Experience Points Level 3 – Succumbing to the Allure of the NES

Experience Points – Memories of a Lifelong Gamer is a series of blog posts that I’ve undertaken to record some of my fondest memories of nearly 40 years of gaming.

Fun Fact

I didn’t have my own NES until early 2019. I acquired it from a friend who was getting rid of some old video game consoles, including an NES that didn’t work. I had played quite a lot of NES games before then, including during its time as the reigning home video game console, but it was always on someone else’s.

I really was content playing my Atari at home. For years I kept finding new games and discovering gems like Pitfall2, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Solaris that kept me very busy among the many others. But most of my friends had an NES. I truly wasn’t jealous, but I did finally realize what all the fuss was about and had a tremendous amount of fun.

A Little Help from My Friends

Video games were rapidly becoming a favorite activity for kids my age. Games were being talked about at school more than ever before, the commercials were getting flashier and there were even shows like the Super Mario Brothers Super Show, which illustrates how much Nintendo had brought games back into the mainstream. I also must admit that show made me very curious about the Super Mario Bros. video game. The show made it look like loads of fun and I had only barely gotten to play it a few times.

However, I want to emphasize how much different the time still was. Many of us still had our video game systems connected to the family TV, which meant we had to share. Only a few lucky ones had TVs of their own on which to play video games. There was no internet, so there was no GameFAQs to get help or online multiplayer. If you wanted to get better at a game, figure out a secret or get past a tough spot, you either bought a magazine like Nintendo Power, or more often, you just kept playing until you figured it out or got good enough.

There was one other option as well: sharing strategies and secrets among friends. In the NES era, video games were still a very social activity. If you wanted multiplayer, you had to be in the same room with wired controllers connected to the same console. We would have discussions at lunch or on the school bus about how far we had gotten in certain games, or if we had figured out a particular strategy or a way to get extra lives or beat a boss.

Even when we did get together to play video games, we still may have to wait for a TV to become available, or even to wait our turn to play the game we wanted to, while a brother, sister or friend played something else. So we would either watch them play this other game, or as often as not, we would find something else to occupy our time. We still spent many hours away from the screen, outside playing tag, sports games at the playground, riding bikes all over town, trading baseball or football cards, talking about sports, school or girls or a variety of other activities.

I’m not sure whose NES I played first. There’s a very good chance it was Ricky’s, the same friend with whom I was introduced to the Atari 2600 in 1983 or so. It may also have been Roger’s NES, the same friend who eagerly told me about it on the same Christmas morning that I got my Atari.

At Ricky’s, I can clearly remember playing Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Excite Bike, Marble Madness, Bases Loaded and the first Castlevania. There was a large group of kids there, and it’s quite possible that it was for Ricky’s birthday when he got the NES. I remember that I really liked Super Mario Bros., but I was pretty bad at it. But more than any other game, I remember playing Bases Loaded.

I’m going to repeat a theme from the last few articles: at this point in my life I was a lot more into sports by far. Baseball was a sport that I only loosely followed. My dad didn’t watch it at all, and my favorite team was the Atlanta Braves, completely because that was Ricky’s favorite team too. While I didn’t follow the actual sport closely, I absolutely loved collecting and trading baseball cards, as well as playing baseball. I had collected and traded quite a few baseball cards over the years, and in 2010 I sold the whole collection for cheap to a local kid looking to expand his collection. His excitement and smile was better than whatever money they were actually worth.

In those days it wasn’t difficult to quickly put together an ad-hoc baseball game together at the village playground, with maybe 4 or 5 kids on a side and a good Wiffleball bat and ball. Those of us who took it more seriously would go out for local Little League teams, as I did in the 6th grade. I had actually attempted Little League before, but I just wasn’t ready for the commitment of practice sessions. But in the Spring of 1991, I was ready and I played for my home town team.

If you recall from my first article, I grew up in a very small town of about 500 people. This is a bit of a small pool of talent to choose from, so our Little League team was… well, challenged. Despite how hard we practiced and the time spent trying to develop skills and work as a team, our little team lost every single game that season.

I had a pretty good season myself, however. I was particularly fond of base running. I didn’t always get on base, but when I did, there was a great chance I would be on 3rd base in the next two pitches if they weren’t occupied. I was a very fast runner, and quite good at stealing bases. I actually counted my stats that year and remember that I stole 22 bases in a 10 game season. Not bad!

Playing on a losing team was rewarding, in hindsight. In fact, I would argue that I got more from never winning a game than I did by being on a championship team. It taught me humility, how to lose gracefully and that playing the game was more rewarding than winning. I have a lot of fond memories from that season, even though we didn’t win a single game. It also taught me that girls can be tough as nails, because around half of our team were young ladies. And that was pretty awesome.

So baseball was thick in the air as we played Bases Loaded on Ricky’s NES. We all played it through an entire season. It was more realistic than any Atari baseball game before it, and tremendously satisfying for those of us who loved to play the game.

Game after game, inning after inning. Everyone envied the Jersey team for the player “Paste” and the New York team for “Star”. It just seemed to go on for hours, and we enjoyed watching the games we weren’t playing as much as we enjoyed games we did play.

At Mike’s house, we played a different game: Heavy Barrel. Mike was definitely a lot more into military and combat style games, so we played games like Commando on his Commodore 64 and Heavy Barrel on the NES. This game was cooperative, and featured many different weapon types along the lines of Contra. You could collect pieces of a much better weapon called the “Heavy Barrel”, and if you got all of them, you got a very destructive and powerful weapon.

At Roger’s, I discovered Castlevania 2 and Metroid. Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, was pretty different from the first game. Instead of there being a sequence of levels like your usual platformer, Simon’s Quest featured a continuous map and no levels. You made your way from town to town, caves and castles, looking for hints, upgrading your whip, finding secrets and picking up the parts of Dracula. It took the efforts of Roger, his brother and myself, but on one night (again, probably a birthday party sleepover) we actually finished the game.

I also got to play an NES at a babysitter’s house, where I was introduced to two new favorites: Super Mario Bros. 2 and Tecmo Bowl. I loved Super Mario 2, and how different it was from the original. I thought it was colorful, creative and a lot of fun. My friends and I would talk about it sitting in the last few seats of the bus (as 6th graders we had earned that luxury). We talked about how hard it was to get to Wart, how to beat Fryguy or Triclyde and which character we liked using the most. I was partial to Princess Peach, as she could float for so long. I never got to play Mario 2 long enough to beat it, but I really loved it.

I’ll be talking about Tecmo Bowl in another post, so for now I’ll just say that I loved the game, even though I struggled with it.

Making New Friends

Playing little league baseball unintentionally led me to two of the best friends I would ever have growing up, and my gaming life would become closely tied to theirs for the next several years. I played a variety of positions in little league, but mostly 3rd base and pitcher. I could throw a ball very fast, but not particularly accurately. On good days, I was a good pitcher. But consistency was the issue, and I could have bad days. VERY bad days where I struggled to hit the broad side of a barn. At least I could hit it really frickin’ hard.

So I decided to practice on my own. I made a bunch of drywall squares roughly the size of a strike zone, using leftover pieces of drywall from one of my dad’s construction projects. I would take these pieces of drywall to the village playground and hang them at just the right height on a chain link fence and practice pitching. The reason I loved using drywall was because when I hit it just right, it EXPLODED in a very satisfying way, making strikes very rewarding.

One day as I was practicing at the playground in this manner, a few older kids arrived and started playing touch football. I recognized them of course. I mean come on, we’re talking a town of 500 people. I knew them from school even though they were around 5 years older than me. I also went to school with one of their younger brothers and a cousin of one of the others.

I watched them for a few and they eventually asked if I wanted to join, and I did gladly. It was in this way that I became friends with James and Jeff, two names you’ll get used to reading if you’re planning to continue with me on this series.

Just like with baseball, it was also not unusual for impromptu touch football games to be organized in our small town. So James, Jeff and any other neighborhood kids we could find would play pretty regularly whenever we could, and eventually I got to be very good friends with them. Jeff eventually invited me to his house, where James also often went.

And Jeff had an NES.

Mario Madness

This was 1991. Kevin Costner starred in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which was accompanied by the number 1 song of the year, Everything I Do by Bryan Adams. Metallica released The Black Album. Operation Desert Storm occupied a great deal of the winter and spring of that year, with live coverage on CNN. I was wrapping up the 6th grade, which I would say was my favorite school year ever. And the hottest video game in the world was Super Mario Bros. 3.

I can remember the excitement of my friends at school, and even a bit of my own, as I had liked the first Mario and had very much enjoyed Mario 2. I can still remember seeing the following commercial many times, wondering what the game would be like.

At Jeff’s house, I finally got my chance to play it. Jeff had a brother and two sisters, and they were all excited about Mario 3 as well. Along with James and myself, that made five of us who were eager to play the game. So we often had to wait our turns, and even when we did, it was usually a shared gameplay session.

There was a 2 player mode with Mario and Luigi, just like in Mario 1, though there was no difference between characters and the game just switched back and forth between them after dying or clearing a level. Usually, Jeff, James, Jason and I would just keep rotating our turns. Some of us had our favorite levels or levels that we were really good at so sometimes we relinquished our turn. Of course, we all loved Level 5-3, as it was the only level in the whole game that featured Kuribo’s Shoe, which could walk over spiked and munchers and finally stomp on Spinies! Since this level only came along once, we actually took turns each play through for who got to play the level.

Mario 3 had such a great variety of powerups, some of which were very hard to find. For me, other than Kuribo’s Shoe, my favorite was Hammer Mario although Tanooki was a very close second. Warp whistles, hammers, anchors, music boxes, the Coin Ships, White Mushroom houses, P-Wings and so many little elements like this made Mario 3 an absolute joy.

I was also amazed by how each world had its own theme. Grass, Desert, Water, Ice, Giant, Plant/Pipe, Sky and of course the fire and flames of World 8. It was challenging enough that it took us a while to actually finish the game. Yes, don’t forget that there were no saves in Mario 3. When you died, it was game over and you started over. And since we weren’t playing for hours on end, it took a while to build up the skill and memorize the levels and powerup locations. I want to say that it was Fall of 1991 when we first finished the game. That didn’t stop us from playing it however. It remained a favorite for many months, if not years. There is a very good reason it is often considered the best game ever made for the NES.

We played lots of other games too. The Legend of Zelda, Megaman, Castlevania 3, Wizards and Warriors, Ironsword, Double Dragon, The Adventures of Lolo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Contra, Fester’s Quest, Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Ducktales, Cyber Base Wars, and others.

In December of 1991, Jeff bought a game that would become our new NES obsession, and the topic of our next Side Quest: Tecmo Super Bowl.