I still remember the 8-bit drum solo that began the boss fight music of one of the first video games I ever played; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time.
May it be stuck in your head as often as it is stuck in mine
Every Sunday I would ask my dad if we could go home and play the Super Nintendo when we got home from church. I didn’t just want to play alone, after all who is Leonardo without Raphael, Donatello, or Michelangelo? My older sisters were too cool for the turtles, and my little sister could barely hold a controller, and since I grew up in a more or less traditional Mormon household, my mom would be too busy making dinner. So it fell upon my dad to help me reach the end of this street fighting ninja game, making our way through boss after boss, and maybe even reaching “Super Shredder”. The big bad, the extremist of evils: the final boss. I was never clear what Shredder’s plan was, but it involved time travel and I think world domination. Although I don’t think you have to go all the way back to the Triassic period to take over the world. Also, I was five, so there were a lot of things I didn’t understand.
In 1996 my parents bought me and my siblings a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. It had 3D graphics and our childish minds exploded and/or melted when we saw a blocky Mario running around in front of Princess Peach’s Castle. No longer were we slave to only moving forward or backward, up or down. Now we could move left and right! We jump around in circles and change the camera angle! We spent the first hour running around Peach’s courtyard before we even went inside where the game actually took place. But it wasn’t long after the Nintendo 64 era that I became the primary gamer in the household. My older sisters moved on to boy bands and makeup and other gross stuff. But I played the shit out of Star Fox 64 instead.
When my mom, excuse me, Santa Claus put a Nintendo Gamecube under the Christmas tree in 2011, this time it was solely for me. It had all the classic Nintendo franchises on release or in the works for the next year. Your Mario Bros, your Legends of Zelda, your Donkey Kongs. But it also had an IBM PowerPC "Gekko" ‑ 485 MHz CPU and 24 KB 1T‑SRAM! I had no idea what that meant then, and I have no idea what it means now, but at the time me and my friends would talk about how that made it somehow superior to the Playstation 2 because the numbers were bigger or different in a way that was good, and people who liked Playstation more than Nintendo were buttheads. My favorite game of all time Skies of Arcadia: Legends came out for the Gamecube in 2003, and I have since beaten it at least 30 times and still get choked up during emotional cut-scenes.
My Dad bought me a Nintendo Wii for Christmas in 2006, one of the few years he came back to Utah from Virginia for the holidays. I had been excited about the Wii ever since the motion detecting controllers were first announced, and it was not long before those became the most annoying thing about the system. Most games ended up not using the motion detection at all so you could just play using the buttons. Eventually they would release enhanced versions of the controllers that could detect your motions with more precision, but it was still only fun in sword fighting games and anyone who walked in on you playing thought you looked like a huge doofus.
I bought an Xbox 360 with my own hard earned money from my first job at a KFC near my house. My mom was marrying a video game programmer which I thought would be awesome, but he is more interested in talking about the textures and lighting of games, rather than the games themselves. When I moved out for college I brought my Wii, my Xbox, and all my games with me. Since then a whole new generation of video game consoles has been released and I have several of them. I lose myself to these worlds I feel have been constructed for me to get lost in. The sprawling role-playing games, the shorter narrative games, the silly time wasters. I no longer need anyone to help me defeat the bosses. No Raphael for my Leonardo.
