On Super Mario Bros. for the NES (1985)
A particular room of our childhood home acted as a haven within a haven for me and my siblings. Although it’s all a bit foggy now, I distinctly remember the faintly brittle feel of the grey carpet lining the playroom’s floor and the clock (themed in the style of Michelangelo) on the facing wall.* But of all the playthings my siblings and I stored there, one looms large in the memory.
*The pizza-loving, shelled kind.
Having the same form-factor of an oversized Tic-Tac container - but with transparent, see-through walls - the toy invited the eyes to gaze within, at its underwater contents. The ersatz-aquarium’s base, a garish, plastic yellow overhang, provided dubious purchase for sweaty palms. But at the centre of this briny microcosm - resembling a tryptic of nude seaweed stalks - stood three pink miniature columns. You daren’t let go - no, tuck your fingers around the toy’s back instead and keep both opposable thumbs hovered over the bezel’s two evenly-spaced buttons as to every child’s infinite glee pressing either causes jets of water to magically lift the contents of this world’s seafloor into view - tiny multi-coloured hoops to thread through the narrow, tapered tops of the totems lying at the toy's centre.
Back to planet Earth. The playroom was located in a house which in turn rested on the foundations of a shop. Between the house and the shop (to all intents and purposes a stationery) was an "in-between place", as me and my sisters called it, which housed rack upon rack of VHS tapes (my ever-enterprising father always eager to diversify the shop's offerings). It was a kind of magical place where we'd play shop on a defunct cash register and spin out imaginary tales based on VHS tape box covers. Aside from the usual contents you’d expect to find in a stationery, my mother also happened to keep the store shelves downstairs well-stocked with items aimed at parents; weapons of distraction for them to pull out when the need to placate a child out of a tantrum arose. But it was the early 90s’ and it would take just one enterprising local salesman to change everything. “Insert a cartridge into THIS toy,” this silver-tongued Rumpelstiltskin claimed, “and it will magic an entire world into being!”
I had been looking over an older kid’s shoulder when I saw it unfold for the first time. He’d been playing for a while, it seems, but a particular shade of blue and a flash of underwater shrubbery caught my eye as I entered the shop, and, of course, I ambled on over. Imagine my jaw hitting the floor when the parallax-scroll of his back leaving the station revealed a super-charged analogue of my favourite plaything.
Dripping in 8-bit chip-tunery and pixelated ersatz-kelp, I stared open-mouthed at level 2-2.
Mario Bros. had landed.
Impossibly - although in my case it would verge well into the uncanny - Rumpelstiltskin would repeat the trick within the perniciously safe-looking walls of Super Mario 64's castle. In a room lined with aquariums - !!! - lies a cubby hole (much like the one that would grant access to the "in-between place" of my childhood home). Entering the cubby hole lands you in a water-filled room over which Dire Dire Docks' wistful tune plays out.
You are inside the water toy now.
The Socratic Method: Edutainment versus Fun Games
Suffering the same fate as fizzy candy, perhaps, which must have smacked of gateway drugs to him, the Nintendo Entertainment System and Mario Bros. were relegated on father’s orders to the underworld of the stationery. In its place, and making cozy bedfellows with my father’s LP player on the shelf above the T.V., was the ingeniously named edutainment console, Socrates. Through this VTech-manufactured wonder of technology his spawn would learn the very rudiments of geometry, mathematics and Western music. Not bad for a budget 'video toy', as my father called them.
Socrates was a pretty nice chappy too, all smiles as he was and so eager to spout positive reinforcement. Said that, the animated downward tilt of his eyebrows when you got something wrong was more than a little disconcerting. You didn’t want to let such a cordial fellow down. If anything - being too young to grasp much of the knowledge Socrates here was trying to impart to me - he nevertheless taught me an important life-lesson. To focus in class at school, especially when delivered by eager teachers, even if only on compassionate grounds.
Edutainment seems to have been one of the breakthroughs of the 80s'. For me, though, far more interesting lessons were to be had from the games my father had relegated to the stationery - games that took pride in a simple maxim: pure joy. TMNT Michelangelo, confined to the temporal dimension of the playroom clock, seems to have understood this. And with the dangling slice of pizza in his hand, looking for all the world like a nod to Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’, he bore witness to hours of play with a contented smile on his face. Hours that stopped being hours, where time waxed and waned as Old Father Time loosened his grip on me in passages through imaginary worlds. I extemporized in this state while working out every fiber of my imagination. And it wasn't just jest.
Even the most meaningless of 'toys' imparted little koans of wisdom - knowledge that would only be gleaned much later in life. Abstract or narrative-led, it made no difference: The water toy? It channeled how exacting - but dynamically rich - the laws of the physical world could be. Tetris: an object-lesson in perspective-shifts. The Super Mario series: an exercise in motor-skill mastery, but also the consequent joy of careless (but studied) abandon as its reward. Only the most cynical of games fail to reveal some contour of reality - games designed to copy rather than inspire.
Comments