It’s-a-me, overpriced Mario.

I don’t know how many gamers there are among you, but for me, the highlight of my young life was the day my father brought home an NES console. Suddenly this lonely, sheltered little only child had a new best friend, and his name was Mario.

And though over the years Mario and his friends would evolve into new renderings of themselves and travel to new and uncharted console territories, and though I would discover and come to love the Xbox and the Playstation and Steam, there was always a soft spot in me for the place where it all began: that greige box with the red lettering and its cartridges which were forever needing cleaning and blowing into and even the odd incident of brute force if you didn’t want your game to start with glitched text or, horror of horrors, just a flashing grey screen.

So I get it. I get why the new “NES Classic Edition” is such a big deal, and why today, on the first day of sales in North America, it’s sold out everywhere.

And I get why online resellers are exploiting the shit out of this limited supply, even though I consider their tactics the lowest, most soulless form of commerce and their buyers ridiculous for permitting them to continue getting away with it.

But here in the Nut house, we believe the best way to get back something you used to love is to just never let it go in the first place.

Gotta go. Zelda II is calling my name.

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