How Donkey Kong 3 brings us too close to too many insects

Donkey Kong 3 (1983)

Donkey Kong 3 (1983)

Bugs, bugs, bugs... you’ll hate to hear this, but they are absolutely everywhere. It might even be that my house is bugged with listening devices… actually, I already know it is, I’m typing this on my phone right now and there’s a Google Home device next door to me. It’s 1984-meets-origami-wallart around here.

But I’m not talking about the electronic type of bug, oh no. I'm on about our constant struggle to keep human supremacy over our fellow partaker in earth’s space: insects. Yes, we do have to talk about insects, because there are about 2 million species in the world and a million of them are insects.

That’s right, insect species comprise half of all species of living things, compared to just 6,736 different types of mammals. I know you think I’m clever enough to have those facts waiting in my head, but I don’t - I just looked them up on Google. And now I am very scared.

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But it’s even worse than that. It’s obviously difficult for even the most dirt-under-the-fingernails dedicated professor to actually verify this, but we understand that there are 200 million insects for every single person on earth. Are you serious?! My calculator breaks when I try to multiply 200 million by 7 billion.

Well, strictly speaking that’s not true, but it starts giving me the letter “e” instead which obviously stands for error. Or maybe “eradication”. Either way, I think we can surmise that if those insects ever did put all their differences aside, banded together and took us on… well, I’m plenty tough, but I ain't tough enough to take on 200 million in a row, am I? It’d be like the scarab scenes from The Mummy.

I have it bad enough here in Ireland, even though the bugs you come up against here aren’t that big or bad really, in the grand scheme of things. I had to deal with some woodlice before, or pillbugs as my missus would call them. They’re not quite big enough to necessitate death by flamethrower, but they’ll still befoul your nice clothes and turn your wardrobe space into a dank, musty mess, so be sure to take them out early.

Moving further along the scale of disgustingness, you’ll definitely run into problems with silverfish, which aren’t silver. Nor are they fish. If you get these guys in your house, like I have before, then good luck to you because they’ll breed like rabbits on a long weekend. You'll be looking out for them, and killing them on pretty much a nightly basis until you think you’re safe. But then poof, they magically reappear again to make your life a misery.

You probably now think of me as a disgusting sort who lives in squalor, but I’m moving on to my next bug now and I know this one will resonate with everyone - spiders. Yes, yes, I know, they’re not insects per se. But they ain’t cute and cuddly puppies either, now are they?

And if you saw some of the chaps who've been appearing in my house lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking these fellas could eat a puppy whole. I will remind you that I’m in a country of a temperate climate, where pretty much nothing kills you. In Australia, you have to check your shoes every day in case a massive, beastly arachnid has nestled itself in there.

Australia, that’s one place I’ll never live, by God. It's probably the only country in the world where a house coming with a basement or cellar would actually lose some value - keep an old cupboard down there, and you can guarantee it’ll become a spider breeding ground for the biggest, hairiest, foulest beasts imaginable.

Christ, even just the thought of opening a dusty old press (that's Irish speak for cupboard) and seeing an enormous hairy bugger in there has me shuddering. Can you imagine if it jumped out at you? We don’t have anything like those distressing camel spiders or Sydney funnelwebs here, but have spiders generally been getting bigger or what?

I had to hoover a spider up the other day (because it would have just laughed at the old paper and glass trick, believe me) and the thing actually had sufficient strength to hang onto the wall for a few seconds, even with maximum suckage coming its way. Even when it finally went up into the tube, I had to apprehensively check the tank, just to make sure it had died. Its last hurrah was equal parts impressive and horrifying, like all great predators in nature I suppose. I don’t like to kill any of God’s creatures of course, but sometimes it really is me or them.

Hence I have every sympathy with the protagonist of Donkey Kong 3, Stanley, who needs to remove insects and pests from his greenhouse. Personally, if my greenhouse got overrun, I’d just let the bloody plants rot. And since we basically never saw Stanley again after this game, I’m thinking he should have taken my advice.

Donkey Kong 3 is a game formerly of the arcade, releasing at a time when colour television was still a novelty. It was later to be released on NES, which is the version I’m covering today. I can’t say I ever remember a Donkey Kong 2, but either way, Donkey Kong 3 is probably the most obscure DK game of all.

So what has Donkey Kong got to do with greenhouses and insects? Well, the game doesn’t really tell us, so I’ve tried to put it all together. I can only surmise that Donkey Kong, sick of being put on his backside by Mario, decided to go to Mario’s house and jump him, a surprise beatdown. Unfortunately, Mario was away on vacation, or doing his doctor training or officiating a tennis match or something, so DK had to settle for causing trouble at Mario’s neighbour’s house instead.

Hence the big old villainous ape has allied himself with some insects in an effort to wreck poor Stanley’s greenhouse. Stanley clocks this, however, and he’ll have to fight back against the ape, using bug spray on the insects to keep the plants safe, while also repelling Donkey Kong who hangs gaily over the action unfolding below.

Now, there are several things wrong here. Firstly, bug spray doesn’t work at all. You know that and I know that. You need something far more powerful to deal with bugs, and more powerful tools do exist in the Nintendo universe - he could have borrowed a flamethrower from Samus, or better again, Luigi’s vacuum cleaner.

Bug spray just angers the enemy and makes them fly even more erratically, which is to say, even more grotesquely. You wouldn’t try to shoot spray at a flying roach, now would you? It’ll be the last thing you ever do before it flies at you and you die of a terror-induced heart attack.

This seems to happen to poor old Stanley - whenever an insect makes any kind of contact with him, he seemingly dies of heart failure, along with a particularly sinister music jingle. He’s got two more lives to play with, which a few less than your average wolf spider, but if he touches two more bugs then that’s it - game over.

Anyway, you’ll have already "enjoyed" the bulk of the game by then, because this is another of those very early Nintendo games where there isn’t much to do beyond getting a high score. It’s fun to make your way up the greenhouse and get a win, which means putting Donkey Kong’s head in a beehive.

But, presuming the bees all sting the hell out of DK, this means they’ll all die shortly afterwards, right? Which is just another tragedy. So do yourself a favour: save the bees, and even all those other pests and bugs, and leave Donkey Kong 3 well alone.

28 February 2025