Donkey Kong is DOOMED! | The SCIENCE of... Donkey Kong Barrels

dear rare wait hold on i want to make sure i get this right because it's kind of a tricky one and i've gotten these wrong before let me just okay one second hmm okay so it's created by miyamoto that makes sense oh in 1995 nintendo bought a 25 share in rare that's that's pretty interesting oh but in 2002 microsoft bought the company outright so who owns the donkey kong country franchise oh here we go no it's definitely nintendo not rare rare made the first few donkey kong countries but nintendo owns everything got it okay take two dear nintendo hi it's me austin i just moved across the entire united states which is why it's taken me a long time to get this video out but darn it here it is and you know what i have a beef with you donkey kong country it's a good old classic makes no goshity dangity darnity sense and it's this the donkey kong country barrel cannons make no gossipy dangly darnity sense some of you may think that giant gorillas are the things that are the most common in the donkey kong franchise but that could not be further from the truth in fact the best game in the series donkey kong country 2 had practically no gorillas in it until the very end which means arguably barrels are the biggest star of donkey kong they've been there since the beginning and they are still around and these things are bloody dangerous and in order to understand why all you have to do is listen to me right now well i tell you specifically what we're looking at is what is frankly one of the best mechanics at least in the first game which is the barrel cannons which are used to add a unique element to the platforming sections by letting you turn yourself into a freaking ballistic missile and i love it so much but in reality these things would be tremendously unsafe monstrosities and in order to unpack why we're going to have to talk about physics although before we get there we're going to talk first and foremost about human cannonballs a thing that yes for a time actually existed for a while we used to literally put people into cannons and shoot them out kinda in actuality this is a borderline magic trick more than it is a feat of strength or human endurance while it looks like these people are being shot out like a bullet because there's smoke and stuff what's really happening is inside this big long barrel is a spring with a platform that accelerates them comparatively slowly along the entire length of the cannon this long barrel allows them to accelerate much more slowly than say an explosion would and the smoke and sound is basically there just for show and then they land in a net or water or something and you go wow cool and then you never think about it again this is very likely not how the barrels in donkey kong country work and even if they did it would not matter which is something we will get into later i promise first we have to do our basic pixel measurements to get a sense for what we're even doing here because without a sense of scale nothing matters and you'd think in a cartoonish game with anthropomorphic animals in a fantastic setting it would be kind of a problem to find a solid frame of reference but that is where you're wrong not only is there a frame of reference i can use it's relevant in the games i want to measure no need to try to move from 3d games to 2d games at the very end of donkey kong country 2 your process is ranked by cranky kong where if you're anything like me he shames you and tells you that you suck especially against link yoshi and mario which how how is yoshi better at video games than link look at those stupid dinosaur arms what the [Music] okay that is not the point the point is that what we have right here is one good old mario jumpman mario with a canon height of 155 centimeters which at a height of 72 pixels in this really garbage screenshot makes diddy just two pixels shy of the surprisingly short jump man himself which makes him about 150 centimeters tall now we're cooking transferring this to actual in-game footage on the switch snes emulator we get a sweet 110 pixels per meter making pixels slightly smaller than a centimeter excellent so we gotta do a few things now one we gotta figure out how fast a barrel on average shoots its victims out we can use that to reverse engineer the minimum g-forces the occupants suffer which i will explain in a second first the speed donkey kong barrels are a little unrealistic already because they keep a constant speed once you've exited the barrel but whatever i'll let that slide this little row of bananas here makes a really easy place to measure the speed from thankfully a speed that remains pretty consistent across at least the snes titles traveling a distance of 196 pixels from one banana to the next in four frames or 1.77 meters in .0667 seconds take d over t and you get 26.52 meters per second which is pretty darn fast that is over 60 miles per hour but here's where things get really tough because in order to get this speed our little gorillas and monkeys gotta like get up to this speed they start from a complete standstill to full speed just in the space of this barrel a barrel that at best has only a meter and a half of acceleration room and that is being generous by the way since these monkeys also take up actual space inside the barrel but i want to give them the maximum chance knowing that they go from 0 meters per second to 26.52 meters per second over this distance we have all we need to use this formula to determine acceleration it's been a while since i have explained it but acceleration is specifically the rate of change of speed it is not the speed itself and its acceleration change of speed that makes you feel forces a baseball hitting you changes its velocity rapidly and puts that force into your body giving you a bruise that is the power of acceleration now when we plug all of our numbers into this baby and hit the equal sign we hit 229 meters per second squared over 0.57 seconds which in layman's terms is freaking fast these people would be pulling over 23 g's which is pretty rough and could easily cause serious injury not to mention the power of the impact once they actually ram into the target that they are aimed at and hit it like a freaking gorilla cannonball but it gets worse than that if you start to pick things apart like how if you shoot from one barrel straight into another you don't fall at all you just go in practically a straight line which is not how things following a ballistic trajectory behave using another formula for acceleration this one we can measure the gravity of the game which while the monkey is traveling this way we'll be pulling it down this direction making it follow a curved downward trajectory using this barrel to measure with we can figure out that our little chimp falls about 12 meters in .73 seconds giving us a tremendously strong gravity even for a platform game of 44 meters per second squared given that our little cannon blast here is only traveling at 26.5 meters per second forward about 10 meters off the ground this means instead of making it the full 37 meters from one barrel to the next our little chimps are gonna smack into the ground 20 whole meters short not even close so is it possible to make it into the barrel at all by being shot from another barrel if gravity has its way sure you can tilt the barrel up a bit and give it an arc but there is another way [Music] if the cannonball or in this case gorilla is moving fast enough it will enter the barrel at the other end of the stage before it has had a chance to get pulled far enough downward by gravity to miss meaning if we're being generous we have to go from one end to the other before the monkeys have fallen uh let's say 72 centimeters about half the barrel's length down meaning our little monkeys are gonna have to reach the barrel in just 179 milliseconds has to get there before gravity has done too much damage which means they will have to be traveling 209 meters per second or over 60 percent the speed of sound and what's worse they'll have to accelerate under the same constraints as before meaning they would have to reach mach 0.6 in just a tenth of a second meaning that our little monkeys if this were the case would be experiencing over 1400 g's which sounds bad but apparently bullets experience over 10 times that so it's not too terrible that being said uh it's not it's not great either the average silverback lowland gorilla weighs about 300 pounds or 136 kilos meaning donkey kong himself would be experiencing and ultimately unleashing 1.9 million newtons of force this is equivalent to the thrust of the space shuttle at liftoff this ape would be turned into powdered ape in no time yes i did it who knew that shooting monkeys and gorillas out of barrels would be so infeasible i did it why did i do it why did i ruin monkeys shooting out of barrels because of animal antics in donkey kong country 2. screw that level sincerely austin and i want to throw out a personal shout out to my patrons who made this show possible they really do i would not have survived the revenue drop from the advent of covet if it had not been for my patrons they literally saved this show i'd like to put out a personal shout out to jared beecher nicholas spelinger and marissa reznik for contributing a ton at the einstein level and what's more on the rare occasion that i need props for this show like this giant new york city transit authority graphic standards manual that i bought for my ninja episode i will be giving them away to a random patron every month i just i just do not need more things cluttering my house if you'd like to be a patron of the science head on over to patreon.com thescienceyt or click the link in the description bye [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 676,602

Rating: 4.8741708 out of 5

Keywords: donkey kong, donkey kong country, donkey kong country 2, mario, super smash bros, smash bros, donkey kong barrels, donkey kong barrel cannon, donkey kong speedrun, nintendo, donkey kong game, donkey kong gameplay, the science of donkey kong, cannon, cannons, science of cannons, the science, the science of, game theorists, game theory, matpat, kong, donkey kong country theme, donkey kong country returns, donkey kong country tropical freeze

Id: 9e2T4wGRrEk

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Walter_Alias]

5:19 Actually it's slightly under 60mph

5:42 Gorillas are apes, not monkeys

6:23 0.11s

7:39 Gorillas are Gorillas, not chimps

8:47 0.0145s. 179ms it the time it takes them to cross the 37m between the barrels which is irrelevant unless they have jetpacks because all of the acceleration is in the first 1.5m .