All this week, we’re sharing memories of 8-Bit gaming, from the Atari to the NES. You’ve been sending us your stories of your first experiences, your arcade battles, your late-night tournaments, and more. We’ve been posting them all.
Set the way back machine for 1985 (that’s an ’82 Tron reference). The Brick cell phone and Sony Walkman were new items, and Alternative music was called “New Wave.” The local comic shop’s “Japanimation” section consisted of two shelves with some $20.ooUS Newtype mags, $70.ooUS VHS tapes containing two, ultra-violent anime episodes in Japanese, and some outrageously priced model kits of some obscure series.
We were in junior high school then and Mario Bros. had just come out in the arcades and was at our local 7-Eleven, Fargo’s, and animatronic pizza places like Showbiz and Tex Critter’s. We played Joust, Frogger, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Star Wars, Spy Hunter, and a slew of others popular in the day, each for a quarter or a token. Then, one Christmas, a package arrived containing the Nintendo “NES Control Deck” with Super Mario Bros… bliss. It was double-edged though, since games were rewards for doing good, and the controllers taken away as punishment. Cursed parental unit overlords!
The following year, when we went camping, Grammy (RIP) decided to give me $40.ooUS. We went to Lionel’s Playworld in Colorado Springs, CO where there was an entire wall of NES games; unlike now, none of them were behind the counter or encased behind glass with security tags. The one that popped out was a gold-colored box with The Legend of ZELDA scrawled across it with an interesting heraldic device, which had one quarter open by design, showing a gold-plated cartridge inside like the fabled winning Willy Wonka’s ticket. It was $39.99US. I had just enough (not knowing about taxes) and I thought it was… somehow… mystically… special, and clutched it all the way home. I remember disappearing for hours to play it.
Oftentimes my buddy Ron and I would go to Cub Foods to buy bulk candy and pay for a pizza with pennies, nickels and dimes, saving the quarters for the arcades later. We would trek to either house and each of us would take turns defeating the dungeons, making maps on graph paper as we went through each one. I remember some of the levels being so difficult to me that they took several tries to make it through. I’d often get lost and try to look at the map we’d made to locate the monster — who was always audibly breathing heavily nearby — finding all of the tools and treasures along the way. When I completed Zelda it for the first time, I stared at the screen as the Tri-Force scrolled to the top. And, when it said to start the second adventure, it was shock and awe.
I still have that marker-on-pink-graph-paper map stored in my shed with the original box and printed maps, along with the logo I worked on for a couple of days created with markers. I’ve since gone back through and replayed the game some 20+ years later, still getting stuck in a couple of spots, with the rest of it coming back to me almost immediately. It’s like having flashbacks of all the different places and times the game was played.
My “future Missus” (who is younger than the game), would fall asleep to the theme music as her mom played it in the evenings. Sometimes, her mom would just pause the game and let the background music play for her while she napped. She has yet to beat the game, but she knows the music and effect noises by heart. The cool thing to me is that today she’s getting addicted to the 8-bit games like I did back then. Even though they aren’t as flashy as the newest games, she stills “digs” them.
To this day, the original Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda games will always bring back great memories.
