Playing games on the original hardware has its own magic. It’s something that emulators or remasters just can’t recreate. This whole project is about that first gaming experience, where you could play for hours on end and occasionally have to blow into a cartridge to make it work. It’s not just the history that makes the system so special; it’s also the plastic, the first bumpers, and the feeling that you’re holding something that can never be replaced. Emulators and remasters don’t really cut it for me, and it’s not necessary when you don’t have to cut corners on the history of a technological age that has long since passed.
Many of us didn’t just grow up with these systems; we grew up alongside them. And for that reason, there’s a very familial, almost parent-child dynamic that exists between a gamer and their first console. No matter the various new games that were loaded onto those primitive cartridges, I knew my NES with the same intimate fondness as I did my own childhood home. And oddly enough, as with the old Victorian-row-house duo from my youth, my love for that console can be broken up into three distinct “eras.” They’re times I can recall with such clarity; it’s as though I were really there once more.
The Genuine Encounter: Whistles, Displays, and Gamepads
An experience that is almost impossible to duplicate is now routinely maligned. Original gaming hardware from decades ago was truly unique. You can’t say that using a phone to play a Game Boy game is the same as using a Game Boy to play that very same game. Sure, the engine is being powered on a touch screen rather than through a lovely, eye-friendly green panel, but the game is innately powerful in its very same simplicity. Among a certain set, it would appear that old gaming hardware such as the Game Boy, NES, or even the PlayStation 2 is now borderline socially unacceptable to play with.
One of the purest forms of nostalgia for many players myself included is the series of quaint, somehow mechanically magical system sounds that old game consoles used to make. Inserting a game into the satin-gray cartridge slot of the SNES or the candy-colored love trap of a Nintendo 64—why didn’t their consoles’ power and reset buttons light up, by the way?—makes a kid feel unfathomably victorious (and somehow, as if they’re not just one of the 70 million plus consoles sold). And like a bridge to the past or a wholly musical performance, the sounds themselves evoke a fuzzy sense of victory and the hours upon hours of our lives lived in front of unforgiving TV screens.
Nostalgia is also a profoundly visual experience. The graphics of older games have a very distinct appearance, mostly because during some of the most popular years of gaming, the favored medium was the CRT television set, with a curved screen and narrow top, plenty of weight at the bottom, and poor to mediocre viewing angles. TVs like this, as the recent series of paintings by artist Brent Estabrook will remind you, oftentimes feature the merry merriment of a family living room on a set of wonderfully hideous 1990s lost-a-bet patterned couches. These were not room-filling TVs. And yet, the couch (and, as an as an indicator of familial closeness, the stepdad) is at a distance from the TV you could measure on your outstretched arms.
Game controllers, too, contribute hugely to nostalgia. Take the unfussy, rectangular NES controller. How many hours did we wear into that thing until our thumbs ached and the buttons popped? The “up” direction even started to go all wobbly. Or the sweetness of the SNES controller—maybe, for my humble dollar, the best game controller ever made. I love its hand feel, from the faux leather of its direction pad to the just-right “click!” of the buttons. What a contrast to the modern, Wiimote-style gamepads! I’m sorry, but in addition to all the other things we miss, we miss the N64 controller!
The experience is both familiar and comforting. It relies on raw, unadulterated nostalgia—a sheer remembrance of the good times that have passed. When we take on the task of playing some classic games, we find ourselves nearly swimming in memories at first. Both my mission partner and I are not wired to simply shoot an angle that gives us leeway to further a personal or political agenda. The closest we come to that is to acknowledge that we are “children” of the Space Age.
The ceremony and difficulties of playing old video games.
Using the actual, original consoles to play the games of yesteryear carries a certain singular appeal, even if it doesn’t always amount to an idyllic experience. Remembering and recreating the challenges of retro gaming, like blowing on a cartridge before parating to fear, anxiety, or despair brought about by not having a save point, amounts to a key part of the appeal of reliving the past.
Even if you don’t love every second of it or find every aspect of it to be efficient, there’s no denying the parts of the experience and nostalgia that are downright inefficient.
The cartridge era of video games is often remembered with one action above all others: blowing into the bottom of your game to make it work, with the top part of the plastic shell acting as a kind of rebreather. Many modern video gamers might have done this a few times, but the rebreather was viewed as the most useful weapon in the secret war to make your game start when I was a young man, a war I fought every time I wanted to play Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! during an era when even blowing on the game slightly was kind of viewed as the most rebellious act of the Lighter Brigade.
Yet another widespread problem was the temperamental nature of old hardware. Did it work in the first place? Of course. Is it working now? Not necessarily. Hardware and software incompatibilities were common. And when those violations of the rules of digital operation happened, the often-not-very-helpful message that you were doing something wrong just didn’t compute to the young and stubborn. But looking back, I should probably also add myself to the group of the stubborn, since I went along with all the nonfunctional-nonsense badges of ersatz honor, like the stupid ribbon cable in my beloved Apple that caused the E to become a C on the keyboard and the I to become a T—right around the time I started touch typing.
The simple outward appearance of many older games was frequently deceptive. They were seriously tough to beat, and the original hardware offered no practical way to soften the crushing difficulty. Yet in comparison with the nebulous difficulty of a thumb-straining game like Flappy Bird or the political ramifications of war games, the tortured path through the original Contra or the logical precision necessary to defeat Dr. Wily in Mega Man 2 offered a seemingly lucid moment of satisfaction, also perceived as victory. Let me be clear: The sense of reward that comes from finishing a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System is more exhilarating than the comparatively jaded feelings that arise from completing many modern games.
Retro gaming’s physical nature is a huge part of why it’s special and memorable to us. When we look back on it, we remember rummaging through our closets, blowing on cartridges when we pulled them out of their old, dusty cubbies. We had a lot of physical interaction with the medium. But that’s something we have much less of now. Having game manuals with art isn’t something you experience with digital games. And not a lot of art in games is being seen anymore. Today, we use loading screens to set up the world we’re about to play in. But what if it hardly takes any time at all to load a game? What happens to that extra, semi-awkward time with your friends where you talk about the dumb joke on the back of the game you just popped in?
Another vital component of retro gaming is its social nature. Long before the days of online multiplayer, playing video games was something you did in the company of others. Human beings are social creatures, and I have fond memories of playing video games with friends. In my mind, the communal activities associated with video games further give the nostalgia element of retro games a boost. When friends play games together, the excitement of sharing the gaming event is part of the reason for the games being remembered as such a big part of the console era. Street Fighter II or Mario Kart, anyone?
The task of amassing and safeguarding the history of video games is a gargantuan one a task that the folks at the Video Game History Foundation have made their mission. “We have an enormous respect for the medium,” executive director Kelsey Lewin said in a video call last week, “and we’re just in love with the medium enough to dedicate our entire lives to it. That’s why we think we’re the people who should be doing that.”
The wistful yearning for a time when playing video games was much simpler is a pastime closely tied to the hobby of amassing a mountainous, top-quality collection of memorable video games. The originals—and the original systems they were played on—hold a special voodoo over many a head of the Nintendo Fan Club, and our little group of friends is, for the most part, no exception. One time at the Midwest Gaming Classic in Brookfield, we even had Cesar sing a song he had penned during college (and dedicated to his then-girlfriend) about the magic of old video games, in front of hundreds of fellow enthusiasts, no less, and we still ended that day as friends. Even our significant others understand the obsession, even when they find it completely odd (as mine does, for sure).
Indulging in the pastime of collecting old games and game systems can be a hell of a lot of fun. What can touch the pleasure of stumbling upon a rare, vintage game hidden within a musty old flea market? What can match the sense of fulfillment that comes from finishing off a whole library of games for a particular system (and just think of all the hours it takes to play the games and verify that they’re in good working order!)? And, of course, what can equal the joy of putting an old, decrepit gaming console back into a condition to which one can subject it to hours of punishing fun?
The hobby also includes an important aspect: conservation. Technology is moving quickly, and the physical media and original hardware produced for these games are becoming a thing of the past. Yet, they are a vital part of the history of gaming. Therefore, with the growing concern for the preservation of gaming as it is in danger of being forgotten, the keepers of the gate must make sure the past is a far-from-unreachable place. “We’re like a museum,” says Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, which is an organization dedicated to the cause. “We’re just trying to tell the story of how all this came to be and where it’s going.”
