Marcel Winatschek

The Girl in the Tower Finally Gets a Story

Pauline has been waiting at the top of that scaffold since 1981, screaming for help that arrives in the form of a pudgy plumber in overalls. She never asked for this. Somewhere in the margins of Nintendo’s earliest mythology there’s a whole other story—her story—and the fact that it took this long to tell it says something unflattering about who game designers assumed was watching.