and taught him to play Combat. It was short-lived. He likes games, but not as much as he likes trains. No matter how much I try to encourage him, he really doesn’t get into them.

*Mike Mika, chief creative officer at Other Ocean Interactive, is a veteran designer who has worked on games from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox 360.*My daughter, however, jumps at the chance to play games with her old man. She’s only 3, but she’s always exhibited a keen interest in games. Recently, she took a fancy to Ron Gilbert's new puzzle adventure game The Cave. While she prefers not to play, she insists that I do and then she bosses me around in the game. She’s confident enough, however, to play some of the older arcade games. She’s not too shabby with Pac-Man; her favorite version is Pac-Man Arrangement.

But out of all of the older games, she most enjoys playing Donkey Kong. Maybe it was because it was the first game we really played together, or the fact that she watched the King of Kong documentary with me one afternoon from start to finish. Maybe it’s because Mario looks just like her Grandpa. Whatever the case, we’ve been playing Donkey Kong together for a while. She’s not very good at it, but insists on playing it over and over again until she finally hands me the joystick in total frustration.

Finally, one day after work, she asked to play Donkey Kong, only this time she raised a pretty innocent and simple question: “How can I play as the girl? I want to save Mario!”

It made sense. We had just played Super Mario Bros. 2 on the NES a few days before, and she became obsessed with playing as Princess Toadstool. So to go back to Donkey Kong, I can see how natural it seemed to ask the question. I explained to her that Donkey Kong, while similar, is not the same game. On this occasion, I really could tell that she was disappointed. She really liked Donkey Kong, and really liked playing as Princess Toadstool. We left it at that and moved on.

But that question! It kept nagging at me. Kids ask parents all the time for things that just aren’t possible. But this time, this was different. I’m a game developer by day. I could do this. The next day I talked it through with my partner in crime, Kevin Wilson. We work together on professional projects as well as hobby efforts. We recently finished making a 2600 game with author Ernie Cline for a contest centered around his book Ready Player One. Wilson is very knowledgeable about the NES, which had a similar processor to the 2600. He pointed me in the direction of a couple of tools, one of which was Tile Layer Pro.

Tweaking the Pauline sprites and palettes in Tile Editor Pro. Image courtesy Mike Mika

Mario is made up of four eight- by eight-pixel tiles. So each frame of animation is created with four tiles, each having three colors from the same palette. Two nights after my daughter’s request, I was knee deep in the Donkey Kong ROM, trying to make sense of the graphics. If I was going to replace the sprites, I needed to go all in. I needed to reduce Pauline’s height – she is three tiles tall to Mario’s two, a throwback to when Donkey Kong was going to be a Popeye game. I managed to reduce her height by taking some liberty with her design. I kept the head and hair pretty much intact. But, without any sort of onion-skin animation tools, I was animating blind with only the Mario sprites as reference.

It was 12 a.m. when I started, and I was so in the zone that I had replaced most of the game’s sprites by morning. When I woke up, I finished off the sprites, then swapped the palettes. Only when I played the game, the colors of other objects were all messed up. It appeared that the colors used by Mario were shared with ladders and the pop-up scores. So I found every instance of those sprites and replaced them with the Pauline "white" color.

Finally, I replaced the "M" next to the bonus indicator with a “P” for Pauline.

As I was working, I posted my progress to Facebook. It was definitely something I knew my friends would get a kick out of. Before I was even done with the mod, my friends were getting excited, which put me into overdrive. I couldn’t really share the ROM, so I made a movie to kind of show off the changes for my friends. I basically copied my initial Facebook text to the description and just let it ride.

Oblivious to the kind of attention it started to get, I turned my attention to the reason behind all of this in the first place: My daughter. Just like clockwork, she woke up and sat on my lap asking to play Donkey Kong. Only this time, she could play as Pauline. She was excited! But for all she knew, I just figured out how to get Pauline to work. And that was fine. I wasn’t expecting it to change her life. We played for a bit. And some more. And again later. You know what? She really did seem to enjoy the game more. For whatever reason, she was more motivated to play as Pauline than as Mario. I can’t read into that too much, because it does feel a bit like a new game to her still. So we’ll see how she does after a week with it.

Meanwhile, a couple of my friends decided to tweet about it and post some of the work-in-progress to Reddit. By the time I started to catch up with all my social feeds, something insane had happened. This little mod exploded. I didn’t follow the whole Tropes vs. Women thing, but I saw a lot of references to it. In my wildest dreams, I just expected a bunch of fellow coders to chat about the merits of the mod. I never expected it to ignite a gender-role debate.

The comments under the YouTube video can, at times, be just as horrific as they are encouraging. While some of the things people have said about my daughter are almost comically inappropriate, they are still downright disturbing. One person wished her “dead” because “it would do the world a favor and be one less feminist in our future.”

My kids are awesome. They are too young to understand any of the things people are saying. And after all, it’s the internet. It comes with the territory. It got me thinking about Metroid. If the internet was more prevalent back when thousands of boys discovered that, all along, they were playing as a woman, maybe Nintendo would have gotten just as much hate mail?

Having kids is incredible. And having a daughter is something special. I get the opportunity to see the world through her eyes. And if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that the world could be just a bit more accommodating. And that if something as innocuous as having Mario be saved by Pauline brings out the crazy, maybe we aren’t as mature in our view of gender roles as we should be.

I didn’t set out to push a feminist agenda, or try to make a statement. I just wanted to keep that little grin lit up on my daughter’s face every time we sit down to play games together.