Gaming Memories: 1 — Dad’s NES
When I was super young, I’m thinking pre-school and kindergarten years, my father actually was a gamer. I say this somewhat incredulously because that took a 180-degree turn later in life, but in my childhood, he gamed, as did his brother.
My earliest memory was sitting on the couch in the early evening, I think I was home from school, sick with some sort of cold. My father was sitting on the floor, because the NES controllers only reached so far, and was playing the first Super Mario Bros. game. Dad was working on one of the castle levels, fighting one of the imposter bowsers, and I was huddled on the couch hiding under my blanket, afraid to watch because the castle levels scared me. I could see, however, the outline of him going about the level through the gaps in the weave of the fabric. Dad lost, unfortunately, he was never great at games — but I didn’t know any better, back then it was a spectacle to me.
Oddly, I only have one other memory of him gaming at that time in my life. He had borrowed this special gamepad from his brother that had turbo and other functionality on it. It used this plastic sliding circle in place of the d-pad (back then, known as a “cross-key pad”). Dad was working his way through Kid Icarus (I think he also borrowed this from his brother), and though he put forth a valiant effort, he was relentlessly made into an eggplant and ultimately grew frustrated with the game.
For those of you who are uninitiated into the world of Kid Icarus, it is actually a pretty slick game. Many regard it as one of the hardest (legitimate, not a troll-like) games that were made for the NES, it was a platforming game that I believe was built on the Metroid engine. Kid Icarus featured multiple vertical scrolling segments, which was fairly neat in a time where most platformers were side scrolling. But, my favorite part was that after completing a few side-scrolling segments there was a palace level that switched to a Zelda dungeon style layout. One platforming section per screen, no scrolling, with exits potentially to the top, bottom, left, and right of each room. The rooms formed a reasonably complex labyrinth, which was deadly of its own accord between the traps and enemies therein, but the most formidable, save for the boss, were the “Eggplant Wizards.” Note for our young readers — this was in a time long before eggplants had any widespread meaning as anything phallic, and way before emojis were a gleam in anyone’s eyes, hell, nobody said “lol”, and ASCII smilies were incredibly novel.
Anyway, the Eggplant Wizards threw eggplants around, with incredible range and annoying spread. If Pit (the player character) gets hit by one, he’s transformed into an eggplant himself, and can no longer attack. Pit has to find a doctor to remove the curse in one of the “hospital” rooms in the palace. This was the 80’s, so nothing had to make sense. Regardless, you’re playing these levels where everything is out to get you, and the eggplants will render you helpless until you carefully makes your way back to the hospital, almost always fairly early in the level, at maximum vulnerability along the way. It sucked — and was awesome too. My father spent a lot of time as an eggplant.
Those are my two formative memories with him, everything else just comes from little bits and pieces here and there. I remember my dad getting an arcade style controller (I think because he felt it would give him an advantage, he was competitive in his youth) and using it on every game under the sun. Again, it did not confer an advantage, but it was really satisfying to play Mike Tyson’s Punch-out with, there was just something pleasing about smashing those thick buttons down, both acoustically and in terms of haptics.
I also remember Dad playing some Rad Racer, and letting me borrow the red-blue anaglyph 3D glasses, which was pretty neat for me as a little kid. How far we’ve come from then, but sometimes the simple things were plenty effective.
Watching my dad play games is what paved the way for my desire to play as I got older. Even though we never bonded much over it at the time, it led to certain shared experiences — for example, I think playing Chessmaster ignited a mutual interest in Chess, for which we bonded over an actual board with as he taught me. I still remember after learning the basics and losing to him a bunch, we saw the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer together. Some weeks later, I was out with him at the mall and we stopped into a bookstore. Still excited about the movie and chess in general, I went to a section that had chess books and picked out “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” — dad was polite enough to purchase it for me. The book changed my relationship with the game, I learned about Capturing En Passant, a rule that dad never knew, and I taught him some things about the specifics of castling (e.g. you cannot castle through check, you cannot castle if you’ve moved your rook or king). Everything I partook of as a kid, I wanted to play out, so when I got my first communion, I was playing priests with my legos, when I got my first dental filling I wanted to drill everything, so Searching for Bobby Fischer made me absolutely in love with chess for a short while, and it made all the difference.
What is your earliest memory of gaming? What kind of impact did it have on your life?
