The Videogame Solipsist: NES

Oh my my, oh hell yes (image taken from VGmuseum.com)

I must have gotten the NES in '88. It was for my 4th birthday, and I'll always remember this because while my parents had gotten me the NES my grandparents on my Mom's side had gotten me an electric racecar track. While I played with the latter for 15 minutes or so while my Dad set up the NES, it would--obviously--never become a fixture for me. It was as if my entire future were set up then and there as a choice of toys: become the cool kid racing cars or become the Nintendo nerd.

My first memory of the NES was simply trying to get past the first enemy in Mario. Certainly we messed around with Duck Hunt but Mario held us transfixed. The coordination it took to somehow defeat the relentless Goomba seemed like a mountain I could never hope to climb; this also marked the last time my Dad would ever play a videogame, let alone be better at it than me. Only he could get to the end of the level at first, and my sister and I were jealous.

Still, it was an amazing new toy. A game you played on the TV--yet it wasn't just a game. You could put other game cartridges into it, too, not unlike tapes in a VCR. I honestly don't remember when I began to get other games, or what those were, but it seemed like everyone you knew had a Nintendo back then and different games to try. Eventually you rented scores of them from videostores--in the end I probably only owned a dozen or so games, but must have played a hundred or so more.

Actually, that was the big thing about the NES: its ubiquity. There were so many games for the damn thing that I eventually played something from every genre even before I began to use genre distinctions. Dragon Warrior was baffling until years later when I played Shining Force on the Genesis and learned about "levels" in terms of character power and not what stage you were on. Anyway, all my friends and neighbors had it and we would help each other on games. I'll always remember how my older neighbor Adam got really far into the first Zelda and during one summer used to come over every day and help me through it. Funnily enough, when his sister had a birthday party once, I spent most of it playing a gift for her: Rad Racer. Even then, I liked doing things alone--please, resist the urge to make the obvious joke here.

As for the games I played...well, this would be a really long post if I went through them all. Suffice it to say that the obvious ones--Zeldas, Marios, whatnot--were all amazing and mindblowing. Oddly, even back then I found Metroid obtuse and frustrating, though one of my friends insisted it was the best game ever. I remember playing games competitively and co-operatively for the first time on the NES, too, which was just as fun as playing them alone--if not more so. This was also during the era when you didn't scour websites every few hours to see if the Smash Brothers date had slipped; you pretty much heard about games from Nintendo Power or clerks at the store or video rental place and that was it. I recall the first Turtles game being a total bitch to find, both because of its popularity and the fact you couldn't find it to buy anywhere because nobody knew if it was out or not. Of course this was before everyone realized that the game was harder than a pair of diamond testicles and controlled like utter shit.

The end of the NES was particularly interesting to me because people weren't really sure what to do. The assumption amongst adults seemed to be "hey, this thing was supposed to be like a VHS tape player!! You're just supposed to get new games, not new systems!!" Sometime in 1992 or 1993 I got a Sega Genesis because most of my friends had it and the games looked so much better than the NES. For some reason, the SNES didn't interest us. About this time the NES began to start into the era of "blow into the end of it, blow into the machine itself, cut yourself and swear a blood oath to Yamauchi" in order to get the damn thing to work. But with time, the NES became a very fondly remembered piece of hardware which we would all dig out from time to time for nostalgia's sake. The majority of the games don't hold up as well anymore, partially because as kids we had no critical faculties, but enough of them do to make the system still worth playing.

Except that my grandma sold my NES and 5 games for like $15 at a garage sale in the mid 90s. I think it was revenge for ignoring the electric racecars.