Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

lighting, greenhouse-like seating. Me and Heath
and Roy, fresh from seeing “Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade” for the sixth time. This was
the end of June. Ice in my Dr. Pepper. Heath and
Roy and I had been training ourselves at SMB3
for a couple of die-hard weeks. I spoke with
weight:
“I want to beat the game, someday, with-
out warping. You know, non-warp.”
“Non-warp?” my brother asked skeptically.
We’d seen Rohit perform non-warp feats of dex-
terity on Super Mario Bros., though to imagine
such a thing on SMB3, which we hadn’t even
beaten with warps yet - it was unthinkable.
Heath was nominated as the one to even-
tually beat it, first, non-warp. He had gotten
better than my brother and I, most likely be-
cause he was the best and oldest gamer among
the three of us. He could beat NG in one life,
after all. He beat the game with the use of one
warp, just to show us the ending. He collected
lives and items in Worlds 1 through 3, and then
warped from the beginning of World 4 to World
8. He used a Frog Suit to swim under the battle-
ship. He used the P-Wing to ace the hardest
airship level and the Jugem’s Clouds to skip the
only two stages, 8-1 and 8-2. He then toughed
it through he last three challenges. We were
amazed to see that beating Bowser required you
to dodge him as he jumped and broke blocks. It
was so non-confrontational, and brilliant.
One cloudy day in late July, Heath came
over to attempt “the ultimate challenge.” We’d
been talking about it for weeks. He was to beat
the game “non-warp.” He was to beat every
level. He was to do this without any 99-life tricks
(picking up the odd extra life mushroom was
not, in any way, forbidden). He was to do this on
one continue.
He did it.
He used two controllers - alternating be-
tween Mario and Luigi. It took four hours. By the
time he got to World 7, it was raining horribly
outside. Just two days earlier, it had been 116
degrees. The patio door felt cold.
It was the most I’d ever been moved by
76 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3
the end of a videogame. It scared the life out
of me a few times. This game I’d known so well
had so many nuances I’d never noticed, and so
many things I’d been blatantly skipping, or else
too inexperienced to see. Half of World 7, for
example, I’d never seen until that day.
Heath had gone to the bathroom right be-
fore the World 7 airship. I was staring outside as
my brother flipped through the Nintendo Power
Official SMB3 Strategy Guide. He’d been serving
as navigator for the mission. The rain stopped,
and a B-1 Bomber streaked across the sky on
a touch-and-go from McConnel Air Force Base.
The B-1 had been the other big debut of the
summer, and it shook the windows and shorted
radios every once in a while.
I felt like crying, then. SMB3 had made me
cry for some stupid reasons. I cried when they
didn’t have it at Pop’n’Go one day after school,
and my mother called me an idiot for crying.
She said, “Grow up! So what if they don’t have
it? You can go play another Mario game.”
That day when the rain stopped and a B-1
shook the basement glass door, I wanted to cry
for a different reason. It was a reason of finality.
Finality always brings about emotions. I think,
when emotional movies end emotionally, we
aren’t moved so much by the particulars of the
story as by the fact that the movie is ending. Or
at least that’s how I’ve always felt. That’s almost
how I felt on that day. Before Heath came
back to finish what he’d started, I understood
something quite simple, and childish. Is it not
the case, however, that the childish things are
often the most important? What happens to us
in childhood shapes us as adults, to be sure. To
look at it most obliquely, we can say, if we don’t
die in childhood, then we will no doubt be alive
in adulthood. That’s as direct and, at the same
time, indirect as it can get. There couldn’t have
been anything more direct than what I realized
that day:
Without fail, I will play this game for the
rest of my life.
It meant I would never grow up.