http://www.patrickscottpatterson.com/WomenKaylaThe Queen of Kong: Kayla Rose aims to master an arcade classic
Originally published May 17, 2013
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While modern-day video gaming now has a strong presence from women gamers on both the casual and competitive side, the classic arcade scene is still seemingly dominated by men. Documentary films and a sometimes constant barrage of stories about new world records on arcade relics have done little to change that perception. In this crowd of multi-day Q*bert marathons and perfect Pac-Man games stands San Francisco's Kayla Rose, a long time gamer aiming to reach the top of a revived arcade classic.
"I want to be the first female player to hit a Donkey Kong kill screen. I WILL hit a kill screen," she said.
Rose, a world traveler who studied California history and Biology at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley, started her journey up the video game ladder with an early home computer.
"The term gaming did not yet exist when I started playing video games," Kayla noted. "The earliest memories were playing Frogger, Dune and a few others on an Apple 2GS computer, also known as the 'dinosaur fossil'. This was before the mouse, so everything was done by key command. Green screen, huge monitor, floppy disk drive, frequent syntax errors, no internet connection and a really loud dot matrix color printer that used feed paper."
Kayla's video gaming would get a colorful upgrade a few years later when a full video game console came into her home.
"When the Sega Master System was introduced, we got one for Christmas," she recalled. "I remember spending hours playing with my older brother. The best games were Wonder Boy 3 and R-Type. To this day, I'm still a die-hard fan of the SMS. In its day, I still think it was better than Nintendo, because Nintendo always seemed to freeze or crash."
In August 2011, Kayla would be introduced to the very game that saved Nintendo of America as her boyfriend purchased an original Donkey Kong cabinet for his apartment.
"We started living together a few months later, so I had plenty of time to try it out," she said. "I watched him play for weeks. He seemed really into it and it looked like fun. Finally, I was brave enough to try it."
While Rose states that her earliest games created humorous moments, her scores soon began to increase. In November, Kayla and her boyfriend took a trip to the Kong Off II event in Denver, Colorado, where her ladder climbing skills began to gain public attention as she started playing one of the Kong machines at the event.
"I found myself in the groove, oblivious to anything going on around me," she said. "Level after level, board after board, people were starting to notice. It wasn't long before I had a crowd of people around me, watching me play in amazement, fascinated by what they were seeing. I breezed through every elevator board without any deaths, which got everyone's attention. When my game ended I found myself surrounded by a group of people cheering me on."
Recently, Kayla hit a personal best of 345,000 points and says she feels good about pushing her numbers closer and closer to the kill screen level.
"I didn't lose any lives on the elevator boards, so I feel good about where this is going," she said.
In addition to having fun and making friends with her Donkey Kong quest, Rose says the game has helped her in other ways.
"I spent so many years dedicating myself to electronic music. Eventually, I grew apart from music and started to focus on long term goals," Kayla said. "Priorities shifted toward health, finance, education, stability and personal establishment. At some point, I guess things became more serious than expected, but I didn't have a way to relieve day-to-day stress. My attempts to find another creative outlet failed, because I didn't know how to inspire the same passion I had with music. Years went by and I started thinking my inspiration was lost completely, then I knew I was lost. Something special happened when I started playing. It didn't happen overnight, but definitely clicked. Somehow, it sparked my interest and managed to ignite a flame. Maybe it's the fireballs."
As her kill screen pursuit continues, Kayla states that she is looking forward to getting to play in front of a crowd again later this year and hopes to see more women taking up play on the all-time classic.
"I look forward to playing at the next Kong Off," she added. "I really want to see more ladies playing. Let's throw up some scores. Queens of Kong, come out and play."
