My father never once told me he was proud of me when I was young. Pride is a sin. My good grades in school were just the status quo.
He bought a used NES when I was 2 years old. He got it with the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt combination cart, 2 controllers and an NES Zapper. It was a long time before we got another cart. My earliest memories of playing video games were with Super Mario Bros.
I must have been around 5 when I was finally good enough to get to world 8 (using warps), but I still couldn’t beat the game. I’d timidly approach the hammer brothers in 8-3 but their attacks were too unpredictable to dodge, and I’d run out of lives before I reached the castle.
“Hey dad, have you ever beaten this game?”
“Oh, of course!”
“Could you show me?”
He took the controller. He breezed through the first two world 8 levels. In 8-3, he plowed forward. Where I was timid, he took nearly the whole level at running speed, dodging and weaving before the hammer brothers had a chance to get many hammers in the air.
The final level was a struggle. He got lost in the maze, and he only had a couple lives left. He found the pipe that leads underwater. “Finally! OK, this is the right way.” He was small Mario, so he was playing extremely carefully. He dodged the fireballs, back and forth, waiting for the perfect moment to jump past Bowser. He soared through a small gap in the hammers and landed on the axe. He did it!
The game looped back to level 1; he pumped his fist and smiled, handed me the controller and left. I still had an adrenaline high. I wanted to be able to do that!
A few years later I did finally beat Super Mario Bros. I ran downstairs to tell my dad.
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. It was awesome! Don’t you remember when you beat it?”
“Oh, I did? Huh.”
I first played Super Mario Bros. 3 at a friend’s house. I didn’t even know it existed. The graphics were amazing compared to the first game. You could go to an airship, a desert; you could be a raccoon, a frog.
Monica and I would pass the controller back and forth. My sister cried that it was her turn to try. We gave her the second controller so she thought she was playing too.
Monica showed me a few tricks: she uncovered a darker note block and jumped into the clouds. She crouched behind the background and got a secret whistle. The game was bright and colorful and bizarre and full of possibilities.
I threw up before school one morning. My mom bought ginger ale and took me to the Video Safari to pick out a game rental. (The “Dayeeahtonaaa, let’s go away” from the arcade in the back is still burned into my mind.)
I meticulously combed through the levels, barf bucket by my side, trying to reach ones that I hadn’t seen with Monica. The game was still full of secrets. How had I never seen this coin ship before? Instead of warping ahead, I tried out World 3. The fortress there was a strange, circuitous maze. I was dizzy with the freedom of playing games during school, the nausea. Ginger ale would remind me of vomit for nearly a decade.
My dad finally got me Mario 3 one Christmas. He disguised the shape by putting a plastic scotch tape dispenser on top. Before I opened my presents I was convinced my parents hadn’t gotten it; I knew he said it was expensive. I stared at the bright yellow box when I opened it, processing it.
One night we had a baby sitter. I was playing Mario 3. She wanted me to stop so we could watch TV. She turned on a Ghostbusters cartoon, which I didn’t think we were allowed to watch. “It’s OK, it’s just a cartoon!” Later, I threw up on the bathroom floor. She mopped it up with a clean bath towel.
“Where do you put dirty things?”
“Down the laundry chute.”
My mom screamed from the basement a few days later, “WHO PUT THIS DOWN THE CHUTE?” We never saw that sitter again.
Later we had another sitter. She seemed super interested in the video games I was playing. I put in Mario 3, and she watched me play it nearly all the way through.
“Wow, you’re so good! I could never do that. That looks so difficult!” She sounded sincere. She was literally leaning forward, on the edge of her seat.
“Great job!” She jumped out of her chair when I beat the game.
It was nice to have someone, especially an adult, care about my interests, to give me encouragement.
My grandpa died when my father was really young. Sometimes my father would get teary eyed and tell me that he never knew his father, so he didn’t know how to be a dad. I used to not know what that meant, but I did now.
