Hey guys! Did you all have a good weekend? It was so nice out this weekend that I spent pretty much all afternoon outside yesterday. Which was awesome. Okay, so before we get into today's post, there's some housekeeping that I need to do. First, as you probably noticed from the title of this post, this isn't my review of Mickey's Fun Songs/Disney Sing-Along Songs: Beach Party at Walt Disney World. I'll have an update post explaining all that coming out later today, probably after I've posted this one. Instead, I'm starting a new series where I talk about my video game memories, one game at a time. Or at least one group of games at a time, because for the Pokemon games I'll be covering them by generation rather than by game. So let's get into it with the first game I ever owned, Super Mario Bros.
In the early 90s, Nintendo and Sega dominated the video game industry with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. Both Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog were everywhere. They had cartoons, breakfast cereal, toys, comics and clothing. Basically if you could put them on it, Nintendo and Sega did so. However, in 1991 the NES was joined by the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America and the two consoles were played by millions.
In my little corner of the world however, things were alot different. We didn't get an NES until, probably, November 1992 when my mom bought one for my dad as a birthday present from all of us. However, because he worked and my mom stayed at home with my brother, sister, and I, my dad didn't play the NES quite as much as my mom did. Especially once we'd moved out to this old, refurbished, log farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the summer of 1993. In fact I think I spent more time watching my mom play Super Mario Bros. than I did actually playing the game myself. Which made sense, because this way I learned the controls and what not to do while playing the game. There was alot of trial and error because we didn't have the internet or game guides back then and I definitely didn't have any friends who had the game who knew what they were doing.
Anyway we'd sit in front of the TV and watch my mom play the game. I remember being absolutely mesmerized by what I was seeing on the screen. There's this little dude running around, stepping on these little creatures, falling into pits, which I learned very quickly was a bad thing, or jumping over said pits, going underground and swimming in the water. And eventually he'd get to a castle and have to fight this giant lizard dude, only to be told that the princess you're supposed to be rescuing is in another castle. Eventually I came to learn that the little dude is Mario, the creatures he steps on are Goombas and Koopa Troopas, the lizard dude is Bowser, the king of the Koopas, and the princess is named Toadstool, and the dude in the mushroom hat you rescue in the first seven castles is named Toad.
Originally the launch game for the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America (probably, most likely in Japan as well), the version we had was actually the 1988 re-release, where it was combined with Duck Hunt (I'll get to that another time don't you worry) into a single cartridge as a pack-in game for the NES. I also remember playing the original individual cartridge at the hospital along with Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda (again, I'll get there). Sitting there on the floor of our house, watching my mom try to beat the game was actually more fun than playing the game itself (less stressful for sure). I did play it myself numerous times as we got the NES up in our play area, which included a TV and VCR (to save my parents from having to watch Guests of the Grunges, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, and The Backyard Show for the kajillionth time), once my mom bought a Super Nintendo a few years later (my siblings and I also eventually inherited that console by the time we moved to another house in late 1995).
I may not have been able to have friends over to play the NES, but playing with my family was just as much fun. Especially when we got to play two-player and take turns, with one of us being Mario, and the other being Luigi as you couldn't have both characters on screen at the same time, something that was a problem right through the Nintendo 64 era, with Luigi being completely absent from Super Mario 64. And because my parents have been very conscious about things like this, we never got to play for more than half an hour at a time, which is totally fair, because once we got the N64 in 1999 and the Xbox in the early 2000s we'd play for hours upon hours.
Also, the best part about playing Super Mario Bros. back then is that we didn't care if we ever beat the game or not. Beating the game was definitely achieveable, but none of us actually cared whether we did or not. Mainly because there was no save feature and in order to end the game, we'd run into a pit three times, or however many times it took to run out of lives, so we could get a Game Over screen and turn the console off for another day. Or, if we only played the game for fifteen out of our alotted thirty minutes, we'd either reset the console and play Duck Hunt (like I said, I'll get to it) and suffer through that game for the remaining fifteen minutes, or we'd play one of the other few NES games we had like Days of Thunder, After Burner, Yoshi's Cookie or Batman: The Video Game.
Sometime in the late 90s, about the time we got the Nintendo 64 or a little before that, our NES died on us. However, we could still play Super Mario Bros. At some point in the mid 90s we upgraded to the Super Nintendo and got a ton of games for it, most of which I still have some 25 years later (the console still works too). One of those games was Super Mario All-Stars which was a compilation cartridge that included 16-bit versions of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan), Super Mario Bros. 2 (Super Mario Bros. USA in Japan), and Super Mario Bros. 3. So any time I feel like playing Super Mario Bros. I play the Super Nintendo version, which still holds up. Also, my sister lent me her NES Classic Mini so I got to play all the original Mario games for a little while. Which is cool.
That's going to be it for today ladies and gentlemen and other. Next I'm going to be continuing down Mario memory lane by talking about Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. My plan is to go through the major franchises that I played when I was growing up before I get to the one off or smaller franchises that I also played during that time. So until next time have a great day, and look out for an update post, which I'll have out shortly. Talk to you later everybody!
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