My Experience with the NES

Christmas Day of 1989 was probably the biggest Christmas I ever had. We got a Nintendo Entertainment System – the Action set, meaning it came with SMB/Duckhunt, 2 controllers, the Zapper, and the required cables. We also got Zelda II: The Adventure of Link as well. We played the crap out of that thing. It also meant that I didn’t have to live at my friends’ houses to play games, nor would we have to bribe my parents to rent a system for a weekend. There were days that it probably wasn't turned off at all during the first few months. 

We only had a B/W 13” TV that had the screws instead of a coaxial jack. The B/W aspect made it hard for some things. For example, during the final boss battle on Zelda 2 it was impossible to tell how much life you had, and the Bubbleman stage on Mega Man 2 caused a static-y sound to come from the speaker. That TV wore out after a few months and we bought a new, cable-ready color TV that lasted until early 2015. At first we had sharing issues. My mom’s solution was to have us take 10-minute turns. Obviously she had never played these games otherwise she would have realized how that wouldn’t work - 10 minutes was not nearly enough time to get somewhere in Zelda, accomplish something of value, and have enough time to save. The same was true of Super Mario Bros. I guess she just assumed the games were like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong - short and restarted often.

I didn’t have any inclination to keep the boxes/manuals in good condition, unfortunately. I did, however, see an idea to use electrical tape to tape the black sleeves together to make a DIY game case. This proved very useful in keeping games where they should be, and we didn't have the sleeves lost all around the house like a lot of people did. 

One time I went to swap games (temporarily) with my friend Chad. Originally the trade was going to be Zelda 2 for Mario 2, but Chad's mom decided that Mario 2 was too valuable to let go, so we got Defender of the Crown instead. My mom had me go trade back because if they weren't going to give us their good game, we weren't either. Another issue I had with game trading is that my mom sometimes took a black sharpie and wrote our last name in BIG letters all over it. I felt it was kinda defacing and devaluing the collectability of the game. For later games she would just put an address label on it instead. 

With the system was an ad for Nintendo Power, and I started subscribing. My first issue was the Super Mario 3 cover. At that time it was only published bi-monthly, but they started sending super in-depth strategy guides on the "off" months, and it just so happened that my third issue was the first strategy guide. After 4 guides it became a monthly magazine. I ended up taking the magazine for 3 years. By the end of my subscription run, most of the games weren’t as cryptic as the first ones requiring the maps and hints in the magazine to advance. Plus I could just borrow my friend Michael’s copy from across the street. Like the boxes/manuals, I didn’t keep these in great shape. I read them often when I was bored or on the toilet and didn’t think to keep them nice on a shelf like Michael did.

That year at school, we started a Nintendo Club. We were all given some kind of Nintendo-related code name – I was the Zelda Zapper. We had cards laminated with our names and a picture from a game manual on it. We had meetings at each others' houses on Fridays where we played games we had. Video game talk was the usual fare at the lunch table at school and playground when there wasn’t anything in particular to discuss.

After a few months, we got Super Mario Bros. 2 while on vacation in Utah (we had taken the NES with us an hooked it up to an old spare TV my grandparents had). We had wanted to get Mega Man 2 originally, but due to the box art, my mom deemed it too violent because of Mega Man’s gun (LOL). The following Christmas we got Golf from my aunt/uncle because during a family reunion at their house during the year we had 3 game systems and a computer all playing golf games for some reason. I also got Final Fantasy (the original).

Around this time the Super Mario Bros. Super Show debuted. It was a goofy kids show but it had cartoons featuring the adventures of Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool (she wasn’t Peach yet), and Toad. The show was ok, but the main reason I watched it was for the Friday cartoon: The Legend of Zelda, featuring the obnoxious version of Link and headstrong Zelda. Later, on Saturday mornings I would also watch Captain N, featuring Simon Belmont, Mega Man, and others, and later the Super Mario Bros. 3 show – basically the same thing as the first version of the show but with updated power-ups and the Koopa kids as additional bad guys.

Then the movie, The Wizard, came out. It was kind of a crappy movie, but kids didn’t seem to notice because they played games throughout it and name-dropped many more. But the main reason was to see advance footage of Super Mario Bros. 3. The movie was essentially the world’s longest commercial for a video game [EVER] but we watched anyway.

Later on we got a few more games. I bought Maniac Mansion from my cousin Bruce, Ninja Gaiden II from Toys’Я’Us (with a little wheeling and dealing with my mom) while Matt got Punchout!! (the non-Tyson version). We ended up borrowing Tetris from a friend and my dad liked it so later that Christmas I got it for him using a discount I received from Nintendo Power. He played Tetris a lot and finished Super Mario Bros. Most of my friends’ parents didn’t play so when they heard my dad finished SMB they were kinda impressed.

I swapped games with friends many times (never permanently, of course) so I could play a wider variety of games. I kept track of a small network of friends/acquaintances and which games they had so that I could try as many games as I could. One summer we played Castlevania 3 for weeks on end while drinking soda refills (Caffeine-Free Pepsi) we would get from the nearby gas station. On top of that, I had 2 means of game rental relatively close (Video rental store and a grocery store both within walking distance) and did so probably about every other weekend on average. Sometimes we could even convince my mom to rent one while she was at the grocery store when we were at school so that the game was ready and waiting for us when we got home (even Mega Man 2 - since the cover art was different in the rental store). 

I earned a reputation of being able to finish most games I sat down to play, and knowing all there is to know about them. I would have friends call me up out of the blue for advice/help. It was a combination of skill and determination that got me the rep. There were too many games to play them all, and I had a late start to the party. But I feel that I hit almost all the major games that are still remembered today. 

A couple years later we moved the NES downstairs when Matt and I moved into the basement. One night the ladder to our bunk beds got knocked off and shattered one of the controllers. I think we ended up getting another one, and we had to repair the unshattered one using a repair kit. It had parts to replace the rubber pads on the inside and replace worn out buttons. We opted to get neon colored buttons. We also had to clean the games and system a few times using isopropyl alcohol and special applicators. I also ended up opening up the system and bending the contact pins closer together to get a tighter grip on the games to prevent the blinking grey screen of death. That made it harder to get a game in and out, but we had to blow into it less often. We got a lot of dust in it because we lived in a desert, but also because a rogue basketball broke the door off of the control deck. 

The small cabinet we used as a TV stand held the game systems as well as a stereo/mixer board thing. It was missing one of its wheels, so the back corner was held up by a copy of the Back to the Future 2 novelization and an Encyclopedia Brown book. Looking back it probably seemed a little ghetto to my friends, but I didn't seem to mind. We also took the NES with us on a couple of trips to my grandma's house in Utah. It certainly helped alleviate some of the boredom of being there once we had exhausted all of the usual things we did there. 

Later games we got included: Captain Skyhawk, Time Lord, Iron sword, Kickle Cubicle,  Rescue: The Embassy Mission and Tecmo NBA Basketball. I also traded in the SNES game Contra III to the Card Shop for the original Legend of Zelda. Michael's copy of Zelda 2 had stopped working for some reason, so he borrowed ours one time. When he came to return it, I was playing basketball outside, so I just set it on our front porch, figuring it was out of danger. But the ball hit a corner and made a funny bounce and landed on the game, chipping off a piece of plastic from the cartridge.  

Eventually I got the SNES and had both systems hooked up simultaneously, but at some point we moved the NES upstairs to the kitchen TV because it was the family’s system, while the later ones were mine since I bought them outright. I still played the NES every so often, especially if it was part of a series (like Final Fantasy or Zelda) but my focus shifted to the SNES.

Eventually our NES wore out, between years of play and the percussive maintenance we had used to get it to work right. Even though I had the SNES, I didn't want to sell all our games and lose the ability to play them. So we bought a NESv2, a modified version of the NES that resembled the design of the SNES. It was only $50 at the time, and all of us chipped in to pay for it. It worked a lot better than the old one and survives to this day. 

During my time in Japan and at college, my brothers nearly doubled our collection when they bought some used games cheap from the video rental store, which was getting rid of old inventory. 

When I moved out of my parents' house, I left the NESv2 and games there. But when I got married, my mom was getting rid of things and gave me all the old video game equipment. We hooked it up to the 13" TV in the bedroom for a while. Once we moved to our condo, it was hooked up to the 25" TV in my bedroom while sitting in my top drawer. But now it has been moved to storage and replaced with a broken Wii that has the HomeBrew channel. 


In addition to the HomeBrewed Wii, we now have HomeBrewed 3DS systems that can emulate NES games, as well as the NES Classic Mini that we got and modified to have more games.