Little Did They Know

Do you remember the heyday of the Nintendo era? The golden days of NES? When everything they advertised seemed like it was pure magic, regardless if it was crap! Things like ROB, the Robot Operated Buddy, who could move spinning discs right by your side. Or the sweat inducing Power Pad, that gave you the false impression that you had the control over an 8-bit Olympic athlete through the power of your feet! Perhaps the most well known, the Power Glove. A fashion accessory that wielded so much useless power no one knew what to do with it...not even it's creators. I of course only had the Power Pad, because it came in a cheap NES bundle pack that my parents could afford.

Ahhh, sweet fond memories.

But that's not what this Facts' about. No, it's about high, lofty expectations being crushed, and then forced to live with those crushed expectations for the rest of your life. And then play with them.

In keeping with the theme that I was poor as shit, my parents would very rarely go out and just buy a video game. No sir, that occasion was usually reserved for something special like Christmas, a Birthday, or if the family pet left us some money in it's will. We all knew this; it was law.

I remember having this naive idea that my parents just knew what the good ones were, that they would magically pick the best videogame of the shelf, the one that would provide only the finest entertainment; mindless hours of callous inducing, thumb numbing bliss! Unfortunately that was not the case.

For them picking videogames was allot like picking out toys. What they would do, when picking toys, is walk down the toy aisle and pick up the one that looked economically feasible yet similar to what you had originally requested. Example: If you asked for a GI Joe, you got a generic 'American Fighter Brigade' figure instead, one that looked like a GI Joe, but was a poor (shit poor) substitute.

By taking the above example into consideration, and the fact that they knew nothing about video games, how do you (the reader) think they picked out video games for us? I'll tell you: By cover art and price.

If the box looked like it might hold our interest for twenty-thirty minute intervals (dragon or spaceship) and it was $24.99 or less, then we were gonna love it...damn it. Sadly they were right.

If it wasn't for the fact that we had rarely gotten videogames, or that when we did get them it was like a holy experience, we probably would have been more picky and whiny when we got a shiny new copy of "Star Soldier" instead of "Mario Bros 3". And this is where the confliction starts to come in.


You see, on these special events (Christmas or Pet Funeral) that we were actually bestowed a slice of 8-bit heaven, you usually made a request on a list of some kind the night prior for what you wanted. So on Christmas eve you left a note for Santa begging him not to give you a shitty game, but one of grace, form and that your friend told you was awesome. It was hard to wake up the next day, unwrap a present that you KNEW was a videogame, and not be disappointed when you saw that it was not a copy of Robocop, but instead was something called Xevious (try and pronounce that).


At the same time the sheer joy and bliss of receiving a brand new game was so rare, that you forgot that you didn't get what you asked for specifically, and your disappointment disappeared. Such is the joy of being an underprivileged youth.

The funny thing is that now, being a retro gamer, and after playing these games again and again (and having no choice), they're really not that bad. Some of them were actually quite good, they were just above my head at the time. I mean you try to teach a 10 year old to appreciate the complexity of a poorly translated Japanese Action/adventure game with RPG elements. Not easy.

I still own all of those games that I received throughout my childhood (I know I said we throughout this, but I never really let my siblings play them), and I still play them from time to time. And time to time I give my parents grief for not buying me, or my siblings, the proper video games to grow up with. They understand my pain, and tell me to shut up.

So it's a Fact: My parents didn't (and don't) know shit about good videogames. But the ones they got me ended up being okay...after ten years.