Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

asked if she could rent the game, and the guys
said they were busy. She gave them a lecture. It
was scary. We ended up with the game.
My brother and I had been playing it for
ten minutes, gliding through the first couple of
stages with the skills we’d honed since Super
Mario Bros., when my brother entered the first
Mini Fortress and promptly imitated what he’d
seen in “The Wizard.” He got the raccoon power-
up, he flew up and over the wall as Raccoon Lu-
igi, and got the warp whistle. Next thing I knew,
we were whisked away to World Four, the Giant
World, the world the credits would reveal was
properly named “Big Island.” The first level had
huge pipes and huge enemies. Little Mario was
a good one-fourth the size of Huge Goomba. I
felt heartbroken for a minute. I’d only been able
to play World 1-1, 1-3, and die in 1-4 before
suddenly being forced into 4-1. I felt like I didn’t
deserve the right to be there. I felt like I hadn’t
earned it. My older brother - who’d eventually
give up videogames, take them up again when
Resident Evil was released for PlayStation, and
then give them up again before PlayStation2,
only to pick them up again with Halo on Xbox
- was possessed merely with the thought of get-
ting to the most advanced world. He wanted to
see his position in the game represented by the
highest numbers possible. It merely made me
feel cheated. I wanted to learn the game a stage
at a time.
It was hard to rent the game. They had
two copies, and they were both most certainly
out, or promised to someone who’d signed their
name on a list that spanned a dozen or so pages
of a legal pad. If we’d had the cash to buy the
game, we wouldn’t have been able to find a
copy. Life sucked for a few months. And then,
suddenly, Nintendo, knowing they had a hit on
their hands, unleashed a large shipment to the
public. Around this time, miracles conspired and
I received a check for $50 from my grand-
mother, on my birthday. Normally, she only sent
$25, though I guess a part of her realized that
she’d been spending a bit too much of her dead
husband’s fortune on the casinos in Atlantic City
74 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3
and cruises around the Caribbean, so she threw
me and my brothers a little extra. We all have
birthdays in the month of June. I’m the 7th, my
little brother Clint is the 8th, my big brother Roy
is the 26th. I was born at 11:58 PM on June 7th,
1979. I remember my dad telling me the day
after Clint was born, “You know, if you’d been
born just two minutes later, you would have
been born on Clint’s birthday.” Eight years old,
I was, on that day, and I screwed up my face
and replied, “No - if I’d been born two minutes
later, he’d have been born on my birthday.” I
was that kind of kid. I guess that’s why they
never bought me presents. My grandmother, the
type to offer me a dollar whenever the family
car found its way to Newark, Delaware, perhaps
because she never saw me and never knew
me, found it easier to give. Little did she ever
have the chance to learn -- her chain-smoking,
condescending, throaty, utterly serious “Go buy
yourself a Snickers, tubby” did more to make
me than years of never receiving presents. My
family had been kind of poor until around the
time I turned eleven; having a baby brother
with a birthday the day after yours has a way of
acquainting your parents with statistical irony.
They get all misty-eyed, and they declare that
the child will have a better childhood than the
other two children. I guess you could say I’m a
little jealous. I guess you’d be right.
I thought to buy my copy of Super Mario
Bros 3 at a Children’s Palace toy store by Town
East Square Mall in Wichita, Kansas. A girl with
braces told me they didn’t have it. She looked at
me like I was a kid. It occurs to me, now, that
that’s what I was. We finally found a copy of the
game at a K-Mart. It was on layaway, and my
mother screamed at some hapless redneck clerk
until he gave us the game. We took some poor
bastard’s layaway.
My brother and I played the game every
night until midnight, all summer. Having the
Nintendo in the basement of a three-floor town-
house was a wonderful way to keep my parents
ignorant. Sometimes my mom would find out we
were up so late, and she’d get mad. She’d tell