My Inspirations: When Mario was a Video Game Character

This next inspirational posting is about Super Mario Brothers. But it's not really about Super Mario Brothers.

We return, again, to my childhood and very early into it. How early? I'm not positive, but back in the six-seven age range again. I was already falling into patterns that defined and plagued me for the rest of my life so far. I was, and often still am, timid, introverted, and unable to try new things without taking time to study them. This was the ancient, almost lost, truly terrifying era where I, among other things, was afraid of video games.

Oh, there were some I liked as a kid. I never had an Atari growing up; my parents settled for the Intellivision instead at this early age. A few of the games were fun. There was Snafu, an early Tron knock-off that moved at white knuckle Intellivision speeds (yes I'm joking,) and had some excellent music for its time (not joking.) I could conjure up its tunes in my brains now. In fact, here they come. That'll get old soon. And there was Frog Bog, where your character leaped in between two lily pads and tried to catch bugs. There were almost no obstacles, dangers, or consequences, but I liked it that way. There was a higher difficulty setting where the frog could fall in between the lily pads, but I didn't prefer that one. That's right, I didn't yet have the hard core skills for the real version of Frog Bog.

As for the other games, they terrified me, especially the ones where death was inevitable and the entire point of the game was just to survive as long as you could. But there were many games that scared me. Dungeons and Dragons, where your own arrows could reflect and kill you faster than the monsters and you could hear those monsters growling before they burst out of the darkness at you. And then there was a space fighter I no longer can remember the name of. You flew through some planet's canyon or trench system (I'd guess that Star Wars came out shortly before the game did, yes,) and shot at missiles fired at the Earth. The entire screen shook when a missile was destroyed, but if you failed to destroy them all in time, they launched at our home planet and blew it up. It was terrifying stuff when you're seven.

I spent most of my video game time watching my dad play the games, and at the time, my time spent in arcades were about the same. The closest thing to an arcade that we went to, though, was the old Showbiz Pizza. If you don't know what Showbiz Pizza was, think of the modern day Chuck E. Cheese with slightly different creepy musician automata. In those days, my parents would give me two dollars to play in the arcades. Hours later, I would return and give them back $1.50. I spent that time watching the games.

Was it motivated by fear? Probably. But with time, fascination began to replace the fear. I studied the games and how people played them, but mostly I wanted to see how they worked when a competent player was playing it. Rarely, at least at first, did it matter. But as I got older, the games got more complex, until I saw what was my first video game love.

Its name was Super Mario Brothers, and damned if it wasn't the most incredible thing I ever saw. By that point, I probably knew what Donkey Kong and even the original Mario Brothers were, but that didn't matter to me then. Mario was just a video game character, not THE video game character, so I could see the game with no assumptions and bias. What did matter was that every time I saw this game, it was different. Once, Mario was on a grassy overworld. The next, he was swimming underwater. Then he was in a castle full of spinning lava lines. Then it was night, and turtles were throwing stars at him (I have no idea why child me thought hammers were stars, but I vividly remember that was exactly what they were at the time.) I didn't understand this game at all as a kid, and that enthralled me.

This wasn't the first game that I personally began to play, at least fairly regularly and seriously, but I like to think that it was what won me as a gamer anyway. It was here that I first saw games as something to cherish, something worth more than a study. And it was this game that made me realize that games were not simple patterns and tests of memorization and skill. They were adventures.

It was also here that I did find the first game I really started to play, but that is a story in itself. Since the game in question kind of sucked, it should make an interesting one.