First Owned Games
Written by Jacob Rubin, Jesse Baldridge, OJ Patterson and Seamus Calder
Every journey has a beginning. For some of us, it’s Tetris on an older sibling’s Game Boy. For others, it’s Snake on a Nokia phone. For a handful, it’s ET for the Atari, probably? Jesus, what a mess that was. Anyway, if you play games, one game was your first game. This isn’t a theory, that’s just how time works. So we asked the STTV crew to sound off on the first game they ever owned. Things can be a little wobbly with the concept of “first” (I mean, we can’t count Chex Quest, can we?) but we all picked something with a good deal of meaning. Enjoy this trip down memory lane!
Jacob
I for sure owned and played other games before this, like CD-ROMs based on Animaniacs and Toy Story and shit, but the first real deal serious console gamer-game I owned was Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land for the Game Boy.
This was gifted to me by my parents along with the limited-edition Ice Blue Game Boy Pocket, the first video game-related thing I ever owned. I recently asked my parents why they chose to buy this game, and they had no idea. I can only assume a knowledgeable staff member at Toys R Us suggested it, and he was right!
I liked this game a lot, but it wasn’t until I got my first proper Mario game, Super Mario Land for the Game Boy (the second video game I ever owned) (I think), that I realized how much Wario ate Mario’s lunch.
Wario started every level in his large mode and shrank when he took damage. Mario started small and would die unless you found a mushroom. What a dork!
Mario killed enemies by jumping on their heads. Wario could jump on enemies to disable them and kill them with a sick-ass bull rush. Or, while disabled, he could pick them up and throw them! Much cooler!
Wario goes through his adventure with a sinister grin, and he looks like he’s having a great time, whereas Mario’s face remains placid for the whole affair. What are you, miserable? It wouldn’t kill you to smile, sweetheart! (It’s okay to say that to men.)
I’d argue that Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land is the perfect entry-level platformer. The gameplay isn’t as simple as Mario (with just the jump and run) but not too much else going on, the power-ups are logical and visually distinct (jet hat go fast whoooosh), and the levels are easy to navigate. Plus, there’s loads of fun and satisfying secrets like the fifteen little treasures hidden all over the place. One of them is a football! One of them is a Metroid, I think?? I played this game constantly: long car trips, flights, Grandma’s house, sitting in the back row at Shabbat services, anywhere I could sneak a Game Boy Pocket (and later Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance). I got lots of other Game Boy games (Pokemon of course, Link’s Awakening, a Yoshi-themed Tetris-type puzzle game called Yoshi that felt more like it should have been a mini-game in something else) but I always went back to Wario to re-play some of the boss fights or autoscrolling levels.
It’s a game with accessible gameplay, a charming setting (all the worlds are food-themed! Rice Beach! Parsley Woods! Mt. Teapot!!) and a good message: the goal in life is to accumulate as much money as possible and die with all that money. Words to live by!
OJ
There were pictures, probably videotape too. A tiny boy holding a big ass box. Dead-eyed stare into the lens of my father’s Canon. I never knew how to take pictures as a kid. Always looked like I was in my own world and was rudely interrupted, demanded even, to join someone else’s. “Huh? What do you want now?”
According to the picture, I wanted a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. According to my math, I had just turned three years old. I probably liked video games, as all children enjoy cute shapes, bright sounds and flickering lights. But I clearly didn’t have the mental acuity to know much about the power I possessed, let alone the dexterity to really enjoy SNES’s biggest hits. Yet, it was mine? Sort of?
(This confirmation would mean, unless my postmaster father had a hook up, my birthday party was weeks after my actual birthday. The SNES came out August 23, 1991 and my birthday is [redacted].)
The Nintendo Entertainment System, the console that saved the gaming industry and predated me by three years, was decidedly my older brothers’. I played the NES sparingly and far after it became obsolete–a time capsule of curiosity but never a fascination to finish.
By 1996, my teenage siblings, eight and ten years my senior, would come and go as they pleased, able to procure their own systems and (bootleg or borrowed) software (and bucket-ass cars and cool girlfriends). I too would request from our parents, graciously procure, and play games (when my brothers let me or were too far away from home to say no). Access to memory cards and strategy guides that personalized each of our experiences, the huge jump in graphics and expansive virtual space, new peripheral haptics, an ineffability of playing “the future,” all coalesced into ethereal awe. The 3D era (3DO, Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn) was too big to claim for any one person, any one system, bigger than Gen X or Y; it was “Nobody’s.”
Super Nintendo was “Ours.” SNES, with limited memory and expensive cartridges, was practically impossible to “hog”. My brothers and I played co-op games, or borrowed whatever from Blockbuster for a weekend at a time. An hours-long single player epic in a house of three (eventually four) boys (especially with each having vastly different interests and mental capacities) was improbable. Franchises like Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, gorgeous and stirring (and difficult), were too intricate for me to progress through and too “not them” for my brothers to want to play on my behalf.
I say all that to say this: my first owned game was the one that came with the box: Super Mario World. The continued adventures of Mario, Luigi (and their special dinosaur mount friend, hello hello, :lowers sunglasses:) was the perfect pick-up-and-play killer app for the 32-bit era. SMW segued seamlessly from the ludo-language and logic established in Super Mario Bros 1-3: tight controls, a tactile sense of friction and momentum, rich sound design, a surprisingly non-linear overworld map, an expanded lore and believability. You can spin-jump off the “hard” surface of a damn Buzzy Beetle and herd a pack of Boos away from doors with carefully timed attention. What can Yoshi eat? Almost everything??? The only way to metabolize those possibilities is experientially. Super Mario World afforded me strategy, expression and deftness for the first time in my life.
As long as I didn’t save over the file with all the cool stuff unlocked, I was safe to do as I pleased in Vanilla Dome or Chocolate Island. Hell, I probably could (and did (unwittingly)) save over my brothers’ progress. A lack of care of what comes after is definitional to inheritance.
By 1994 or so, when I had my first flickers of consciousness and long term memory, my brothers had moved on to Super Punch Out and Madden. They had probably beaten Bowser and his illegitimate children many times over, done with the simplistic solitude of stomping on Goombas. All unlocked !-blocks and 1UP farming levels were my (unearned) spoils to enjoy. Or to erase.
The beauty of Super Mario World is that you can pick it up at any time, start playing any level, access any region of the game, and “get it.” It’s so easy to “start over” because SMW feels eternal. It has always been there and will always be there. The freedom to fuck around and find out, to explore every rule and relation between avatar and hazard, to investigate speed and form, the glorious soundtrack requiring you to reach a certain level to bop along to it meant Super Mario World was (is) infinitely satisfying.
And in it, I filled a void of disinterest with my nascent interiority. I made mine mine. I have the pictures to prove possession. (They’re at my mom’s house, I think).
Seamus
I signed up to write something for this thinking I had an easy answer. I think I even said mine would be fun. But that’s the thing about memories, sometimes you catch yourself and realize what you think isn’t actually what happened. Case in point, in 1999 the San Francisco Giants played their last game in Candlestick Park. I went to that game with my dad and my older sister. The Dodgers won because God isn’t real, and we had to leave early and missed all of the post game celebrations because we had to pick up my little brother from after school care. We gave him a commemorative ball we got at the game. 27 years later, my brother will tell you he was at that game. Memory is a hell of a thing.
I’m not your typical nostalgic video game nerd because, well, for a lot of my early years I didn’t have them. I remember going to Ross’ house and he had an NES with Duck Hunt and I was blown away, no pun intended. Mary and Sam had a SNES with a TMNT fighting game and Bart’s Nightmare, but I remember showing up to their house one day and hearing them say as I walked in the door “hide the Nintendo or Seamus won’t leave.” One of my best friends growing up, and still, Taylor, him and his brothers always had all the games and all the systems. It’s how I experienced the Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, and first fell in love with Final Fantasy. You’ll notice now that I’m skirting around the actual topic of this, and that’s because I don’t know what my first game is (definitively). I have ideas that could be answers, but I feel like I can’t accurately respond to this prompt without explaining the rest.
My childhood was… fine. Until in my late 30’s I went into therapy and my therapist told me that actually my childhood was “fucked up.” Her words. My parents got divorced in 1997. I was 8. One year prior the hot ticket item for Christmas was Tickle Me Elmo and the Nintendo 64. Every day we would watch the news and they would have a story about how there was no chance you were going to get either thing for Christmas because they were sold out everywhere. My sister and I thought Santa was real, more than that, we thought our parents were letting us watch these news broadcasts so we’d be even more excited when we opened up a fresh Tickle Me Elmo… I mean Nintendo 64 on Christmas morning. When the day came, it was my turn to open a present and I grabbed the closest small rectangle to me and it was…
Super Star Wars for the Super Nintendo. Immediately I was ecstatic because I loved Star Wars and thought this was… actually I don’t know what I thought it was, but I was jazzed. Then I noticed the Super Nintendo label on the bottom of the package. It was weird because I did not have a Super Nintendo. So I asked my dad if it was a mistake. And my dad said no, and then breaking all the illusions of Christmas walked over to the tree, grabbed a big box and told me I was supposed to have opened this first. It was a Super Nintendo. The year that it had been replaced my parents finally bought me a video game. But here’s where what I said about memories comes back.
My childhood was rough, for everyone. I called my dad to confirm this story and he had no idea what I was talking about. That time was so tumultuous for everyone that no written record exists and asking a family member to recall something that was significant for me, but a footnote in an otherwise exhausting decade opens myself up to conversations that usually end in a lot of apologies and inner turmoil. Sometimes it takes being almost 40 and talking about your first video game to realize how chaotic your life was. Oddly enough, it cements those memories you have of playing Donkey Kong Country with your sister and jumping up excitedly when you heard your dad’s car pulling into the drive-way stand out so much more.
When I really dug into this prompt the questions I had to ask myself felt unreal.
“What house were you living in?” “Who were your friends?” “Where did dad work?”
When pressed, my dad said my first game was probably Indiana Jones and The Fate Of Atlantis, a point-and-click adventure game from LucasArts.
Jesse B.
Up until I was five years old, I don’t recall playing with technology much. I think I mostly associated tech with Inspector Gadget. I wasn’t a stranger to TV, but I was probably more of an outdoor kid. There was nothing particularly special about that winter in 1993; the “Storm of the Century” hadn’t happened yet, and as a West Coast kid, I wasn’t even aware that the East Coast existed around that time until I just Googled it right now. Anyway, being the sensible and frugal people they are, but I’m sure wanting to impress their favorite grandson, my grandparents landed on a Super Nintendo, which at this point had been out for two years. I don’t say this to make fun of them – if I were trying to do that, I would tell you about the time they got my cousins in Colorado a jetski for Christmas (to use in the creek near their house I guess?) and sent my sister and me (in California) the box it came in with a note saying “You can use it too!” RIP Don and Adele.
Anyway, this new technology looks fun, right? But it only comes with one game that looks pretty cartoony, and that’s not very cool. Cars are cool, though! So they picked out TOP GEAR 2, which I put in first. I asked if they knew how to use it. I don’t think any of us knew that games came with instruction manuals. After fiddling with it for a couple minutes, the car on the screen started moving! I’m doing it, I’m driving! But the steering is pretty tough... Sometimes when I want to go left, the car goes right. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to respond at all. After another few turns, the game goes back to the start screen. I hadn’t even finished the race, how could the game be over?!
A year or two down the line I would learn a couple things: 1) That was a demo video, and 2) old games make you actually press Start, not just hit any ol’ button, to start the game. At the time, however, nobody knew what the hell was wrong with the game, so we marched right back to the video store to get me a game that would “actually WORK!” I was just starting to watch Looney Tunes at the time, and wouldn’t you know it, there was a game featuring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. I snatched that up immediately, excited to see what the system was like with a game I could actually play!
Yeah, that game was Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally, widely considered one of the most difficult games to ever grace the console, up there with the likes of Battletoads – except the WHOLE GAME is the speeder bike level, because you play as the Road Runner. I didn’t get past the first level until I got older and gained more fine motor control. I don’t think I beat the first boss until middle or high school. All this is to say, that while I technically did play a sliver of TOP GEAR 2, and made many, many attempts to do anything in Death Valley Rally, I still consider Super Mario World my first video game, since it’s the first one in which I was actually able to make it to the second level. There’s a reason it’s the flagship game of the console!
Super Mario World gave me a love of platformers that has never left, to the point where I tried Super Mario 64, put it down after 20 minutes, and have never gone back to the 3D Mario games. (I was so stoked when they started doing the Super Mario 3D World series!) The way the original teaches you what a platforming game is and how to play is just magical. Having the time as a kid (and somehow the patience?!) to brute force the routes and techniques that I personally discovered, rather than looking it up somewhere, gave me such a sense of wonder, not to mention muscle memory that still makes the game fun to play any time; that shit is baked in me for life. And that’s not to mention the sound design! The BGM! Learning later that all those moments are intentionally built by the devs is one of the biggest aspects of gaming that keeps me coming back. I love telling and experiencing stories, both as an actor and as a gamer. There are things you can do narratively or emotionally that can’t always be achieved with other mediums.
So, even though my grandparents had no idea what they were doing when they got me that Super Nintendo when I was five (and they would probably regret doing something that turned me into such an indoor kid), I’m grateful that they took a chance on what probably felt like a unique gift at the time. Video games have led me not only to hours of fun, but to a community like this where I get to write about it! And yes, I meant what I said about 3D Mario games. Platformers are better. Fite me IRL.
This is moving!