Are you in love with gorillas with big pecs and lots of barrels? You’ll be thrilled at this news then. The world’s largest playable Donkey Kong arcade game opens on Friday. You’ll be able to see this approximately 20-foot video game from the first-floor welcome atrium of the World Video Game Hall of Fame—then climb to the second floor (you won’t need ladders) to play it.
The Hall of Fame is part of a major 90,000-square-foot expansion focusing on video games at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. The campus itself holds a playful collection of innovative architecture, with structures that resemble a Slinky toy, childhood blocks and more.
The Donkey Kong game is 370 percent bigger than the original game (fun fact: when released in 1981, Donkey Kong rescued Nintendo from a financial crisis). Players use a regular-sized control planner that looks just like the ‘80s joystick and buttons, and the game will run on a motherboard from an original Donkey Kong Cabinet, but the screen showing all the madcap action will be much larger than back in the day.
“The Donkey Kong arcade machine is nearly 20 feet tall, and part of it extends from the second floor down toward the first floor. It looks fairly big in photos, but it’s hard to get a real sense of just how massive it is until you’re standing at the base of it. It’s a game fit for Kong himself,” says Shane Rhinewald, senior director of public relations for the museum.
The Strong is named for Margaret Woodbury Strong, whose early 20th-century collections formed its basis—she collected dolls, dollhouses and toys. Her vision for the museum was something to be called the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum of Fascination, but she died before it could be realized. Today, the Strong is the “only collections-based museum in the world devoted solely to the history and exploration of play,” according to its website. Besides the new video game Hall of Fame, it offers the International Center for the History of Electronic Games and the National Toy Hall of Fame, as well as the world’s largest collection of historical materials related to play. Sounds like it’s time to book a visit!