
Note: The following piece is based on something I originally wrote in 2017, weeks before my dad passed away unexpectedly from a stroke. The original piece is here on Medium, titled My Dad Isn't Into Video Games, But He Loves His Family. I've been wanting to revisit these feelings and re-edit the piece, so this is an attempt to do that. I wish he could have read it.
If you had asked me the question "Are you close with your family?" in 2016, I would have laughed, shrugged, and changed the subject. We had always been close, or at least, I always viewed us as close. But I realized that "close" was never really close in my immediate family, not the way my cousins were close. Most of my cousins live within a ten minute drive from each other and they do things like have dinner together frequently or catch up regularly. I don't think it's an insurmountable problem, though; after some trauma, we’ve all made an effort to become more transparent and tight-knit. My dad is preparing for some fairly invasive back surgery in the near future, once my parents’ insurance approves, and so, at the encouragement of my therapist Dr. Flier ("You know, like a bird"), I’ve been driving to Orange County from Los Angeles about twice a month to visit.
The most recent time I went, I decided to bring my NES Classic. We didn’t grow up with a Nintendo Entertainment System but every now and then my cousins (the ones who are close) would visit and bring theirs, a dusty grey box with all manner of cables and wires protruding from it, and the weekend would be filled with Duck Hunt, Excitebike, and, of course, Super Mario Bros. My mom was particularly fond of Dr. Mario (who doesn't love that soundtrack?) and so I figured the NES Classic might be fun to play all together, a kind of nostalgic blast from the past. I have occasionally called myself a "video game evangelist", some vestigial part of my church upbringing colliding with my love of interactive mediums, and I wanted to test the appeal of the NES Classic on my parents who haven’t touched a controller in easily a decade. In my mind, Nintendo's miniature game box with its curated selection of classic titles would serve the duel purpose of showing them that my interests were valid, and give us something to do for our biweekly visit.
My dad is over six feet tall. He is mobile but recently has had to make use of a cane to hobble from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to living room. He has to prop himself up on pillows when he sits in a chair, and is often in extreme pain because he has several fractured vertebrae in his spine. It’s difficult for him to focus on anything for long periods of time because the pain is distracting and pain meds make focusing difficult. He’s cheerful and upbeat for the most part but I know he is in extreme pain for hours out of the day. My mother is the most empathetic person I know and she suffers along with him, feeling his pain while knowing there is only so much she can do. We have never talked about any of this directly.
Obviously a Nintendo set isn’t a pain pill but it can serve as a powerful placebo. Once he was settled in his recliner, I asked my dad if he wanted to play some Dr. Mario; he smiled as he responded, “Fire it up!”. I set up the NES Classic while we talked. It doesn't take long. Instead of one person fiddling with AV cables behind an unfathomably heavy CRT set while someone in the front flips between channels 2 and 3, I used the unused HDMI slot on the side of their new TV. An HDMI slot that my parents almost certainly didn't know existed. My mom commented on how small and cute the device is while my dad asked how you fit the games in it since the micro-console doesn’t open up. I explained that the games are preloaded onto it, that it has 30 of them built-in. He nodded and said, “I see, that’s great.” He always talked like he knew about the subject firsthand. I talked a little about the baffling decision Nintendo made to keep the controller cords short (they're barely two and a half feet long), but that I had gotten an extension cord so my dad wouldn’t have to lean forward or get out of his chair.
Jaunty menu music playing, we scrolled through the games and my parents commented on the ones they remembered from my childhood. My dad remembered “you guys used to play the shit out that” in regards to Super Mario Bros. but seemed surprised when I told him that we couldn’t play Mario Kart. I started to explain that Mario Kart didn’t come around until the Super Nintendo, but then I realized he was talking about Mario Kart 64 and smiled to myself. He was a little out of step, but hey, what dad isn’t?
There was a missed opportunity there, to talk about my parents' history with games. Did they ever go to arcades before they had me? What about the Atari, had they ever messed around with one of those? Did my grandparents think video games were frivolous or dangerous, or did they not think about them at all? What did they think when my cousins brought the NES over? Did they sit and watch us out of curiosity? Did they play with us? Things I think about now that didn't cross my mind to ask at the time.
I found Dr. Mario in the menu and started the game. My dad asked which buttons do what, and I gave him the rundown as best I could. He put the game speed to low and gave himself a medium amount of viruses to eliminate, not a bad choice. He opted for the less-iconic “chill” music over the more instantly-recognizable “fever” theme. Once the game started, he had some trouble lining up the right color pills over the viruses that needed to be exterminated, and he asked if I wouldn’t mind retrieving his glasses from the bedroom. I wondered how hard the screen was to see from his chair. He didn’t clear that first round so my mom, who had been watching this development off to the side of the room, asked if she could step in. She proceeded to empty that bottle of viruses with efficiency, while standing in the middle of the room and never once bothering to sit down. I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. She was a pro, she made the pain go away. My mom and dad talked about my mom’s sister, and how she used to play Dr. Mario too; I guess the skills are more on her side of the family.
After Dr. Mario my dad picked Excitebike but asked if I would show him a race first. I went through the first level, making a few solid jumps but crashing more often than not. Maybe I was trying to make things more exciting. He noted that I kept overheating the bike, and I instinctively apologized; my dad is an avid motorcyclist (when I checked the mail later that day he had just received a copy of Cycle World magazine with a note saying he should update his subscription, which was set to expire next month. I wonder if he renewed?). I placed ninth in that race and passed the controller to my dad, who completely blew me out of the water with a third place finish. Grinning, he said we could stop there; the classic end-on-a-high-note gambit. Irascible.
He asked me what games I was best at and I replied, “Mario, probably,” so we went to Super Mario Bros. He recognized Koji Kondo’s iconic overworld music immediately and smiled softly. The music rockets me back to childhood, me sitting cross-legged on the floor gaping at the screen as I clutch the rectangular controller in my hand. Where did the music take him? He commented how amazing the concept of the game is, especially for the time period- “When was this game made again? Early 90s?” and I reminded him that no, Super Mario Bros. came out in 1985. I made it through World 1–1 and as I went down the pipe into the teal-and-black underworld of World 1–2 he asked suddenly if there wasn’t a secret way to to run along the blocks on the top of the screen. He must have paid more attention to when my brother and I played as kids than I remembered and I felt a pang as I realized that I wished Colin was here to play, too. I told my dad he was correct, but that I could only get up there if I was able to break through the blocks as Super Mario, that “regular” Mario just bumped up against them. He nodded and said, “I see. Well, at least you’ve got some squished penguins.” He was looking at some Goombahs onscreen, the iconic leftward-marching mushroom enemies, but I didn’t want to correct him.
Because don't they kind of look like squished penguins? That's how I choose to think of them, now.
I eventually rode up the rising red platforms at the end of the level to show him the Warp Zone. I don't know who was the first one to show me this secret. It must have been a cousin, but no specific memory comes to mind. Seeing those three pipes still makes me grin every time I see it. We moved on to World 4–1. I told him about the Spinies and how they’re basically the worst, how the best way to get through this level is to run straight through, not allowing yourself to slow down lest you become overwhelmed by red-and-yellow enemies (I don't think I actually said "lest"). World 4–2 begins with a tricky jump over a pit which I managed to mess up four times in a row, promptly resulting in a Game Over screen. My dad asked, “Is that a ‘fail’?” and I said as honestly as I could: “It absolutely was.” I'm still unsure if I was playing badly on purpose or whether the pressure of an audience got to me.
He told me a story then about Enzo Ferrari who, when asked to showcase one of his cars, immediately drove into a tree. He managed to get out of the car and explained the safety features of the vehicle, then hailed his driver, got in the backseat of the car, and never drove again. I have not fact-checked this story and I’m not going to, because I like that my dad compared my wanting to show off the game I’m supposedly “best” at to a famous entrepreneur wrecking the main thing he’s known for.
The rest of our visit was routine, but at the end of the day my dad asked if I wouldn’t mind leaving the Nintendo there, at least until the next time I came down. Surprised, I said of course I wouldn’t mind, and explained to my mom how the reset button worked and how to change the input on the TV. I had brought an extra controller in case they wanted to go head-to-head in Dr. Mario, so I left it on the counter and told my mom to go easy on him.
I drove back to Los Angeles that night happy, but not because I had managed to open someone’s eyes to magic of classic video games. Despite the questions I didn't ask, I felt like I saw a different side of my father, and I think he saw something in me, too.
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