My father had been staying with an elderly lady in Ohio that he met through an ex-coworker, trying to get a job at the Honda plant in a town named Marysville. Honda was a great place to work and would mean dad would make a lot more money, enough that mom wouldn't have to work at night anymore and could stay home with me and Ryan. But mom didn't want to wait much longer to find a place to live because she wanted to make sure I started my new school at the beginning of the year with the other kids. This was all explained to me as we drove to New Jersey, where I would be dropped off for the summer.
I had no qualms about my vacation in New Jersey. I was still at an age where relatives were exciting and not humiliating or boring to be with. I was even excited about my pre-arranged week stay at my boring-as-hell Aunt Cathy's house. She was a newlywed so now I would have more company than just her and her cats. I had brought a huge selection of books, coloring books, and notebooks so I could write stories to my heart's content.
It was in New Jersey that I first encountered the Super Nintendo. The gaming industry had moved on without me and when my cousin taught me how to play Mario Paint, I wasn't impressed. Sure, the colors were bright and for the first time I could remember Mario looked like his box art counterpart (I am of course referring to the famous blue Super Mario 2 box), but it was boring. My cousin wouldn't let me play any of his other games because as he explained, they were too hard for me. So Mario Paint it was.
I was shipped off to visit other relatives as well, my home base with my aunt and grandma in their North Bergen apartment. When it finally came time for me to visit boring, hyper-religious Aunt Cathy, I wasn't as optimistic as I had previously been.
My uncle, her new husband (now ex-uncle I suppose), was as boring as her. He would wake up at the crack of dawn to do some sort of martial arts in the backyard, then quietly slip in the house and eat breakfast with us without uttering a word. After that I would usually never see him again until the next morning. I wasn't even sure if he had a job, but the point is that meant I was completely in Cathy's care. I was as miserable as could be. The pool I had been promised I would have unlimited access to ended up being closed to me after a day because the couple that owned it decided to go on vacation. All the Amish villages we visited blurred together very quickly. After a disastrous trip home from a video rental store (I had wanted to rent two movies but I was only allowed one and threw a fit), I stomped inside and was surprised to see my uncle in the living room, cleaning out the cabinets under their TV unit. He had a few items splayed out on the floor, including a Super Nintendo. That was the last thing I expected to find in this house.
"Is that yours?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, not looking up at me. "Do you play?"
"Only Mario Paint."
"Well there are plenty of games besides Mario Paint!" And then he laughed, which freaked me out. Hearing his voice and then laughter in such short succession was too much of a shock.
He invited me to sit down while my aunt came in and went into her bedroom, slamming the door and probably praying for my soul. He handed me a small plastic Rubbermaid bin that had a couple of cartridges and a few game boxes. Since my basis for picking out games up to this point was the game either being a Disney tie-in or Mario, I was overwhelmed. F-Zero? The Legend of Zelda? Super Bowling? Super Mario World? I picked up one of the games that was in a box.
Final Fantasy II.
It was a simple red box with the title. That was it. I turned it over and read the description. What the heck was a RPG? Still, it sounded just like some of the fantasy chapter books I had been reading.
"Have you played this?" I asked.
"Yeah, I beat it a long time ago," he replied, finally looking up at me. "It's OK, but I'll never play it again. It's one of those games you just play once. Why don't you just keep it?"
Being a kid that loved any kind of gift, especially a toy, I didn't bother telling him I didn't even have a SNES. I thanked him and went up to the attic to my guest room. Since he was still cleaning out the TV unit I didn't bother asking if I could play. I opened the box and pulled out the cartridge, instruction manual, and world map. I had never seen such a thick instruction manual! I switched on my light and read it cover-to-cover several times before I was called down to dinner.
It's so funny, because at the time, I was just excited to have something else to amuse me besides my 30-minute cartoon from the rental store. I had absolutely no concept that that miserable day would be a turning point for the rest of my life.
It sounds dramatic and crazy, but it is honestly how I feel and I will never again feel otherwise. Sure, I might have been introduced to Final Fantasy at some other point in my life, but that's something I won't really ever know now. But opening that book and falling in love with just the concept of Final Fantasy would not only lead me tumbling head-first into the world of gaming once again, but that autumn it would introduce me to my first best friend, five years later it would lead me to another friend that made my high school existence much more bearable, and in that same fifth year I would meet the love of my life.
And doesn't the heart of every true gamer have a moment like that in their lives? Sometimes you know as you are experiencing the moment that your life has changed, and in cases like mine you don't figure it out until years later and it just strikes you one day.
---
We moved into a duplex that summer, a temporary solution until my parents could scout out more housing developments that were popping up all over Marysville. The boys next door desperately wanted a Sega Genesis, but they couldn't get one until they sold their SNES. I begged my dad to buy it, even though I knew he wouldn't play with me ever again. Final Fantasy II was tucked away safely under my bed in my suitcase.
I spent my first summer in Ohio holed up inside with Cecil and Rosa, and saved the world three times.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Continue?
Sadly, I can't claim that I beat the first two games I ever played through. I don't think I ever even got to a bonus round in Duck Hunt and once I discovered the joys of used video game stores I eventually sold off my copy of Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. for $2 credit towards a PS1 game. It wouldn't be until I got Super Mario All-Stars years later that I would finally beat my first Mario game.
My love affair with Mario, and gaming in general, actually ended quite quickly because my mom would make me quit after five hours a day of staring at the TV. Since there were no saved games and I was, you know, six years old, I didn't really have what it took to get to the eighth world and save our princess.
I had also started first grade and things were getting exciting, friends from kindergarten were in my class and now I got to go to school all day. After school I would go to downtown Rochester with my mom to the Mayo clinic; I was getting a little brother.
On my seventh birthday, my dad wanted to take me to KB Toys at the mall so I could pick out a Barbie I wanted. My mom was too tired, she was in her sixth month of pregnancy and she was working through it part-time at Target, so it was a rare trip with my dad and of course when it came to Barbies he had no clue what he was doing. We got to the store and in addition to getting my Birthday Barbie (that was her real name), my dad had picked out something in the glass case behind the counter. On the way home in the car, I dug it out of the bag and squealed: A Game Boy! I had certainly heard of this, a friend of mine at school had brought one in and had it confiscated. And better yet, I recognized the fat mustached man on the cover of one of the games it came with....Mario! I think that might have been the first time I experienced nostalgia, as I remembered my lazy afternoons in front of the TV, shoving Econofoods chicken nuggets in my mouth as I played. I begged my dad to let me play as soon as we got home, Barbie already forgotten.
But it's funny, as I looked over my dad's shoulder as he showed me how to play, I wanted more than anything just to watch him. It was more exciting for me to see how far he could go with Mario, since in my short history with games I could only manage playing the same levels over and over again. Eventually it got to be that I would just curl up next to my dad, and he would fire up the Game Boy and we would see how far we could go that night. As he played, I would make up a narrative, pieced together from the action of the game and what I had read in the instruction booklet, which I poured over every night. My dad would just laugh at me and ask me what happened next in the story. I'd like to think that my love of a good gaming plot stemmed from those stories I would tell him.
The day we finally reached the final stage and we flew Mario's airplane to victory over the alien Tatanga, I cheered and announced that Mario and Daisy were off to get married on a boat, ala Ariel in The Little Mermaid (guess I was wrong on that one). I had finally seen the ending of a game and my love for gaming had been reignited. In the meantime, my dad bought me a couple of other titles for us to enjoy together. I finally got a new NES game, The Little Mermaid, the first game I ever beat on my own. The last game my dad and I played together was Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly. I was too terrified to even entertain the thought of playing that game on my own, especially in the later levels in the deep woods and underground. I don't think I could bring myself to pick it up today, either, which just goes to show what a pussy I am when it comes to certain games.
I feel it's appropriate to end this chapter here. It wasn't too long before my love for video gaming faded into the background once again. After my brother was born, a lot of things changed at once. My dad stopped playing video games with me, although I never understood why. We don't have the kind of relationship today where I could ask him why he stopped and expect an answer not laced with sarcasm. We never had a talk about it, he just stopped coming to get me from my room and the Game Boy remained in the end table drawer next to the couch, put back in its original box. He eventually started taking long trips, gone for several weeks at a time, and after I finished first grade and I hadn't seen my dad for two months, my mom announced that we were moving to Ohio.
I would be staying in New Jersey with relatives as long as it took for my mom and dad to settle on a house, and it would be too much for them to have to entertain me and take care of Ryan.
To be continued...
My love affair with Mario, and gaming in general, actually ended quite quickly because my mom would make me quit after five hours a day of staring at the TV. Since there were no saved games and I was, you know, six years old, I didn't really have what it took to get to the eighth world and save our princess.
I had also started first grade and things were getting exciting, friends from kindergarten were in my class and now I got to go to school all day. After school I would go to downtown Rochester with my mom to the Mayo clinic; I was getting a little brother.
On my seventh birthday, my dad wanted to take me to KB Toys at the mall so I could pick out a Barbie I wanted. My mom was too tired, she was in her sixth month of pregnancy and she was working through it part-time at Target, so it was a rare trip with my dad and of course when it came to Barbies he had no clue what he was doing. We got to the store and in addition to getting my Birthday Barbie (that was her real name), my dad had picked out something in the glass case behind the counter. On the way home in the car, I dug it out of the bag and squealed: A Game Boy! I had certainly heard of this, a friend of mine at school had brought one in and had it confiscated. And better yet, I recognized the fat mustached man on the cover of one of the games it came with....Mario! I think that might have been the first time I experienced nostalgia, as I remembered my lazy afternoons in front of the TV, shoving Econofoods chicken nuggets in my mouth as I played. I begged my dad to let me play as soon as we got home, Barbie already forgotten.
But it's funny, as I looked over my dad's shoulder as he showed me how to play, I wanted more than anything just to watch him. It was more exciting for me to see how far he could go with Mario, since in my short history with games I could only manage playing the same levels over and over again. Eventually it got to be that I would just curl up next to my dad, and he would fire up the Game Boy and we would see how far we could go that night. As he played, I would make up a narrative, pieced together from the action of the game and what I had read in the instruction booklet, which I poured over every night. My dad would just laugh at me and ask me what happened next in the story. I'd like to think that my love of a good gaming plot stemmed from those stories I would tell him.
The day we finally reached the final stage and we flew Mario's airplane to victory over the alien Tatanga, I cheered and announced that Mario and Daisy were off to get married on a boat, ala Ariel in The Little Mermaid (guess I was wrong on that one). I had finally seen the ending of a game and my love for gaming had been reignited. In the meantime, my dad bought me a couple of other titles for us to enjoy together. I finally got a new NES game, The Little Mermaid, the first game I ever beat on my own. The last game my dad and I played together was Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly. I was too terrified to even entertain the thought of playing that game on my own, especially in the later levels in the deep woods and underground. I don't think I could bring myself to pick it up today, either, which just goes to show what a pussy I am when it comes to certain games.
I feel it's appropriate to end this chapter here. It wasn't too long before my love for video gaming faded into the background once again. After my brother was born, a lot of things changed at once. My dad stopped playing video games with me, although I never understood why. We don't have the kind of relationship today where I could ask him why he stopped and expect an answer not laced with sarcasm. We never had a talk about it, he just stopped coming to get me from my room and the Game Boy remained in the end table drawer next to the couch, put back in its original box. He eventually started taking long trips, gone for several weeks at a time, and after I finished first grade and I hadn't seen my dad for two months, my mom announced that we were moving to Ohio.
I would be staying in New Jersey with relatives as long as it took for my mom and dad to settle on a house, and it would be too much for them to have to entertain me and take care of Ryan.
To be continued...
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