Advent Calendar 01: The Beginning (For Me)

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Some of my earliest memories are of video games. I'm told that when I was very little, my parents had a COLECOVision, a console largely eclipsed by the Atari 2600 at the time, largely remembered by retro enthusiasts today for its most excellent home ports of the arcade games Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. The family tells stories of my parents staying up late to play the Smurfs game, toddler-me and my baby sister asleep on the couch between them, carping at each other with, "Honey, it's my turn! You died!"

The COLECOVision is perhaps more recognizable as a descendant of Pong than as the ancestor to the Nintendo Entertainment System, what with all that swanky early '80s styling and the permanently-attached joysticks. I'm not sure what kind of buttons were under the number pad, but I do know the joysticks had four actual clicky switches inside, which in our house stood up to being repeatedly opened and re-soldered. (My father is built like a Wookiee, and apparently Smurfs: Rescue In Gargamel's Castle is very frustrating.)

The earliest I actually remember is the NES. My proudly Nerd-American parents are generally in the second-wave of "early adopters" -- not the very first to buy a new thing, but quick to jump on it once the first true killer app comes out. In their case, it was The Legend of Zelda, released in North America just in time for Fall '87. That Christmas, they shelled out for not just the console and game cartridge (first-edition gold, of course) but for the full Deluxe Set, which also included the (reasonably fun) Zapper and the (ambitious but ultimately useless) R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, plus a game that used each of the accessories. 

The whole bundle would have cost the equivalent of almost $600 in 2022 money. Which was a lot, but they did use the hell out of it. I was six at the time, and I'd been introduced to the school schedule of "two weeks off at Christmas". My father worked as an engineer at a place co-located with their manufacturing plant, which closed between Christmas and New Year's. The combination of that, plus new video games, kicked off a long-running family tradition: Living on takeout and convenience foods for the last week of the year, while we played a console RPG through to completion. 

Well, "we". My father had the controller, my sister and I kibbitzed from the floor in front of the TV, and my mother had a pad of graph paper on her lap so she could map out the dungeons and give Dad directions. Nineteen eighty-seven was well before the advent of printed guides and GameFAQs, and if you got lost the only recourse was to call -- like, on the phone, with your voice -- the Nintendo Hint Line, a number which was not toll-free, and only to be used as the last resort. 

I thought the game looked fairly easy. What I did not realize, until I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, was that my parents were pre-playing through the dungeons on a second save file so my mother could have a map ready for the demonstration-play we kids watched the next day. I caught the two of them in the dark, hunched over the 5" portable TV at our kitchen table. One of the earliest snapshot memories I have of home life.