We dream in 8-bit

It’s the year 1985, and the Nintendo Entertainment System
lands on the shores of North America. In the
next 10 years, the NES would connect a generation with its quality, simplicity,
and sheer economic power. If accompanying my mother to buy an NES at JC
Penney’s is my first memory, then the succeeding hundred memories involve
sitting on the carpet during hot summer days focused on the television screen
while the 8-bit soundtracks blasted through the house.

It’s not that the Nintendo replaced the outdoors; it
supplemented it. The Brothers Grimm were replaced by
the Brothers Mario, and the minimalist stories of the games framed our
adventures and dreams.

As young minds, we forever connected our synapses with the
locations of hidden coins and keypad combinations of
up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-start. The fledgling Internet lacked
the ability to inform our theories of game play, physics, and toadstools, so
secret lives and shortcuts traveled via hearsay and next door neighbors, seeds
planted by the miniature manuals that came with each game or a holy issue of Nintendo Power. The NES’ charming
unreliability conjured a cookbook of home remedies to prevent that dreaded
blinking screen, rituals that provokedimmutablesuperstitions.

But alas, the gaming industry is fickle. Only five years
after its release the Arthurian NES was overshadowed by its own offspring, the
SNES. Camelot ended — the Genesis vs. SNES rivalry tore apart households and
friendships. Never again would one company so thoroughly dominate the video
game market share, unintentionally creating a near universal cultural
experience.

And this year, the industry is set to move on further, with
Nintendo’s next generation console Wii rumored to be
out before the Christmas shopping season. The Wii is
potentially a return to form, with a focus on innovative game play, graceful
simplicity, and even the option to download classic NES and SNES games to its
hard drive.

But those who’ve tried to play Metroid
or The Legend of Zelda via computer emulation know,
it’s just not the same. There is magic in that bulky grey box and its ungainly
rectangle controller. Luckily, for the die hard nerds, for the temporally
unbalanced, for the curious and the junk collectors alike, there’s hope—the
survivors of the 60 million NES systems sold still inhabit the globe. Find one,
blow some air into the cartridge, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2006.