Ikea gets the ball/barrel rolling with a design that’s sure to remind fans of an all-time Nintendo classic.
There’s an understated playfulness to a lot of Ikea’s home furnishings, and odds are when most people see the brand’s Lustigt shelves, they see a way to add some tasteful quirkiness to their interior décor.
Gamers, though, see the world a little differently, and they’ll likely notice a visual connection with one of the most important classics of all time. That’s definitely how it looked to Japanese Twitter user @miki800, and if you’re of the same mindset, one glance at those offset platforms connected by ladders will practically have you hearing the staccato sound effects of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong.
Having a particular fondness for retro games of the bitmap-era, the DK vibes were too strong for @miki800 to resist, and she quickly purchased the 999-yen (US$9.15) shelf set. But while the Lustigt shelves definitely look a lot like Donkey Kong’s iconic Level 1, @miki800 realized that she could make them look even more like the setting of Mario’s very first adventure, and so she got to work.
After a quick stop at 100 yen stores Daiso and Seria, she had the supplies she needed (yes, Daiso has art supplies): brushes, paint, markers, and an oil drum-shaped pencil holder. The first order of business was to paint the platforms red, to match their in-game hue.
Since those are girders that Mario is running around on top of, next she used a fine-tip marker to draw black little triangles along the edges, to simulate empty spaces.
At the very bottom of Leven 1 is a blue oil barrel, so repainting the pencil holder was also a must-do, as was labeling it, just like in the game’s graphics.
Of course, you can’t recreate a Donkey Kong scene without Donkey Kong himself. To solve that problem, @miki800 used a pack of Jakks Pacific 8Bit Collection Nintendo figures (you can get them on Amazon here for 1,405 yen).
A visit to a second-hand toy shop scored her a suitably sized wooden barrel, and as a final clever touch, @miki800 repainted the central vertical backing piece on the shelves a lighter shad of white, so that it would better blend in with the shade of her wall.
Then all that was left to do was put the shelves up, the props and characters in place, and admire the awesomeness.
The results are so polished that it almost looks like an official product that you’d see in the Ikea catalog or on offer at the Nintendo Tokyo mega store in Shibuya.
On a side note, the shelves come with two black ladders and two green ones. theoretically, @miki800 could have repainted two in order to get a matching set of four, but she actually bought two sets of the shelves and used all of the green ones for the Donkey Kong project, and has the black ones to use with the unaltered Lustigt.
@miki800 herself points out a few places where there’s still room for improvement. For one, the coloring on the Mario figure is based on his appearance in Super Mario Bros., not Donkey Kong. Also, there’s currently no figure for Pauline, the woman Mario is trying to rescue in Donkey Kong, so it’s sort of unclear why the jumping hero and kidnapping gorilla are in opposition over. It’s hard to be bothered by such tiny concerns, though, when so many of the other details look so, so right.
Related: Sousameki (@miki800’s blog)
Source: Twitter/@miki800 via IT Media, Sousameki
Top image: Twitter/@miki800
Insert images: Ikea, Sousameki
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