My first nine years of life were spent in a small village called Upphärad where about 600 people lived. This was during the happy eighties and you would think that a few decades later more people would have moved there, but according to the statistics, the population has decreased by almost a hundred people. I only say this so that you understand how small this village actually is. Still, as kids we could have fun shooting rifles in the big gray house by the local store, kicking a ball on the well-kept soccer field at the school, or exploring the big forest just a couple of hundred yards from where I lived. But you were always longing for toys and the like that occupied the time you spent indoors. Dad’s computer, a Commodore 64 that sat in his office, was quite exciting. At least it planted a seed for what was to come. I won’t say that I was an active child, I liked the Dumbo and devoured movies and often sneaked into that office to play on Dad’s C64, but got tired of the fairly simple games pretty quickly. Besides, it was actually Dad’s computer. Not my own to play on whenever I wanted.
My family lived in a newly built yellow house, and it took twenty minutes to drive to the nearest town called Trollhättan. In one kiosk, which mainly sold tobacco and candy, there was also a rental of VHS movies and they had a couple of odd black boxes with Nintendo’s first console. We often rented that box and watched some game. Either my little brother and I had carefully discussed which one, or we had to take one of the games that were inside. The games came in VHS cases with their cover behind plastic that broke more and more pieces over time. Words like Yapon, Nintendo Video Games and the game’s title adorned game cases that would one day become collectibles for some. Just like everything that was and is associated with Nintendo.
The kiosk, located in a suburb, is still there today and as fate would have it, many years later I would get my first apartment in its area. I’ve visited it as an adult but can’t quite remember where the games were set up. Some memories simply fade. But luckily, most of the gaming memories stayed forever.
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Renting that black box was repeated on numerous occasions, until the lucky day when mom and dad thought we could buy a console. It was a strange feeling not having to return it, that it was there, all the time. In a TV stand that my parents still have today.
Nintendo’s little gray box squeezed out 1.66 MHz of processing power and had 2 kilobytes of RAM. It displayed a staggering 256×240 resolution, but the worlds being painted were beyond my comprehension. I, who was still quite interested in technology as a six-year-old, was convinced that a faster processor would make a machine too hot and that it would “explode.” That’s what I claimed to my friends who claimed that there would be more powerful machines in the future. Think how wrong I was. For me, the NES was as good as it could get. With games like Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Punch Out, nothing needed to be prettier and better. Today I can imagine what is to come. I lacked that experience then because there was nothing to base future dreams on.
There are so many memories associated with that gray box that I could have written an essay about it. Not to mention how long a column on individual games would have become, but I’ll try not to take up all of your time. I remember trying to land the plane on the aircraft carrier in Top Gun, how The Goonies II had difficult parts in first person, and how Dad had to translate English words when we played Zelda. There are only a few of the memories that have stuck. I could probably list a hundred more without a problem.
Something that was synonymous with this time was the fact that it was the parents who decided when new games were purchased. Most often this was associated with Christmas and birthdays, but of course it could happen from time to time that mother and father surprised you. Just such a memory concerns Rare’s gem Cobra Triangle. I had already rented the game, probably several times, but one day they put us in the car, said we were going to visit the grandparents who lived in Gothenburg. But then we stopped at a mall and dad ran in, came out with the game and revealed that they just tricked us. We didn’t go to Grandma and Grandpa’s at all, and then we went home and were one awesome NES game richer. Steering that small boat, rescuing children in the water and participating in difficult races became what weekdays were spent on. When you finally got a new game, you broke it down into molecules, played it until every detail was in muscle memory.
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These days when I’m buying games at a breakneck pace and there aren’t really any special moments associated with it, other than “this has been released, time to buy” of course memories like this are worth their weight in gold. Every new game that ended up in the home was a moment of celebration. Bills were put in a jar and when it was close to enough, mom or dad said they could put the last hundred.
All games are associated with what I remember today as something special. How I tried to fit in half an hour of game time in the morning before going to school (whereas nowadays I try to sleep as long as I can instead), how summer holidays were mixed with playing outside and then in the evenings it was all about video games. How I frantically toiled through titles like Ice Climber trying to reach that damn peak and the bird day in and day out. How I took the long walk to a friend’s place to try Gun Smoke for the first time. Actually, games didn’t have to have a story, but just be about a central moment, a game mechanic that was repeated and then we sat there and sweatily pressed red A and B buttons. Completely enchanted.
Another great thing about the NES was how one by one the friends in the neighborhood started buying it and we debated who would buy which game. So I trudged over to the neighbor’s and played Atletich World with the accompanying mat and we took breaks and ate cornflakes that Veronica baked while me and her brother Mikael continued to play. They were several years older than me, Mikael had his room in the attic and watched horror movies and tried to fool me that his snuff movies really showed real deaths. I don’t remember if I believed it or not.
Friends Daniel and Henrik, who lived a couple of houses away, found an old bag of money in the woods from an old robbery, got a reward from the police and Henrik bought himself an NES and Punch Out! We were glued to the TV trying to figure out how to get King Hippo to drop his shorts, then many hours later finally defeat Mike Tyson. It felt like everything we accomplished in games fed our egos. The feeling of accomplishing something was euphoria at its highest level. In the eighties, we chased happiness and reward in video games, long before we became adults and chased the same feelings in a completely different way.
I think a lot of what happens during our childhood, whether it’s soccer camp, family movie nights, or mom saying “you can have a friend sleep over and order pizza” is one of the most special things we have. I’m also glad I was the perfect age for the NES. It got me through elementary school, into middle school, and even if it was to be followed by a machine I have even more love for, it had the huge advantage of being the first console I had a long-term relationship with.
Its game, its controller, its memories. All were the first moments of video games for me. That’s the nostalgia the NES gives me. That feeling, so strongly associated with those years in the small village. Along with everything else I experienced, and that made an impression, it was video games and then the NES during those years in the eighties that shaped a lot of who I became. It may sound cliché, but just as a musician or director refers to inspiration that paved the way for their career choice, Nintendo’s first machine in so many respects actually made me a gamer. It simply laid a foundation, something to build on. It would take something really good for it to be better than this.
Luckily, Nintendo would follow it up with something that was even more super in every way.
What was your first console?
