Welcome to the Blade blog Culture Shock, a three-times-a-week riff by Pop Culture Editor Kirk Baird on pop culture news, events, and trends. The blog will appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings here, with the odd night or off-day posting if something is merited.
I generally try and steer clear of personal stories in the blog — that's not what Culture Shock is about — but I make the occasional exception, like today.
Five years ago Saturday I married my wife Sarah. And what does that have to do with pop culture? Nothing. But how she said yes to the marriage question does.
Like many guys contemplating the specifics of their marriage proposal, I wanted a unique and personal way to pop the question. No flowers. No violins. No ring in a piece of dessert. It had to be something Sarah wouldn't forget and, most importantly, something to which she would favorably respond.
While casually Web surfing one day looking for some ideas, I happened upon a site that offered the best marriage proposal method I'd seen yet: Donkey Kong.
Seriously.
In the original 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game, the ubiquitous video game character Mario -- then known as "Jumpman" -- risks his life to rescue the girl, later named Pauline, from the clutches of the love-starved gorilla Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong has taken Pauline to the top of a building still under construction, with Mario in hot pursuit. The hero of the game risks his four lives to save the girl, jumping over speeding barrels, avoiding roaming balls of fire, riding fast-moving elevators, and clobbering tubs of cement with a hammer. And all for a brief moment when Mario finally saves Pauline, and sends Donkey Kong crashing down onto his head after removing rivets from the building's girders. And it then starts all over again. (So much for the happy ending.)
So I read about a guy who had a game programmer rewrite the coding to Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 — you know, the 1970s-'80s game system most people had prior to Nintendo. With the new coding, after completing the first level in Donkey Kong, instead of going to the second stage in the game, the screen formed a series of hearts made of red girders, with Mario and Pauline at the top, and the question, "will you marry me [insert her name here]?". It was brilliant, different, and totally me, as a classic gamer and unabashed dork.
I mean, I still had an actual Atari 2600 to play the game.
I contacted the guy who planned to use the modified Donkey Kong as his marriage proposal. He asked me to wait until after he popped the question via the game to his girlfriend. I agreed and, with his permission, I had the programmer change a few lines in the game's code to personalize it for me. It now said, "will you marry me sarah?" I also contacted someone else to create a personalized box and sticker for the Donkey Kong game cartridge.
Everything arrived several weeks before I planned to propose, so I kept the game and box hidden away in a drawer. Meanwhile, the guy who came up with the idea posted online that his girlfriend played the modified Donkey Kong and said yes to its in-game marriage proposal. I was feeling pretty good about my chances by now.
There was only one problem: My wife doesn't play video games. She's since marginally embraced the Wii, but other than a quick round of tennis or baseball there's really nothing about video games that interests her. When I asked her to play this new Donkey Kong game "with a special screen," I shouldn't have been surprised by her reply: "No."
I was stunned anyway.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because I don't like video games. I'm not any good at them."
"But you'll like this one," I assured her.
"No. I don't want to play."
My wife has a stubborn streak, and I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere with her. Nevertheless, I attempted a few more times to convince her to play, just asking her to get past the first level. She wouldn't do it, convinced that her video game skills were so bad she would quickly fail.
"I'll die before I ever make it up to the top of the screen."
Sarah instead suggested I play the game for her. Taking the Atari joystick from her hand, that's just what I did, and a minute later I was at the top of the screen. Just as the red girders formed a heart, I turned to her to watch her expression: She was briefly stunned as she read the question and saw me opening a small box with her engagement ring inside. Moments later she said "yes," and 10 months later she said "I do."
Saturday I plan to play the game again, like I always do on our anniversary. And, just like every year, I will ask my wife to play too. She never does. And she probably never will.
It doesn't matter anymore, I suppose. Like Mario, I ended up with the girl just the same.
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First Published April 16, 2010, 4:12 a.m.