The Gauntlet

Remember when video games were hard? Yeah me too.

People complain about video games now, but there is nothing bad that can be said about any game that you didn’t have to pound on just to get it to play. The hardware error that companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari built into there cartridge platforms bread a whole generation of wife beating children who, even before you could kill whores and steal cars in Liberty City, were reverting to violence to solve their problems. I pounded on Donkey Kong harder than Mario did to Princess Peach, or King Kong did to Fay Wray.

Looking back it occurs to me now that besides being harder to start these games were also harder to play than anything on the market today. The controls for some of the classic and super Nintendo games are alright, but that’s easy when all you do is run and jump. But in the original Donkey Kong even athletic great Mario jumped like a ballet dancer on acid. Once you get to Jurassic Park on the Genesis, the one place you really need to run and jump, those abilities kind of fall apart in your hands as you wake up in a shady, monster filled, government occupied Pitfall.

If you see what I’m driving at here, you’re better off than I am. These games were hard, even if you didn’t utilize the one option they designed the menu for: the difficulty setting. But difficulty? Difficulty? Is that even an option in these early games?! I understand easy, normal, and hard, but what about “playable” as an option, or how about, “application of the natural laws of physics” on/off switch? How about some “difficulty” settings that would actually allow the game to slide back and forth on the spectrum of skill level, and not luck. I don’t know how many Italians, scientists, monkeys, and marines I’ve killed hoping that they could make it across a two foot jump and not trip standing up or face plant themselves into an invisible ledge. These games had one real setting- suckyhardtryagaingoodluckbastard. But the games were fun and challenging in a way TV hadn’t experienced since the introduction of the presidential debates and then much later and more predominantly with American Idol. It wasn’t just that we were young, with undeveloped hand eye coordination, or that these games were really, really, badly programmed (which they were), that made this games so hard. They were designed intentionally to be hard, and because of that worth playing again and again.

Looking past the insane logic of the story lines, the poor programming and resulting complex paradoxical game play that introduced games like “Schrödinger's Cat’s Bowl-a-Tron”, and sadistic game developers dreams of blind, nubby fingered children, the video games of our youth were pretty damn amazing.

Now, I’m not going to lie, I once I had to have someone remind me that Sonic wasn’t Mario, and that rings weren’t coins. And, for a long time when I’d play Mario in my uncle’s basement with all the cousins crowding around I had no idea what was going on. I mean there were dinosaurs, and manila colored nipple men, and a guy that could spit fire, and an arrangement of different mushrooms. And, sometimes my brother would give me the second player remote and tell me I was playing when I wasn’t, and for a long time I couldn’t tell. But eventually I got a “big” just like Mario did, and I grew up and understood a few things about video games.

The things that video games have taught me almost seem like universal truths to me now, things I was born knowing, natural rights intuit in every child. So, here they are-

What video games have taught me:
-That no matter what modern concepts of physics tell us, there is such a thing as a double jump. That is right, one jump on top of another, a mid air miracle, pushing little men a little higher.
-If something or someone changes color, they’re probably a zombie. If they bounce up really high and then off the screen, they’re probably just dead.
-Even little mustached plumbers can find the love of a beautiful princess, even if they can’t find her.
-Health is everywhere.
-And so is lava.

Seriously though, isn’t art supposed to relate to real life? At least a little. And I’m pretty sure that a huge part of life isn’t about getting eaten by raptors and falling off cliffs. But then again, I could always be wrong about that too.



-Caleb, true ninja