It is 1989. I am six years old. For managing a good report card, my parents present me with a Nintendo Entertainment System. My friend Paul is over when my father comes home with the system. It is a surprise to me.

It is the summer so I am not able to brag about my good fortune to all of my classmates. I have too long listened to everybody talking about finding the Triforce and beating Bowser and the latest issue of Nintendo Power and I am finally a part of that world. In September I talk about Dragon Warrior and Super Mario Bros. and when I first see a friend playing Super Mario Bros. 3 it is all I can talk about until I receive it Christmas morning. Before Disgaea came out I was similar—talking about it and downloading every preview movie I could. I buy it on the day it is released and it is so worth the wait. Walkthroughs or in-depth strategy guides have not come out yet so people ask each other questions on the message boards. It is like old times.

In the original Super Mario Bros., if you hold A+Start on the title screen, you can continue from the beginning of the world you died on. I learn this when the aforementioned Paul’s sister, the aforementioned Anna, tells me. Do you know how shameful this is to a seven-year-old boy, to be given a videogame code by a girl? For weeks I pretend this is something I stumbled on by myself.

Prize question: Are games easier or are the codes just more accessible?

A classmate and I get copies of Dragon Warrior III within a few weeks of each other and decide to set up a competition of sorts. He gets to the Dark World first, but I beat Zoma before he does. It is a triumph. Each morning we meet on the playground and discuss the previous day’s progress.

We all play Nintendo. We sit at the lunch table and talk about games. The main interaction I have with a few kids involves the trading of games over weekends. We are criticized for the passive act of videogame playing but nothing could be further from the truth than the word “passive”. Nintendo informs our play at recess. We fight over who gets to pretend to be Link or Mario or Samus who we think would be cooler were she male. I justify my gaming habit with academia. I hide behind footnotes in order to seem more professional, more intellectual^[1].

Nintendo Power is our favorite book. Most of us have subscriptions and we bring new issues to school to show them off. Unless we have coverage in Nintendo Power or get tips from people who have been through it before, the only way we can get strategy is to experiment and play ourselves. I will remember up up down down left right left right b a select start until the day I die, and if you’ve never been a seven-year-old boy playing Contra with a friend, if you’ve never gotten into a fight because one of you stole a life from the other—well, you just haven’t lived.

In my Existentialism and Literature class we have a discussion on the concept of power and how money is a form of power. “Yeah, money’s great and all, but not for its own sake,” I point out. “I mean, the only reason money is good is because of what it can get us—it’s like, I don’t care about the money, I care about the PlayStation games that I can get with the money.” Some kid scoffs and says, “Well, yeah, but, like, you need to think about more important things—like, freshman year I liked video games, but then I started paying bills.”

I do not like paying bills, and my conversations about videogames are done in IM boxes rather than on the playground.

I have a Mario lunchbox and my friend has a Zelda one; one day we swap thermoses and get in trouble because our mothers don’t understand that, yeah, Mario rules, and yeah, Link rules, but Mario and Zelda? Unstoppable. I get a Back to the Future lunchbox the next year and don’t have that problem again. We watch the Super Mario Bros Super Show daily. Hey, paisan’, swing your arms from side to side, come on, it’s time to go. Captain Lou Albano becomes just that much cooler, and every Friday when they show the Legend of Zelda cartoon as opposed to the Mario cartoon, it’s something special—it’s something to look forward to. A friend of mine burns the series onto a CD for me and they are still great. When it’s cancelled and is replaced with Club Mario, featuring two future stoners, we’re crushed.

All of us have a copy of at least one of Jeff Rovin’s books. I own two—How to Win at Nintendo Games III and How to Win at Super Mario Bros. Games. The Super Mario book is slightly more useful because it gives the full list of the card/memory game items and locations. There are no pictures. It is 1989. I am six years old. For managing a good report card, my parents present me with a Nintendo Entertainment System. My friend Paul is over when my father comes home with the system. It is a surprise to me.

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Footnotes

1) Now you know the reason. Do you think it works?Return