[Why have I played 101 stages of Donkey Kong [Game Boy, 1994] in 101 days? Go back to Day 1 to find out. Report back here once you’re all caught up.]

After 101 days, it seems that we’ve finally arrived at our destination, people. Welcome to stage 9-9 which, unless Nintendo pulls a fast one on us, should be the very last stage in the game. Also, be sure to check the area around you for any personal belongings before exiting the aircraft. And thank you, in advance, for flying with us.

Yesterday we bore witness as Donkey Kong plunged hundreds, maybe even thousands of feet to what appeared to be his certain death. No ordinary ape could have survived a fall like that. Yet, if we’ve learned anything about D.K. over the last 100 levels, it’s that he’s no ordinary ape. Other things we’ve learned about D.K.: he’s selfish, he’s stupid, and he thinks that throwing weird mushrooms at people is funny.

Donkey Kong, of course, is very much alive and well in today’s stage. From what I can see—and I can only see his face and his hands (more on this in a moment)—he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. And I have one more bit of news that you’re probably not going to like: he has somehow become gigantic. So, who exactly took a nose-dive from the top of the tower yesterday? Was it, a la a telenovela plot twist, D.K.’s twin brother, Tom Kong? Note to Hollywood: I would very much enjoy seeing a movie called Tom Kong, the sad, poignant tale of King Kong’s younger brother, Tom, who works as a busboy at a Taco Bell by day but dreams of one day eclipsing his more famous brother’s glory by becoming the toast of Broadway. Go ahead and get to work on that, Hollywood. I’ll be waiting over here, arms folded across my chest and whistling.

Exactly how big is this final incarnation of Donkey Kong? He’s so big that the Game Boy’s original screen apparently was unable to contain his entire body. So what we see are his head and his hands. That’s all. On the bright side, Giant D.K. is so massive that Mario can actually ride around on his nose.

How To Ride On Giant D.K.’s Nose:

1. Stand in front of his face. 2. Jump. Voila, now you’re riding on his nose, which turns out to be even more fun than riding on that rogue ladybug. (See: JUNGLE.)

From the opening moments of this stage, it’s obvious that Giant Donkey Kong is determined to murder Mario once and for all. How do you know that he wants to murder Mario? Like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, no matter where Mario goes in the stage—left side, right side, up, down—D.K.’s bloodshot, rage-filled eyes eerily follow him. Also, at the outset, know this: this qualifies as the longest, most protracted battle in the entire game. Which is appropriate, considering that after this, there is no more game to play. (…Or is there?)

I won’t sugarcoat it: you’ll need plenty of nerve and stamina to survive this encounter. You have to strike D.K.  no less than six times with barrels (more on how to do this in a moment), while surviving his increasingly unpredictable attacks. And, if you’ve been with me on this mad quest since the beginning, no doubt you can predict what I’m going to say next, which is this: in order to survive this final, epic skirmish, you’ll need ample amounts of both luck and skill. One last word of advice before you begin: make sure that your Mario Reserves are topped off before heading into the breach. I personally wouldn’t attempt this stage with anything less than 30 Marios in the tank. The absolute last thing you want to have to worry about today is running out of Marios at a crucial moment. If you need to, go do some Mario Harvesting (which, in retrospect, I’m going to miss; I loved revisiting the old levels and squeezing Marios out of them), then come back here when you’re ready.

All set? Let’s go.

Round 1: D.K.’s gigantic head appears from the bottom of the screen, blooming like one of those stop-motion movies of a flower. On either side of his head are his gigantic hands, balled into tight fists (a sure sign that D.K. is sexually frustrated). The fists slam to the ground twice, in rapid succession—first one, then the other. If Mario is standing on the ground, the resulting “fist quake” (decent name for a band, by the way) will temporarily paralyze him. So try to jump when the fists are about to come down. It’s not easy to avoid both the first and the second fist-quakes from his one-two fist slams. But know that it can be done.

The fist quakes, per usual, trigger an avalanche of trash from the top of the screen, which includes the usual assortment of hubcaps, dumbbells and barrels. All three of these things can kill Mario. The barrels behave identically to the barrels in Stage 100, meaning that they never magically stop falling and right themselves. Instead, they keep on falling, straight through the bottom of the screen.

You could try to handstand-catch one of the falling barrels. This does work. I know, because I executed a couple of handstand-catches. However, once the barrel is upright, getting out of the handstand, then getting on top of the barrel, then picking up the barrel, and then tossing it at Donkey Kong’s dopey face simply takes too much time. I lost a couple of Marios while experimenting with this strategy, before I finally abandoned it.

Notice that every 10 seconds or so a rogue barrel will plummet from the top of the screen with the “trashvalanche” and land upright of its own volition on the platform directly above Donkey Kong’s head. In order to reach the platform and that upright barrel, you’ll need to, 1. stand on D.K.’s nose, 2. wait for the one-two fists to fall on either side of his head, 3. climb on top of one of the fallen fists (they don’t stay fallen for long, so you’ll need to be quick about it), then, 4. use the fist as a kind of elevator to reach the platforms above D.K.’s head.

Pulling this off requires patience and persistence. Sometimes you’ll fall off the fist for no discernible reason; other times, you’ll actually make it to the upper platforms, but the upright barrel will be gone by the time you arrive (a one-two fist pound will cause it to explode into splinters). Then you’ll have to loiter up there in what I refer to as “The Danger Zone,” waiting for the next magic barrel to arrive. Pro Tip: Jump back and forth between the platforms, trying to time your jumps so that you’re airborne when the fists—one, two—hit the ground.

Once you do finally have a barrel in hand—don’t get discouraged; you’ll get one eventually, trust me—hustle over to one of the lower platforms on either the left or right. Position yourself as far out on the edge of the platform as possible. Then turn around and heave the barrel at D.K. If you’re far out enough on the platform, the barrel will strike him square in the face. He’ll cringe for a couple of seconds, then gather himself, then continue attacking you. Do this a second time. Congratulations, you’ve survived Round 1. On to Round 2.

Round 2: D.K. introduces a new handclap move in this round. Instead of the one-two fist pound, his hands appear at the left and right side of the screen, like bookends. They then slowly move together, meeting directly in front of his face, making a thunderous, Mario-crushing clap. The hands retract, then repeat.

These claps, as you might expect, cause “clap quakes” which will shake more trash and barrels loose from the sky. What you need to do is this: position yourself on D.K.’s nose, then jump whenever the hands are about to come together. Avoid the trashvalanche, stay alive, and every second or third clap, the hands—and this is important—will very briefly rise up, like hand-shaped elevators. Pro Tip: They change color when they do this, become a darker shade of beige (good old Game Boy). These hand elevators raise Mario high enough so that he can reach the above platforms, a.k.a. Home of the Magic Upright Barrel.

Once you’re above it all, D.K. will revert back to his old one-two fist pound, in the name of bringing you back down to the ground. Again, try to survive on the platforms until a barrel falls from the sky onto the center platform. When you get knocked down—yes, that’s “when,” not “if”—D.K. will revert back to the handclap move again. Be patient here, ride those hand elevators whenever they’re available, and keep striving for those magic upright barrels.

Hurl two of the barrels into his face, and like that you’re off to Round 3.

Round 3: This round is identical to the two previous rounds, with one monumental exception: D.K. vanishes from the screen at random intervals, leaving only one of his giant hands visible. The disembodied hand will move across the screen, either left to right or right to left, pounding the ground three times—boom, boom, boom. You can avoid the hand, as well as the sky trash that falls from the sky, by quickly moving all the way either to the left or righthand side of the screen.

Once D.K.’s fat head finally returns, you’ll know what to do from here on out: ride the nose, avoid the handclap, take the hand elevator, reach the upper platforms, stall for time until the Magic Upright Barrel appears, grab the barrel, race to the edge, and pelt D.K. with it. Do this twice, and that’s it—you have officially completed all 101 stages of the 1994 Game Boy version of Donkey Kong. Take a moment to go and find someone or something to hug. If there are no actual human beings in the vicinity, a cat or dog will do. Once it’s all over, a brief animation is triggered, showing Pauline and Mario standing together. It occurs to me in this moment that Mario and Pauline bear a striking resemblance to Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley.

Things veer unexpectedly towards the weird when Pauline/Christie whips out an Eerie Mushroom and offers it to Mario/Billy. Mario accepts the Eerie Mushroom, which transforms him back to Regular-Size Mario. Which, I realize in retrospect, means that Giant Donkey Kong was not a giant at all, but that Mario was simply Hamster-Size Mario all along.

An 8-bit heart appears between Pauline and Mario. Then, without warning, Donkey Kong’s corpse falls from the top of the screen, accompanied by a slide-whistle sound effect. His lifeless corpse appears to outright flatten Mario. Then Mario climbs to his feet, holding Donkey Kong’s body above his head, and strikes a victory pose.

Donkey Kong ends the way that all Nintendo games end: with everyone putting their differences aside and becoming great friends again. The last image in the entire game consists of a Polaroid-like snapshot of Mario, Pauline, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior all posing in front of a picturesque mountain range, as if they are all enjoying a family vacation together in the Rockies.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but Donkey Kong looks a little sheepish in the photo, as if to say, “Sorry for all this craziness, guys. Bananas on me tonight, OK?” Mario is making a “V” sign with his gloved right hand. Pauline is looking offscreen, to the right, which tells me that she’s not 100-percent committed to Mario. (You get the feeling that she’s just waiting for someone else to come along and carry her away for another 101 stages.) And Donkey Kong Junior? He looks as if he’s recently enjoyed a bout of high-speed self-pleasure.

Now that it’s over—and it really is over; there are no more stages beyond stage 9-9—I feel the way I usually feel at the end of a videogame: a little hollow, a little disappointed, a little sad. While games have evolved over the last 50 years, they still don’t do the whole denouement thing terribly well. The end of Donkey Kong, for some reason, reminded me of a scene from Spielberg’s A.I. It’s the moment when the robot boy, David, decides to sit down with his human parents for dinner, even though, being a robot, he can’t eat food. He loads up his plate, really piling it on, not only in the name of attempting to develop a closer bond with his human parents, but also because he is trying to be what he believes his parents want him to be. Game endings, I think, tend to have that same eager-to-please, going-through-the-motions quality as David’s act. “If only we act like there’s real feeling here,” the endings always seem to say, “maybe real feeling will eventually show up.”

Gamers are always claiming to have “finished” this game or that game. But “finished” doesn’t feel like the right word to me. Games aren’t finished, not in the traditional way that books and movies are finished. At this moment, Donkey Kong isn’t over for me; I could ostensibly go on replaying the previous stages of the game until the end of time. Instead of describing games as “finished,” maybe a more accurate word might be “abandoned.”

Because that’s what it feels like to me: like it’s time for me to abandon Donkey Kong. That’s what we do to games: we leave them behind because they have given us what we needed and now it’s time to move on and start something new. Sure, in the future, I’ll inevitably find myself wistfully staring at the Donkey Kong icon in the 3DS’s menu. And, on a random cross-country flight some day, I’ll probably even boot up the game again, for old time’s sake, to see if the magic is still there. But I’ve lived long enough, and finished enough videogames, to know that it will never be the same again.

It will never feel the way that it feels right now, at this moment. The same way that Bob Dylans’s “Blood on the Tracks” is forever tied to a series of terrible Greyhound bus trips I made to Boston in the late ‘1990’s, Donkey Kong will forever be tied to this time and to this place in my life.

It’s finally starting to sink in now. It’s really over, isn’t it? My work here is finished. Tomorrow morning, for the first time since January 1st, I’ll wake up without a Donkey Kong stage in need of playing.

I can’t wait.