Donkey Kong is one of the most popular video games. Despite its popularity and proper documentations over the decades, Shigeru Miyamoto just made public some of the game's trivia that weren't recorded in the books yet.
Sure, Donkey Kong gave birth to the infamous Super Mario and is one of the games that made Nintendo's success but there are just some short stories from creators themselves that weren't documented yet or maybe it was said before but nobody was paying attention.
GamaSutra.com reports that Shigeru Miyamoto shared some interesting trivia about the game that nobody could have ever known until now. The interview was published in Japanese via Nintendo's website. The trivia concerns the process on how Donkey Kong was made. It is important to note that the source site is in Japanese so some thought might have been lost along the translation process but nonetheless, we also thank Wired.com for the efforts on translation.
What were the trivia?
Miyamoto made known to all that at a certain point in development, Donkey Kong supposedly features English voice clips. The woman, or Miyamoto would like to call 'lady', kidnapped by Donkey Kong was supposed to cry for help with the actual words: 'Help, help!' Also, when Mario jumps off a barrel the princess was supposed to cheer, 'Nice!' Some feedback within the employees said that how the words were pronounce were a bit off. So they tested it on a person who natively speaks English, some professor, and the result seems to sound like, 'Kelp, Kelp!' - as in seaweed.
The technology back then was 8-bit so voice on video games would sound very weird indeed so what they did was remove the cry for help and replaced it with a growl that when you hear sounds like an 8-bit garble and another set of 8-bit notes replaced the word 'Nice!'
There you go, some trivia we haven't heard before. For a detailed report with decent translation from Japanese, you should check out Wired.com's artice. Below is a gameplay from Donkey Kong, go check out the sound effects:
