I should mention that we had, for me, a traumatic move from a major city to the middle of nowhere Alabama, when I was six years old, and that really affected me. One thing that made this move bearable was that we had moved near family and within 5 miles of our new place was three sets of cousins that were about my age. One year for Christmas, either 1988 or 1989, they all got the famous NES Action Set that came with Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt and the orange zapper. I should note, that I didn’t even know that they made a grey zapper until I was a grown man. However, we didn’t get an NES that year, as my dad was an outdoor type of person and I think that he wanted us to be more outdoorsy. In fact we wouldn’t get a NES ourselves until the summer of 1992, when we got the Challenge set bundled with Mario Bros 3. However, I am getting a head of myself here. We would constantly play the NES at our cousins’ houses when we visited. To them it might have been just a game system, but to my older brother and I, it was the best video game system around, loads better than our C64 or 2600 that we were still playing on occasion. One cousin’s house was a very big sports family, like they pushed them into sports all the time and both boys ended up playing baseball at the college level. They, like you would assume, had a ton of sports games, like they had probably 8 games and 6 of them were sports games. The baseball ones were boring and not fun to play, but they did have the best football game of all time, Tecmo Bowl. We loved that game! It was quite fun to play as a kid, and I imagine would be fun to play now as an adult. The other two sets of cousins loved games and had a large mix of games, and that is where I was exposed to most of the games for the NES.
However, one day when I was visiting the sports cousins, they had rented a bunch of games from the local movie place. I should note that the movie place in my town was different from other stores like Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. It was a mom and pop place that rented out for a day, not the weekend or week or any longer period, it was just a day, and it cost $2.50 to rent a game or movie from them for the day. So I was a bit surprised that they had rented several games at once. One of the games was the epic game that got me hooked on a series for over 35 years now, Dragon Warrior! I had a blast playing that game over there. Killing slimes and drakes, discovering all the secrets, dancing to the level up music, it was a fun game!
I can’t say what the sales pitch was for my Mom, but she was Christmas shopping for my Brother and I in 1989, when she came across people going crazy for this new thing called a Gameboy. Now my Mom recognize that it was made by Nintendo, and got it for us as our big Christmas gift rather than the other toys that she was going to get us. Maybe because we were traveling that year to have a big family Christmas and she didn’t want to pack a lot of gifts for the flight, or perhaps she thought that this would sate our need for a Nintendo. Either way, we opened that up in upstate New York and loved it! It came with Tetris, and it was amazing! We played it nonstop on the way home, which really helped when the flight between Atlanta and Dothan was cancelled and we had to take a bus instead. The Gameboy became a family device that was passed around during the evenings, to see who could get the best score in Tetris! Who could get the highest level! How many lines could you get before it became too much? It really was a family sport for a good six months or so. Eventually we got more games for it. Final Fantasy, Megaman, Super Mario Land, and my favorite, Battletoads! I loved that Gameboy! It even got damaged and parents sent it off to be repaired by Nintendo, and that was a long wait for it to return! Eventually, it was delivered to our neighbors by mistake, but they let us know it was at their house, and we got it back and enjoyed playing it again!
While I have told this story before, but I will tell it again since this is my history with gaming post. I took that Gameboy everywhere with me. We even got the AC Adaptor for it as I was burning through too many batteries constantly playing it. I took it to school, and had it in my bag, as I was staying over after school for baseball practice. At practice, I had put my back pack in the pile with everyone else’s but after practice, my Gameboy was gone! Now, I had suspected a teammate of mine for years of taking it, but I actually found out the true story 7 years later in my senior year. I am in music class during a lull, and the guy behind me (Matt) is talking to the guy next to him (David) about the time he ”Found” a Gameboy at school. He was playing with it the next day on the bus and another student that liked to bully him (Michael) threw it out the bus window. I turned around and asked if the Gameboy had final fantasy Adventure 2 in it. He said yes, and I hit him so hard that his chair flipped over. He gets up and square off against me, saying ,”What was that for?” I stand up, being a 6’2” varsity basketball center, towering over him and say, “That was mine!” He sat down and mumbled something, and music class resumes. The teacher later asked me about it, but never did anything as she figured that if I hit Matt, then I had a good reason for it.
However, I mentioned that Final Fantasy Adventure 2 was in the Gameboy, and that was a game we had borrowed from my brother’s friend. So not only did I lose my main means of gaming, I lost $35 of my saved money to buy him a replacement for it. So here I am with a bunch of Gameboy games, ac adaptor, and no Gameboy. Well, my parents decided that it would be a waste to let all that go, and they got me a new Gameboy for my brother and I for doing so well in school. To this day my Mom still blames me for losing the first one though.
Now, I should mention something here. My school was 23.7 miles from my house. It wasn’t a local school, in fact, it wasn’t even in the state. It was right across the state line, in the middle of nowhere where my mother went to school. If you allow me to get a little dark here, I will explain how I started going there instead of the local school in town that was a mere 6 miles away. When we first moved to the little town in the deep south, my brother and I went to the local school in town. My mother was even the head of the PTA (Parent Teacher Association). This caused her to be involved with a messy set of circumstances. Now, I was in third grade at the time and was sheltered from a lot of this story so everything I know is third hand at best. I imagine that my mother and brother could tell us more details. Suffice to say, at the local high school in 1991, a teacher went to the principal’s office and left her class unsupervised for a long period of time. Now from what I was told, she was having an affair with the married principal, and while she was doing so, something really bad happened to one of her students. At that point, my mom being on the PTA called for the dismissal of the teacher and the principal. While they did fire the teacher, they put the principal on paid leave for three months during the summer. So my mother was afraid of the principal taking his revenge out on her boys, and she sent us to her old school, where her friend was the principal and she knew a lot of the teaching staff. Now I told her, years later, that all she had to do was tell her dad about her boys being picked on by the principal at school, and that would have fixed that problem, permanently. Sadly, the principal remained there at the school in his job for at least the next 10 years, maybe even longer. He is not there anymore at least.
So why did I tell you all this? What is the point of it? Well, my older brother was born to be a salesman. He convinced my mother that we would make this move to a new school if they got us a NES for our birthdays that summer. With our birthdays being three weeks apart we could ask for combined gifts like that. So my mom and brother, make the long drive to Toys R Us and gets us the Challenge set bundled with our favorite game at the time, Super Mario Bros 3! Shortly afterwards, I use my Birthday money and get TMNT 2 The arcade game, as I am super into TMNT at the time and this was my favorite arcade game. My brother gets us the epic game Dragon Warrior! Not a bad set of games to have for the NES! Our collection of games grew each birthday and Christmas. Eventually we get some of the best games for it, like Megaman 1-4, Final Fantasy, Ultima, and the Dragon Warrior sequels. At this point, the SNES was coming out that fall, and there were lots of cheap NES games that had been out for years for us to play, as well as us loaning out games with our three sets of cousins to play some of their classic games that they were tired of while we were getting newer games that they didn’t have. That is how I played Zelda, Punch out, and Mario 2. Also, games were cheap enough at that point that my brother and I could ask our grandparents for one as a combined gift at Christmas time. We also started renting games from the local place, with such amazing games like Castlevania 2, Star Tropics(we had the code from a magazine), Zelda 2, Shadowgate, and Solomons key. We eventually discovered this device in a magazine or something, and we got it for Christmas one year. It was called the Game Genie! That thing was a deal breaker! Suddenly, even the most infuriating game was playable and even enjoyable. Playing around with it, trying to find new codes that worked was a lot fun in itself. We even signed up to get new codes sent to us in the mail. That was always fun when they arrived every quarter or so. We liked it so much that we eventually got a game genie for the Gameboy when it was released!
Eventually, my mom came home with a second NES console that she said she found on the curb. It being late into the system’s life cycle, we fully believed her, but she said later on that it was probably someone’s old system that she bought for cheap but didn’t remember whose it was. So then we had two of them, one hooked up to the main tv and one hooked up to a little color TV in my brother’s room. They were great systems that we enjoyed having for years, and it really helped that we also got a subscription to one of the greatest magazines of all time, Nintendo Power. As a kid in the early 90s, this was our sole source of news on games as well tips and guides! Not to mention that they would even rate upcoming NES games to let you know which ones were worth your time to get. The posters were cool, the cover art epic, and I loved the Mario and Zelda comics that they did in each issue. We got in fairly early on the magazine within the first 6 months of it launching, and kept it all the way through the NES era and well into the SNES era.
Eventually though, we got tired of seeing all these new 16 bit games coming out, and we wanted to play them. My brother wanted to get a Super Nintendo. As it was the successor to the NES, and it had Super Mario World. However, I was adamant that we needed to get the Sega Genesis. It had two great games that I wanted to play on it. It had Shanghai 2, which turns out to have also been released on the SNES, and it had X-men. Now I had got addicted to playing these tile matching games on the school’s one and only Mac computer in the library, so I really wanted to play these two games at home. Eventually, my brother conceded, and for my 14th birthday we got a Sega Genesis.
