About a month ago DanamesX from Tales From the Backlog introduced a new monthly collaboration post in which fellow gaming bloggers can share their stories and experiences, with a different topic question each month(which I’m completing just short of the deadline, per usual). Having spent the past 30 years of my life playing video games, I’m reasonably certain I have something in the way of experiences and anecdotes that I can share. If there’s one thing I can always contribute, it’s a nostalgia-fueled ramble. For the very first topic in the series of aptly titled EXP Share posts, we are starting at the beginning of our gamer journey by discussing…
The video game, moment, or reason that got you into gaming?
My answer to what ignited my lifelong passion for video games is pretty simple, if not entirely original – Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Going back as far as I can remember, the three things I was most interested in as a young kid were – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, and Nintendo. Anyone who grew up in the late 80’s or early 90’s knows all too well, you didn’t need to specify what you were playing on, you were playing “Nintendo”. I can still vividly remember the bedroom in our home that had the family NES hooked up to a little 13-inch tv. By the time I was old enough to understand what video games were my family had accumulated a modest collection of games as my older brother and sister would play semi-regularly. Most of the cartridges sat on a little tv stand, with about half protected by the black Nintendo dust sleeves; there was also a Ziploc bag full of all the manuals for the games like Mario 1-3, Bubble Bobble, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! or even NES masterpieces like Karate Kid, Rambo, and Jaws. I would lay on the living room floor and look through all of these manuals like I was reading a bunch of comic books. One of my favorites in particular was the manual for Super Mario 3, which features the iconic picture of Mario equipped with a racoon tail flying upward. The inside of the manual showed the levels in the game along with a brief description. There was a drawing and description of each of the Koopalings or “Koopa Kids” as I called them – Roy, Morton, Iggy, Lemmy, Larry, Ludwig, and Wendy O. Koopa – which I thought was so cool at the time and was just as interested in looking through manuals for NES games as I was in nearly any cartoon at the time.
Video games have always been around and have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. If I had to narrow it down to a specific game that caused me to fall in love with video games as a hobby it’s near impossible for me to name something other than Super Mario Bros. – a game first released only a couple months before I was born(so we’re kind of the same age?). Looking forward to more EXP Share posts…
Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!
Gaming Omnivore 
Thank you for sharing! My first console was technically the NES, but we didn’t play it a lot. Was the image that you used for Super Mario Bros the cartridge you had? We had one similar, but it also included Pole Position.
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That’s similar with our household as we actually had an Atari 2600 that I remember playing Pac-Man, Centipede, and Dig Dug on, but I don’t believe I played any of those until I had already started playing Mario games.
Sadly, no. I wish I still had one of the old Mario/Duck Hunt cartridges that we had when I was a kid. I remember not being very good at using the Zapper and playing Duck Hunt…
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Wow there really was something about reading game manuals wasn’t there? If they were simply B&W text-only documents I’d still read them obsessively, but the pictures and game art were wonderful.
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Yeah, the one that sticks out in my mind most was the yellow Mario 3 manual and all the “Koopa Kids” it had illustrated inside. You see, back in my day, games had manuals….
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No paper manual… that’s a paddlin’
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