There are two Video Games that hold a very special place in my heart. They were the first “Truly Great” games I ever owned. Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda. The Nintendo Entertainment System was as the first videogame console I was really able to call my own. I had an Atari 2600, but it was old and barely worked, and the games themselves weren’t as compelling as the “near arcade quality” NES titles.
The first time I saw Super Mario Bros. was in a Piggly Wiggly in rural Tennessee. They had the Arcade version, VS. Super Mario Bros. set up there and a young man was playing it, grabbing mushrooms and stomping Goombas. I thought the whole concept was weird and the graphics odd, but I was impressed by it. I had never seen anything quite like it before.
Soon commercials for the NES started appearing on television, and one of the games was Super Mario Bros.! And unlike games for the Atari 2600, it looked exactly like its arcade counterpart! I knew then I had to have one. So me and Bro both started begging Dad. Our mother had just died due to a freak brain aneurysm, so I suppose he thought we needed something good in our lives, and he probably had a little money left over from life insurance. So he bought us the original NES system, which came with Duck Hunt, Gyromite, R.O.B. the Robotic Operating Buddy, and the Zapper.
Much to my disappointment, Super Mario Bros. was not included in that packaging of the system. That didn’t come until later. And the two games that were included sucked. Duck Hunt was okay for a little while, but one quickly grew bored with it. There just wasn’t much to it. And using R.O.B. to spin the tops to place on the pedestals to open the barriers in Gyromite was just tedious. We had a little more fun with it by taking the second controller out of R.O.B. and opening the barriers by hand, but then the game became painfully easy.
Eventually, however, we did get Super Mario Bros., and it was as great as I hoped it would be. Hell, practically every kid I knew got Super Mario Bros. We swapped rumors about vines into the sky and Warp Zones and stuff that filtered down from the “elite kids” who had Nintendo Power guides to the rest of us plebes who had to figure things out on our own. I eventually became a master at getting to World 8 via the Warp Zones, but those Hammer Brothers on 8-3 almost always did me in. I think I actually beat the game only a couple of times, because of the inability to continue or save.
But then I saw a commercial. A commercial for a game that I wanted to play more than any other game that came before. The Legend of Zelda. It was the ridiculous commercial you can still find on YouTube with the guy sporting a wild hairdo crowing “Oktoroks! Tektites! ZELDA!” while popping up from the bottom and sides of the screen. I was really into swords and fantasy, oddly enough from my exposure to “spiritual warfare” where one wielded the “Sword of the Spirit” and the “Shield of Faith,” and the thought of controlling a young man slashing his way through endless beasties in an open world to complete a noble quest was right up my alley.
It took a great deal of convincing, but finally Dad got it for us. Me and my Brother were instantly addicted, of course, but we gained an unusual gaming companion — my pastor Uncle. He loved the game as much as we did. However, the game’s manual made reference to a “magical sword.” Any form of magic was considered to be “the appearance of evil” to my Uncle, so we were instructed to refer to it as the “great sword.” And we couldn’t refer to the “magical wand” either — we had to call it the “rod.” Nevertheless, Uncle deigned to overlook the obvious swords and sorcery inspiration for the game and played it with us.
Practically the entire family would gather around the television for our Zelda sessions. Only me, my brother, and Uncle ever played, but Dad, my Aunt and my little Cousin would all watch. We would point out suspicious looking rocks or trees and bomb or blaze them into oblivion. We would search for entrances to hidden levels together, and separately, and share what we found the next time we saw each other. There was no Nintendo Power Guide for us. Of particular note was when we discovered the well-hidden “great” sword and the entrance to level 6 in the second quest. A true sense of satisfaction was gained when you solved a game this way, almost never replicated anymore because of the prevalence of GameFAQs.
Of course, once we defeated the game, something happened that instantly catapulted Zelda from “great” into “legendary” status — the game started over again. And everything was different. And harder. And more well-hidden. We plunged eagerly into this quest as well, happier than ever. And after much effort we defeated it again, with a faint hope that yet another quest awaited… ah, but it was not to be.
There are a lot of other memories from that time that come to mind when I think of those games. Making mazes in an overgrown field next to our house. Climbing on top of an old well. Walking to the “general store” where the goods looked like they had been stocked 20 years ago. Perhaps I’ll write more of these at another time. But sometimes I think that the great experiences I had playing Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda radiated outward into other aspects of my life and made them even more memorable. To this day when I remember a time period I always remember the games I was playing at the time as well, with almost the same thought. As a matter of fact, for awhile there, whenever I wanted to remember say, what 1993 was like, I would fire up DOOM, and all the old feelings of a “time” and “place” would come rushing back. I guess that makes me a “nostalgia gamer,” or in other words: an old man.