In the end it is Diddy Kong’s somersault-jump that exposes the unreality of the situation. The Donkey Kong Country series of games are about a group of primates who share some form of familial relationship despite wide taxonomical differences. The series’ titular character, Donkey, is moreover, a villain in his other appearances for Nintendo, although one whose motivations have crept up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (and thus further into the decadence of western consumerism) from the enforced intimacy of his early kidnapping of human women (another taxonomically distinct primate) to his more recent attempts at self-actualisation via late-capitalism’s ultimate good, the ownership of a product.

‘But I still hold onto the dear knowledge that I can truly own the things I possess, that by consumption I can achieve mastery.’

In this case the product is a toy version of his most dogged rival, Mario Mario (brother to famed landlord and vacuumist Luigi Mario), and the form of his ownership is both a circumvention of the dogma and a realisation of the truth of the rugged capitalist philosophy. Donkey uses the only capital he has available to him, the physicality of his body, to take forcefully that which he has been told is needed to make him whole. I am talking of course about Mario vs. Donkey Kong, which is a completely different series of games to the Donkey Kong Country games. The question, however, is what Donkey’s self-actualisation consists of? Is it the (short-lived as it is) ownership of a product, which is both a synechdoche and a conspirator of his nemesis and as such can only degrade him inside by its presence in his life, or is it in the acting of his most famous role. Is Donkey only himself once more because he escapes his couch-based torpor and climbs atop a construction site flinging barrels like it was the good old days once again?

At this point it becomes useful to engage in a Freudian analysis, as although psychoanalytic theory is demonstrably untrue and provides unhelpful and dangerous models of human behaviour it allows me to make certain points that I would like to make using a shared and widely understood critical language. The mere fact that it is linguistically adjacent to psychology is a mere cherry on the cake for providing legitimacy to my dearly held but unexamined ideas. Donkey’s failure in the first Mario vs. Donkey Kong results in his return to kidnapping in later games, although it is pique rather than lust that drives him now. Pauline denies his ego rather than his id when she prefers the representation of Mario to the representation of Donkey. It is not the visceral lack but the ideological that Donkey suffers; he is a better person than he was because his violence, like that of the self-defined gamer, is predicated on an identity he has constructed for himself and not those baser passions that plague the irrational mind.

Donkey isn’t even the star of most of the Country games. Although the first game involves his search for his stolen banana horde by the second and third games it is Donkey himself who has been kidnapped, classifying him into the same category as his possessions, a trick that as we have seen above Donkey has himself fallen for by the release of Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis. Donkey is an object, to be saved possessed and mastered; It is only right that as the player masters each game in the series through the ownership ritual of play that that game’s star moves into the category of things. Capitalism is a force of reification if it is anything, and it is only Dixie who can resist it by invoking the rites of motherhood, that un-commodifiable productive force, as well as the universal destructivity of the sacred feminine as personified by divine Kali. It is Dixie, armed with the knowledge that the ultimate object in the DKC universe, the banana (now shown to be the taxanomic cousin of the bannana bird), possesses a life-force and will-to-power itself who can finally defeat K. Rool and bring an end to the cycle. There were to be no more games on the SNES after her.

Dixie is the poster girl for the reclamation of the word ‘chav’ from terrible middle class people who think that the poor are great as long as they aren’t, you know, visible or themselves.

It is not that Dixie is problematic per-se, but her existence is one that sets the world on edge. Her ponytail spin is a jank mechanic, which when it works destroys the game-world as it is known to be. It makes perfect sense, of course, as with all jank; a combo of effects that, once placed upon the board can punish the opponent for failing to foresee. It is perfectly possible, but just very unlikely, that a monkey might have long blond hair pulled into a Croydon facelift. And it is eminently sensible, once you have accepted this set of affairs, that this ponytail should act as a helicopter blade that can slow one’s descent. Dixie is using what she has and making the best of it in a world that thinks that she shouldn’t exist. She is the working class woman writ small but visible at last, capable and resourceful and defiantly herself.

If the Donkey Kong Country series of games are, mechanically, about jumping on crocodiles then the Donkey Kong series of games are about striving for a pinnacle of existence. In both cases it is Donkey, or, eventually, Dixie and Pauline, who are in the ideal state of being (which is confusing as, as we have previously noted, all of these characters are taxonomically distinct). By jumping on crocodiles with a higher primate character the player is enacting the supremacy of the mammal forebrain over the reptilian hindbrain. The gameplay itself encodes the message; your baser urges will tear you down. Yet in the Donkey Kong games Donkey’s baser urges have lifted him high and it is Mario who is forever climbing to attain what he cannot be intrinsically. The truth of actualisation is therefore suggested to be neither one thing nor the other, it can be gained only through the immersion of the human in the animal, and in the primacy of reason over instinct. And yet, whatever one tries, one will always fall from one’s goal-state; actualisation under capitalism is to become an object oneself. A commodity, a brand or a trinket.

It is a horrifying vision, one which we cannot blame Dixie for wishing to destroy, yet a vision is all it is. In the end it is Diddy Kong’s somersault-jump that exposes the unreality of the situation. The out-of-body joy it hints at, as in freefall he springs forward again is the clue. This is an evolution in game design, not a revolution of the spirit. Diddy opens up new areas in platformers that were not accessible before. In the end, these games were not a metaphor, but instead arguably the best platformer series of the 16 bit era.

8.5/10