Game Theory - How DEADLY Is Donkey Kong's Punch?

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

How DEADLY is Donkey Kong’s punch? It’s one of his most iconic moves in Smash, and now he’s back in Donkey Kong Bananza and he’s stronger than ever. But, how strong is it REALLY? Join Game Theory Host Tom as he finds out the answer today!

How deadly is Donkey Kong's punch? It's one of his most iconic moves in Smash Bros. And now he's back in Donkey Kong Bonanza and he is stronger than ever, destroying anything that gets in his path. But how strong is it really? Today, we're going to find out. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that smashes the environment with science,

although not sure my world smashing brain would put up much of a fight against the world smashing brawn that is Donkey Kong. He may not have always been known for talking with his fists, mostly just jumping on his enemies like his sworn rival Mario, but ever since his appearance in 1999 Super Smash Brothers, D.K.'s charge punch has remained a powerful force to be reckoned with. And now, with his triumphant return in Donkey Kong Bonanza, we finally get to use the full power of his fists,

destroying the environment like you're a villain in an 80s cartoon. The pure destructive force of D.K.'s fist seems overwhelming, But the question is, is it? You see, Nintendo has a habit of, let's say, skirting realism for the sake of, quote, unquote, fun. But you know what I find fun? Physics. Especially the physics of an 800-pound gorilla with weird workplace relationships. So, I figured it was time for me to sit down and do the math for myself to figure out how powerful is DK smash.

You might think this is going to require us to use one of our favorite formulas on this channel. FMA. Force equals mass times acceleration. But actually, we need something a little... Biefier. See, FMA focuses on an object in constant acceleration. However, we're focusing on a singular punch, which doesn't have a continuous motion. It stops once it makes impact. And the force applied during that impact is what we're after. Luckily, there is a formula for that too. And it looks like this. F equals delta p over delta T. Basically, the change in momentum

divided by the change in time. And to figure out that first bit, that change in momentum, we need two things. The mass and the velocity at the time of impact. That's a lot of small pieces to find. So, we'd best make like Donkey Kong and start collecting them. And we've got to start somewhere, so let's start with the mass. In DK 64's final boss battle, the MC announces DK's weight as £800. There is a slight dispute over this on the internet, because according to some people,

Donkey Kong Country 2's player guide has his weight set to £450 pounds. But I read all 129 pages of that thing and I couldn't find it anywhere. So, 800 pounds or 363 kilograms, it is. Nice. First puzzle piece found. Although, D.K. isn't going to get to put all of his weight behind a punch. So what we need to do is calculate something called his effective mass,

which is the weight of Donkey Kong's body that will actually go into the punch. It's not just the weight of the arm either. That will heavily limit the amount of force. You want to get as much weight behind. you as you can. By rotating your body like boxers do, you can throw significantly more weight behind each blow. Looking at DK's punch specifically, he's using a punch type known as a rear hook, which is a kind of punch that is thrown with your dominant hand from behind in an arcing motion. Interestingly enough, while the rear hook often looks like the strongest punch, it's actually wasting a lot of time, energy and effective mass compared to just straight punches. But nonetheless, that's what D.K. likes to do, so that's what we have to work with.

On average, a professional boxer can get about 14.88% plus or minus 6.74% of their body mass into a good rear hook. Given we're seeing DK punch through literal rocks, or through my face in a game of smash, I'm going to go with the higher end and say he maxes out at the 21.62% level, which puts his effective mass at about 172.95 pounds or 78.48.8 kilogram. Boom, there's another piece. And it's not a small one either. That's like having a whole. Hampshire sheep thrown at your face.

For reference, Mike Tyson at the height of his career, weighed 220 pounds or 100 kilograms, meaning his rear hook at the top end could have carried an effective mass of 47.56 pounds or 21.62 kilograms. Just over a quarter of D.K.'s power. And I don't think any of us really fancy getting a hit from Tyson, let alone D.K. Well, unless you're Jake Paul, I suppose.

Now it's time to calculate the velocity of D.K.'s fists. Going frame by frame, DK takes about 13 frames to throw a punch from its furthest back point to its target. With the game usually running at 60 frames per second, that means it happens in 0.22 seconds. But that's just the time it takes for the punch to impact. The velocity requires us to also calculate how far the punch is actually traveling. And that requires some other stats about DK, namely his wingspan. You see, when DK gets ready to punch, he pulls all the way back, even shifting his weight before launching. forward, bringing his fist across his full wingspan. Now, when it comes to humans' wingspan

is pretty easy to figure out. Typically, a human's wingspan is the same length as their height. Not always, mind you, my wingspan is actually three inches shorter, but nevertheless, it's a pretty good baseline. Gorillas, on the other hand, have much larger wingspans, usually averaging a 35% increase compared to their height. Of course, I knew that wouldn't necessarily apply to Donkey Kong. So, I pulled out the pixel measurements to test Bonanza specifically. And what I found is that D-K, is well above the average. His wingspan is a whopping, 85% larger than his height. That is an insane reach.

He'd definitely be winning against Tyson now, or maybe he'd like to take on LeBron James instead. But 85% of what, exactly? We're still lacking the actual measurements. Well, this is where I ran into some issues. DK size is, let's call it, inconsistent across games. Comparing him to our officially confirmed Canon Mario height of 1.55 mrs. meters or 5 foot and 1 inch, in Mario Kart, DK's about 7 foot 2.

In Mario Party, he's around 8 foot. In Mario versus Donkey Kong, he's 8 foot 6, and in Smash Ultimate, he's 10 foot 2. However, it is widely agreed upon that DK's height while fully standing up is actually 7 foot 10. In Bonanza, we see him crouch next to characters like Cranky Kong, maintaining the same height difference that we've seen from him in other parts of the franchise. So, he's not taller or shorter in this game. either. So, we're going to stick with this for our measurements. This puts DK's wingspan at 14 foot

and 3 inches and his punch velocity at about 44 miles per hour, or about 19.74 meters per second. That gives us the first of the many parts of our equation. Delta P equals 78.48 kilograms multiplied by 19.74 meters per second, which equals 1,549 kilogram meters per second. per second. Now it's just the change in time we need. And fortunately, this one's a little easier to figure out. Going frame by frame once again, we can see that while the impact happens in a single frame, it takes seven frames for his arm and fist to fully decelerate. Which means DK is going from 19.74 meters per second to zero meters per second in just 0.12 seconds. So by plugging that into our formula, we find that DK's punch has an impact force of 12,9808 neutens, or about 2,9102

pounds of force. For reference, the human skull is estimated to be able to withstand up to 6,227 newtons before completely shattering. D.K. would not only break a person skull, he would shatter it twice over. No wonder poor Nesco's flying off the stage after DK charges up. If anything, I'm surprised smash characters aren't throwing themselves off the stage. The fall is probably safer. And things only get more deadly when you consider the main gimmick of this game.

The Bonanza transformations. When Pauline sings certain songs, D.K. transforms into one of five different animals to give him new ability. Sometimes it's an elephant who sucks up dirt with its trunk. Sometimes it's an ostrich that can glide, a zebra that can run fast, or a snake that can double jump. And then there's the first and arguably simplest transformation, Kong Bonanza. A gorilla.

Yeah, he may just look like a bigger gorilla, but the whole point of this power up is he becomes so much stronger, able to break things he can't normally. So, thanks to this huge boost in size and strength, what kind of forces are we now playing with? Well, by using this moment right here, I was able to calculate that DK's height increases by around 52% instantly. But once again, this is where DK's size inconsistencies come into play. See, while his height increases by 52%, his wingspan actually increases by 93%, leading to his wingspan being a gargantuan 27 feet and 7 inches. or 8.4 meters. However, despite this new massive distance his punches now have to travel, his increased strength

has somehow allowed him to keep his 44 mile per hour speeds. The only challenging part now is figuring out what his new mass is, because it's clear that different parts of him grow different amounts. And without the game files being readily available for me to shove into Blender like I usually do, it's not going to be that simple to figure out. Instead, I took a bunch of extra measurements from DK. His head, his chest, his waist, his feet. And from that, the best estimation I could calculate was that he's grown on average around 72% in total when accounting for the various differences.

But while his size may have gone up by that amount, that's not going to be the same for his mass. Because of something we've talked about a few times on this channel, the square cube law. What this basically boils down to is that even though his size has increased by 1.72 times, his weight would actually increase by 1.72 to the third time. So, if he weighed 800 pounds before in Kong Bonanza form, he's going to weigh 4,070 pounds, which sounds like a lot. But it's actually just the same weight as a giraffe. Heavy, but not crazy, heavy.

But now we've got to convert that into effective mass like before, which is only 21.62% giving us an effective punching mass of 880 pounds or 399 kilograms. Yeah, D-K is going from punching with the weight of a sheep to the weight of his former self. But with that, we have the last piece of our puzzle. And plugging them all into our impact equation, we can see that in Kong Bonanza form, DK's punch has an impact force of 65,403 Newton or 14,702 pounds of force. I don't even know how I'm going to begin to quantify that. But, you know me, I'm damn sure going to try.

See, other than the transformations, there is one other mechanic that makes D.K. Bonanza stand out. It's destructible environment. Donkey Kong can smash almost anything and everything in this game. So I figured, let's take a look at some of the terrain he can destroy to see whether it gives us any kind of understanding of the numbers we've just calculated. There are several types of terrain in this game, like sand, snow, mud, but the one that caught my attention was the rock. Specifically, these barrier rocks that block off certain areas. They are some of the more challenging rocks to smash, but shocker, barrier isn't a real type of rock. Don't worry though.

With enough digging or punching, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what kind of rock this is. Let's start with the location. Inga Isle, where the game takes place, seems to be a volcanic island as evidenced by the large mound in the centre, the fact that it appears in the middle of the ocean, and, you know, there are lava levels. That makes these hardened walls that cut through the rest of the stone and dirt, volcanic dikes. Which is hardened magma flow that falls vertically. into some kind of crevice.

Dykes are most commonly made of basalt or granite, because both are made from cooling magma or lava, with basalt being made from lava rapidly cooling against the air, and granite being caused by slowly cooling magma. However, unlike human bones whose breaking points are regularly measured in pure Newtons of force or pounds of force, these rocks have breaking points or compression strength measured in PSI, or pounds per square inch,

which is basically the pounds of force divided by the area that force is applied, i.e. the size of Donkey Kong's fists. Granite's PSI roughly tops out at around 36,000 PSI, while Basalt tops out at around 58,000 PSI. So does D-K have what it takes to break these rocks? Well, once again, we need to whip out the pixel measurements and see. From comparing his fists to his body, we can see that in his base form, his fists measure a whopping 19.5 inches or 50 centimeters wide, and about 15.5 inches or 40 centimeters long. meaning his final fist area would be roughly two square feet or 0.2 square meters. That is huge, even for a gorilla.

But his fists have always been unusually massive, so I shouldn't be surprised at this point. And Kong Bonanza's fists are even more massive. Measuring in at 42 inches or 107.5 centimeters wide and 25 inches or 63.5 centimeters long, making his total fist area 7.3 square feet or 0.68 square.6 square. meters. So let's plug those in and see what we get. For regular decay, this means 2,900 pounds of force divided by two square feet, equalling 10 PSI. And for Kong Bonanza, that's 14,702 pounds of force divided by 7.3 square feet, which equals nearly 14 PSI. Huh, that's not all that much, and certainly nowhere near the 58,000 PSI that he would need to smash the rocks we're seeing

in the game. If his hands weren't quite so large and gorilla-like and instead were more like a precision jackhammer, then he'd probably be in a good spot. But size does matter, because it means he's distributing all of that force over too large an area. It's still going to be deadly for a normal human, but against some of Kong's other big threats, it's not going to do him much good. Except, as we can all see, DK is able to break these rocks, even in base form. So clearly, I'm the problem here. Somewhere in my calculations there must be a mistake. Some variable that has thrown everything else out of alignment. But I'm not going to be defeated by math.

I will figure out how deadly D-K's punch truly is. It's time for my own banana transformation. Sing the theorist song, Stoops. Okay, let's do this. If we know that base D-K needs to be punching with a PSI of 58,000, we should be able to use that to work backwards. D-K's hand size isn't changing. Those pixel measurements are pretty hard to deny.

Instead, it's the pounds of force we need to change. So, we just need to multiply 58,000 PSI by DK's two square feet fist area, which gives us 17,530,500 pounds of force. Or 77,97,103 Newtons. Which, for reference, would be like four-fifths of the Eiffel Tower crushing you. But we can go a step further. Because even though we technically forget out the total force, we did a bunch of calculations to get to this point.

So I want to know exactly what else has now changed. If that force is delta P divided by Delta T, then one of those is the culprit. And it's unlikely to be the time taken for the collision, as that happened in 0.12 seconds, which is accurate for most collisions. So it has to be our delta P, the change in momentum. So by reversing this equation and multiplying 77,97,103 Newtons by 0.12, we get a change in momentum of 9,0303.2, we get a change in momentum of 9,357,252 kilograms meters per second. But that came from D.K.'s effective mass times velocity.

And we know the mass is right based on the canon information, which means the velocity must be where the problem is. So, by reversing the equation one more time, we find out that DK's fist is traveling at the insane velocity of... Drum roll, please! 1019,224.7 meters per second, or 266,636 miles per hour. That's just insane! Maybe that's why the game's frame rate was so janky.

I guess even with all the upgrades with the Switch 2, it still isn't past enough to keep up. Again, for reference. To escape Earth's gravity, the Apollo 10 spaceship had to reach speeds of only 25,000. The speed of sound is only 343 meters per second, and Kong is breaking that 347 times over with every single punch. If he punches one enemy, the entire army might fall due to the sonic booms. And with the energy behind it, he's not just destroying rocks or obliterating enemies. He's going to be able to melt steel beams. Although, D.K. would also likely be collapsing, like everyone and everything around him.

Because with every action, comes an equal and. opposite reaction. DK is also decelerating and his hand is also experiencing those 77,97,103 neutrons. The toughest single bone in the body, the FEMA, can only withstand 4,000 newtons of force. The fingers are way less at around 1,485 neutrons. Now, gorilla bones are significantly denser than human bones, around three times more. But given we're dealing with nearly 78 million neutrons, it's just not going to be anywhere

near enough. Even with his 72% increase in size and strength in Kong Bonanza mode, his hands won't just be broken, they'd be turned into a furry pole. But, hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.