jcheatle
05-31-2007, 09:15 PM
It’s been said that, as you grow older, making peace with the establishment is a sign of maturity. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with this statement, but I have recently accepted a belief that might be considered blasphemous by the classic gaming community: Gamestop, EB, and the like are not the devil. In fact, they’re not even lesser demons. No, the market system isn’t perfect, and there is much to dislike, but when we demonize the present state of gaming while waxing nostalgically about the past, something gets lost in the mix. Often times, we need to step back, take a deep breath, and appreciate both what we have and what we have had.
I thought a lot about this on a random trip to the mall last week. I stopped by the local Gamestop, even though I hadn’t purchased anything for my PS2 in months and any hope I have of procuring a Wii or PS3 currently lies in winning the lottery. Nevertheless, I noticed something that we take for granted today: parents buying used, cheap games for their children. Not that odd, you say? No, not today it isn’t, but way back when, in the late 80s and early 90s, it was for everybody I knew.
Today, every town with a stoplight has a used game store within shouting distance, but growing up in the hills, we knew not of such stores. Not only did we have yet to experience The Electronics Boutique, but even Sam Walton’s empire had not graced our rural area. So where’s a young boy to buy NES games in North Central PA? Ames. Fisher’s Big Wheel. Two now-defunct department stores. That’s it. That’s the list. There was no pre-ordering of games, no trade-ins, no special discounts. You could select from whatever was in the case, whenever it got there. If you wanted to trade, you did it amongst your friends since everybody had an NES, period. Discounts? I don’t think so.
What really blows my mind is that today, if I want a game, I go buy it. If I want a new system, I can put it on a credit card and pay it off whenever. These are options as an adult, but back then, I certainly never considered such things. My first NES came as a gift from the neighbors because it blinked too much and they bought a new one. My first game was Super Mario Brothers, another gift because it was now expendable. From there, I received games for my birthday and Christmas, and that was it. Fifty dollars is still a lot to drop on a game, and it was even more seventeen years ago. If I made a poor decision on game selection, that was tough. And yet, I think it developed character somehow. When you chose a bad game, and were forced to play it ad nauseum because it’s all you have, you learn something about yourself.
The first two games I chose for my ninth birthday were Jeopardy and Othello because even then I was a nerd. Eventually, I was able to play Jeopardy without actually reading the clues because I had memorized the answers. For Christmas ’89, I received Contra and Wrestlemania. While the former has become a defining staple in my gaming life, the latter was well… the latter sucked, even then, but to a young WWF fan, it was alright.
In 1990, I picked up a whopping five new games. My tenth birthday yielded Legacy of the Wizard and Spy vs. Spy. Thus began the tradition of video game magazines fooling me into buying “cool-looking” games. And then I suffered until Christmas when my parents ignored Super Mario Bros. 3, the one game I wanted, due to its fifty-dollar price tag. Instead, they went the “quantity over quality” route. The end result was that I may have been the best Airwolf player in Western PA that year, I did enjoy Golgo 13 to the point where I always got stuck, and I nearly hurled Destination Earthstar through a wall. But I guess two out of three ain’t bad, either.
Again, though, you learned to live with the decisions you made (or the ones made for you). There were no “do-overs”. You didn’t return games to the store, nor could you trade them in, which in retrospect may have been for the best. I probably would’ve traded in those three games and wound up with one crappy game instead.
We need to look at these missteps or disappointments and spin them positively instead. The one example I come back to time and again is from Christmas 1993 when all I wanted was a Sega Genesis. The day comes around and sure enough, there’s a box under the tree, and I excitedly unwrap… a new-style Nintendo? Yeah, my parents, the suckers, bought me this NES system that loaded in from the top like a Super Nintendo. Great. Oh, I can play all the games I already have without it blinking? Thanks a lot. Really.
I did find a Genesis under the tree the following year, and it broke a few years after. My top loader sits by the television to this day and plays perfectly. Go figure. However, if there’s a point to my rambling it’s this: we talk about the past being either better or worse than today, often depending upon our age, and the fact is that it’s neither, really. It’s just different. While today’s nationwide system of glorified pawn shops makes it easier to exchange stinkers for something a bit better, I still kind of miss those days when you lived with what you got for six months, for better or worse.
I thought a lot about this on a random trip to the mall last week. I stopped by the local Gamestop, even though I hadn’t purchased anything for my PS2 in months and any hope I have of procuring a Wii or PS3 currently lies in winning the lottery. Nevertheless, I noticed something that we take for granted today: parents buying used, cheap games for their children. Not that odd, you say? No, not today it isn’t, but way back when, in the late 80s and early 90s, it was for everybody I knew.
Today, every town with a stoplight has a used game store within shouting distance, but growing up in the hills, we knew not of such stores. Not only did we have yet to experience The Electronics Boutique, but even Sam Walton’s empire had not graced our rural area. So where’s a young boy to buy NES games in North Central PA? Ames. Fisher’s Big Wheel. Two now-defunct department stores. That’s it. That’s the list. There was no pre-ordering of games, no trade-ins, no special discounts. You could select from whatever was in the case, whenever it got there. If you wanted to trade, you did it amongst your friends since everybody had an NES, period. Discounts? I don’t think so.
What really blows my mind is that today, if I want a game, I go buy it. If I want a new system, I can put it on a credit card and pay it off whenever. These are options as an adult, but back then, I certainly never considered such things. My first NES came as a gift from the neighbors because it blinked too much and they bought a new one. My first game was Super Mario Brothers, another gift because it was now expendable. From there, I received games for my birthday and Christmas, and that was it. Fifty dollars is still a lot to drop on a game, and it was even more seventeen years ago. If I made a poor decision on game selection, that was tough. And yet, I think it developed character somehow. When you chose a bad game, and were forced to play it ad nauseum because it’s all you have, you learn something about yourself.
The first two games I chose for my ninth birthday were Jeopardy and Othello because even then I was a nerd. Eventually, I was able to play Jeopardy without actually reading the clues because I had memorized the answers. For Christmas ’89, I received Contra and Wrestlemania. While the former has become a defining staple in my gaming life, the latter was well… the latter sucked, even then, but to a young WWF fan, it was alright.
In 1990, I picked up a whopping five new games. My tenth birthday yielded Legacy of the Wizard and Spy vs. Spy. Thus began the tradition of video game magazines fooling me into buying “cool-looking” games. And then I suffered until Christmas when my parents ignored Super Mario Bros. 3, the one game I wanted, due to its fifty-dollar price tag. Instead, they went the “quantity over quality” route. The end result was that I may have been the best Airwolf player in Western PA that year, I did enjoy Golgo 13 to the point where I always got stuck, and I nearly hurled Destination Earthstar through a wall. But I guess two out of three ain’t bad, either.
Again, though, you learned to live with the decisions you made (or the ones made for you). There were no “do-overs”. You didn’t return games to the store, nor could you trade them in, which in retrospect may have been for the best. I probably would’ve traded in those three games and wound up with one crappy game instead.
We need to look at these missteps or disappointments and spin them positively instead. The one example I come back to time and again is from Christmas 1993 when all I wanted was a Sega Genesis. The day comes around and sure enough, there’s a box under the tree, and I excitedly unwrap… a new-style Nintendo? Yeah, my parents, the suckers, bought me this NES system that loaded in from the top like a Super Nintendo. Great. Oh, I can play all the games I already have without it blinking? Thanks a lot. Really.
I did find a Genesis under the tree the following year, and it broke a few years after. My top loader sits by the television to this day and plays perfectly. Go figure. However, if there’s a point to my rambling it’s this: we talk about the past being either better or worse than today, often depending upon our age, and the fact is that it’s neither, really. It’s just different. While today’s nationwide system of glorified pawn shops makes it easier to exchange stinkers for something a bit better, I still kind of miss those days when you lived with what you got for six months, for better or worse.