When I read stories about unwrapping NES gifts on Christmas morning and watched videos of kids ripping open grey boxes to discover their brand-new consoles in 1986, I felt like I was flipping through a family photo album that wasn’t mine. I was not there, and neither were many others. At the age of 18, I was working construction with my dad, and saving every penny I could for the impending birth of our child and our wedding, which we were planning to attend immediately after she graduated high school. Video games were foreign to me, and only families that were wealthy enough to afford them could enjoy the thrill of playing.
Twenty years had passed since that point, and I was now a 43-year-old construction foreman sitting in my living room in Denver, Colorado, with my original NES Action Set that I had bought from Craigslist for $60. My daughter Sarah had been pestering me for months to play retro games, and said that I was missing a critical piece of my life as a gamer. She had visited me a couple of times with her SNES and had shown me Super Metroid; therefore, she told me that I needed to go back further in order to fully understand gaming history. Thus, I sat in my living room, holding a large, clumsy, grey controller for the first time, and ready to fire up Super Mario Bros.
One of the very first things that I noticed about the game was how deliberate it was. Every aspect of the game was deliberate. All of the animation, the controls, the enemies, and the environments were all very deliberate. Considering what I now know about the development of video games in the 1980s, this was probably true for many of the developers at the time.
The controller was a bit of an adjustment as well. After spending a year playing SNES games with their curved controllers and four directional buttons, returning to the NES rectangular controller felt like switching from a modern cordless power drill to a manual screwdriver. While neither is bad per se, both are certainly less advanced than the other. However, after an hour of playing Mario, I realised how the simplicity of the NES enabled the developers to create inventive ways to use the limited number of inputs available. Two buttons and a D-pad is all that was available. That is it. Use it.
I was very impressed with Super Mario Bros. in terms of how it demonstrated to me how to play without saying a single word. As a construction worker, I teach guys how to do jobs all the time, and I firmly believe that the best way to teach anyone is to show them, allow them to try, and then correct them when they fail. The first level of Mario is similar to watching a master carpenter teach an apprentice. Here is a Goomba, try to jump on it. Here is a pipe, see if you can go down it. Here is a question block, hit it and see what happens. By the end of World 1-1, you have all of the information that you will ever need to be Mario, and Nintendo never stops the action to explain how to play.
I quickly ran through the rest of the pack-in games. Duck Hunt was fun for about twenty minutes, and while I did enjoy it, I never liked the annoying laugh of that duck. I imagine that I was not the only kid in America that hated the laugh of that duck. In addition, I needed more games, and that is when the costs quickly added up. Apparently, collecting NES games as an adult in 2011 was not like buying video games at Toys”R”Us in 1987. That copy of The Legend of Zelda that I wanted? Forty dollars on eBay for a loose cartridge. The little gold thing cost more than I paid for the entire system.
However, Zelda was well worth it. I had never played anything like it – this massive world that just drops you in the middle with almost no direction except “it is dangerous to go alone, take this”. I am a person that reads instruction manuals cover-to-cover before I try to build anything, and here was a game that tells you to figure it out yourself. Therefore, I did what any rational adult would do – I pulled out a composition notebook and started making maps.
At first, I thought it was silly to sit at my kitchen table and start drawing crude sketches of screens and marking where I had found heart pieces. However, you know what? It worked. And more importantly, it was fun in a way that no modern game with their waypoints and objective markers can possibly replicate. When I finally figured out my way through the lost woods maze, it was not because the game helped me – it was because I had earned it through trial-and-error and thorough note-taking.
As I continued to play NES games, I began to realise that the technological limitations of the NES were becoming more apparent. The sound chip that could barely produce three different tones at the same time, the graphics that were essentially animated tiles, and the colour palette that looked like someone poured a specific variety of crayons onto the screen. However, what I found to be fascinating was that those limitations created a sense of wonder with regard to the games that did exceed those limitations. When I first heard the music in Mega Man 2 – these complex, fast-paced melodies coming from hardware that could hardly produce “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, I had to stop my game and just listen.
I bought Mega Man 2 at a local game store for thirty-five dollars, and I think I was crazy until I played it. The level of precision required, the method in which each Robot Master had a specific strategy, the weapons that you acquire to access certain areas and bosses – it was as if a mechanical engineer had built a mechanical puzzle that was fun. I probably died at least 200 times learning the enemy patterns, but I was never frustrated because each death taught me something new.
As for the infamous cartridge-blowing ritual that everyone talks about? Yes, I quickly learned that ritual. My sixty-dollar NES was defective in that the connectors were on their last legs, and many times the games would freeze or display the dreaded grey screen of death. Clearly, the previous owner was a blower, as you could clearly see the corrosion on the pins when I eventually opened it up to thoroughly clean it.
However, before I cleaned it properly, I went through the same superstition ritual that every other NES owner went through: blow, reinsert, wiggle, and pray to whatever deity governs 8-bit electronics.
One of the most significant differences between playing these games as an adult versus as a child was the degree to which I appreciated the underlying design philosophy of the games. These were not games developed by large teams of people with unlimited resources – they were developed by small groups of people working under extreme financial constraints. Each sprite, each sound effect, each level had to justify itself because there was no extra room to spare. It is much like how the best construction projects occur when you have a limited budget and a demanding client – the constraints enable you to be resourceful and innovative.
After I mastered the basics of NES games, I started looking at other NES games. I bought Startropics on the advice of an online forum member and had no idea what I was getting myself into. The game came with a letter that you were supposed to wet and then tear off to expose a hidden code. As I purchased it 25 years after it was released, I did not have the original packaging. I spent nearly an hour scouring online forums before I found someone who had posted the solution to the puzzle. Outside-of-the-game puzzles like this would never meet the approval of modern gamers, but apparently, it was business-as-usual for Nintendo in 1990.
As I continued to play NES games, I began to notice that the games were vastly different from the modern gaming experiences that I was used to. These games didn’t care if I became frustrated and stopped playing. They didn’t have multiple levels of difficulty or checkpoint markers every 30 seconds. I had to learn the patterns and develop my reflexes in order to move forward. Period.
Coming from modern games that constantly reward me for just showing up, I found the lack of concern for my emotional state with regards to NES games to be refreshing.
My daughter Sarah was pleased that I had taken to the NES, although she continuously encouraged me to play games that were far beyond my abilities as a middle-aged beginner. “You should play Battletoads,” she said with such glee that I thought she suggested I try juggling chainsaws. I successfully completed the first level of Battletoads after failing three times. That speeder bike section of the level? Forget it. Some obstacles are designed specifically for players who have trained their reflexes since they were eight years old.
However, I was able to find my niche with games that were at my skill level and had problem-solving elements. The Legend of Zelda led to Zelda II, which was completely different from the first Zelda, but just as engaging once I accepted that it was essentially a side-scrolling RPG. Metroid provided me with that same sense of exploration that the first Zelda provided, along with a science fiction theme that reminded me of the Alien movies that I loved in the 80s.
Twelve years after I bought that initial NES, I have a better understanding of why my daughter was so insistent that I play these games. It was not nostalgia – I had none. It was the pure game design, unencumbered by modern conventions and gimmicks. These games were designed to entertain using nothing but pixels, primitive sounds, and creative coding. There was no voice acting, no fancy graphics, and no online multiplayer to distract from the weak foundation of the base gameplay. Only you, your controller, and the designer of the game’s vision of interactive entertainment.
The NES did not give me the same sense of identity as it did for countless other children growing up. However, finding it as an adult gave me a different perspective – an appreciation for how creativity can thrive in a vacuum of limitations, how a basic tool can create a sophisticated experience, and how some forms of enjoyment are timeless and will remain enjoyable regardless of when you first enjoy them.
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