Not-stalgia

When I was a kid, I played video games.¹ I spent way too many hours playing on my Nintendo Entertainment System. Here's how nerdy I was about it, and how far removed we all were from the internet age: there was an 800 number you could call that, if you waited through a long pre-recorded message, would lead to a Nintendo of America representative who could look up information for you. I would call semi-regularly in order to ask when new games were coming out. The thought of a wiki list of upcoming releases would have blown my mind.

In 1991, after I had enjoyed the hell out of my NES for a few years, the word came out that a new system would be coming out: the Super NES. Since everyone knows "super = better," people were hyped up for this. It was going to launch with a new Mario game, entitled Super Mario World. And it would have face-melting 16 bit graphics like this:

(hat-tip to ps3gamelist.com, a PlayStation site that for some reason has this Nintendo image. I apologize if your face has suffered any harm from seeing this.)

I, however, was realistic, and knew that I would likely not be able to convince my parents to outlay some cash for a whole new system when I had a perfectly functional one up in my room. That's fine, I thought - I'll just get the watered down NES version of the game.

Then I spent about 16 minutes on the phone one day, waiting to ask someone when the NES Mario World would come out. And some guy in Seattle told me, "Uh, never." To get the new Mario, you had to get the new system. Feeling this was completely unfair, I wrote off Nintendo and Mario games for 16 years.²

After all these years, I have buried the hatchet. Using my Nintendo Wii, I paid eight dollars to download Super Mario World. I sat down and spent today exploring the Donut Plains and Yoshi's Island, spin jumping and cape-feathering, enjoying the revolutionary (for 1991) parallax scrolling.

I don't know if you can feel nostalgic for something you never actually had as a child. But if I could go back to that smaller me ending a sad phone call to Nintendo from my parents' kitchen, I can tell him that we finally got to play this game.

Why I Am Awesome: I never got shaken down for a Super NES. Principles: stuck to.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I am terrible at this game. I ran into a shell-less Koopa twice within the first two minutes of playing. Really, just embarrassing.


¹ I do not mean for that statement to imply that I no longer play video games just because I'm older. In fact, you would already know that if you read the full post instead of jumping down to this footnote.

² Even from a young age, I had a very particular belief in consumer fairness when it came to my toys. I swore off Transformers after there was a TV ad that, I felt, encouraged kids to steal toys from their friends. And at the age of 5 I was banned from FAO Schwartz in downtown Boston for standing in the main aisle and telling customers what suburban stores had better prices on action figures. I was like the Ralph Nader of cheap plastic trinkets.

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