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.
Ha! To this day, my kids’ ringtones on my phone are various Mario noises. Almost-family get Pacman noises 🙂
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Waka waka waka.
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Apparently I am older than you are because my first game system was Atari. I loved Duck Hunt. The hunting dog that laughed if I missed was hysterical. My son had Nintendo. He would ask me to help him get Mario to jump over whatever it was that Mario jumped over. I would kill Mario every time and then my son would cry. He finally quit asking me to help.
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Ah, the ol’ Atari 2600. Played it but sadly never owned one.
And ohhhh, that wascally Duck Hunt dog!!! I’m so glad they made him a character in the latest Super Smash Bros. game because now I can finally shoot him in his stupid laughing face.
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You can shot the dog? Sign me up!!!
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I’m a hopeless geek with my nose in many disciplines, but I’ve only ever had a fairly peripheral awareness of gaming. My first experience was a neighbour’s Atari, then Frogger on another friend’s PC, then nothing really until my second year of uni when I got totally addicted to Abe’s Oddysee and then Exoddus for about 6 months straight. Late nights, poor sleep, bad eating, little exercise, unconsciously twitching and jerking as well probably. I went cold turkey and haven’t played since. I’d like to play it again, introduce the boys, and I bet they would laugh their arses off just as much as I did at being able to possess farts and blow stuff up. 🙂
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Haha. A friend of mine was actually half an hour late to a final exam in university because he’d been up all night playing Baldur’s Gate II.
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I didn’t get to keep mine from my childhood, which made me sad. But, the horrible old people who carpeted the kitchen and bathrooms and installed towel racks in every room BUT the bathrooms left one behind when we bought this house, which made me happy.
Life is funny sometimes.
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Ugh…kitchen carpet…the traumatic flashbacks are real.
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Bathroom carpet + boys = pppp ewwwwww
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There have been many occasions when I wish I still had my old Intellivision system. With its high-tech graphics and complicated controllers with a numerical keypad I was the envy of none of my friends.
And yet they all always ended up at my house playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
It was also funny to me that George Plimpton did the commercials. To this day I joke about Intellivision being marketed to the Paris Review-reading gamer.
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The problem with Intellivision is it didn’t have dice. I find the dice are the main lure for getting people to play anything.
“Sitting around a table pretending to be fantasy characters? That sounds dumb.”
“Here, roll this.”
“Okay I got a 20.”
“Congrats, that’s a critical hit. You just lopped off an enemy’s head.”
“…what day of the week did you say you guys meet again?”
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