Why I am What I am, part 1
I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a small TV by today’s standards, 50cm (20″) or so, passing a controller back and forth. It was like Retro Game Challenge, only less, you know, Japanese. At the time, I didn’t own a NES (and it was almost always a NES) of my own, so it was always at one friend or another’s house. We would play for hours, Super Mario, Battletoads or Super Mario 3, TMNT or Mega Man 2, Probotector (the robot-sprite-swapped Contra Australians and Europeans got) or Double Dragon, in between exploring the neighbourhood, getting into mischief and just generally being kids. I wanted my own copy of TMNT, calling a game competition phone line in an attempt to win one, having to make the choices by spinning the dial on our old rotary phone. It was my sincere hope, and probably in vain – we didn’t have a lot of money back then – that if I won a copy of the game, my parents would cave in and buy me my own NES.
Any information we could get about games came from thick, bright guides, red or blue, or the rarer yellow and green ones, whose name currently escapes me (but must have been made by Nintendo Power, considering they had information about games that never even came out) or magazines like C+VG, Mean Machines, Gamepro, EGM, and Nintendo Power. If the magazines didn’t have the cheats or hints we needed, tough shit, we had to wait until the next issue and hope it was in there. We would prod at games for hours, hoping for something, anything, to move us forward, then cast them aside until we could get the next Nintendo Power (or had put enough time between the last time we begged and now so that we could call the Nintendo tip line at a per-minute rate) to give us the obscure little trick needed to advance, like the Simon’s Quest kneeling trick, which I’m sure I’ll get to in a later post. If we were lucky we might get to rent a game for a weekend, and we would play the shit out of that game, despite our parents and their angry calls to ‘play outside!’, but we always came back to our own games, because if we couldn’t complete them, we sure as shit weren’t getting another one until the next birthday or Christmas.
We eventually moved house as my dad got a better job, and I finally got a NES of my own, with Super Mario Brothers, The Adventures of Lolo, and Zelda 2, in Christmas 1991. When the NES was plugged in through an RF adapter, I remember seeing a vague haze of what looked like a video game and getting more and more distraught until my Dad figured out how to tune it in properly, and then we were in business!
(Now my dad makes me do technical things for him – ‘Here, make this work.’)
I slowly built up my collection of games. When I saw the cool plastic cases with the Nintendo logo that the local rental store used, in awesome shades of dayglo yellow, pink, and green, I got my parents to buy me a bunch and threw out the original game boxes – who needs those pieces of shit when I have wicked plastic cases? I cried a few years later when I went to trade in my system towards some Megadrive (Genesis) games and was told I would’ve got more trade value if the games were in their original boxes…
Living in Australia, while we had a few unique games come out, like Aussie Rules Football or International Cricket, we were also denied a range of releases that the US got. Getting my NES chipped at the weird little hobby store run by a guy with a handlebar moustache, fast-bowler (it’s a cricket thing) neckchain and a mullet opened up a whole new world to me: Grandma could spoil me with new games from America. A lucky few friends had PCs at the time, beige monsters with ‘Turbo’ buttons, which also opened up the world of PC games like Death Track, Rampage, Scorched Earth or Prince of Persia. Sometimes, we’d dial into BBSes with an acoustic coupler to play door games. One PC, unfortunately, got taken out by the Michaelangelo virus, from a dodgy pirate swap meet 5 1/2″ floppy – actually literally floppy. These computers cost 2 or 3 times as much as computers cost now in real terms, and much more than that in inflation-adjusted dollars.
I look back on this period fondly, and remember these games well. Some still stand up today: my all-time favourite game is still River City Ransom/Street Gangs, even if I can now play through it in about 20 minutes flat. It’s not the best game I’ve ever played, but my favourite nonetheless.
I had found one of the great obsessions of my life.
However, nostalgia is an interesting thing. It first brings to mind only the good things, and then you once you think a little bit deeper you remember other things…
Post image from Sean Dreilinger, used under creative commons. Original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/3069425637/in/photostream/.
