Recently my father-in-law unearthed my wife’s old Nintendo 64 console, which was accompanied by the Super Mario cartridge. I was skeptical it would still work after all these years, but we plugged it in and it fired up like a charm.
I didn’t have video game consoles at home growing up, so my exposure to them mostly happened at friends’ houses. For Super Mario it happened once a year around middle school age, when we traveled to central Wisconsin for my sister’s figure skating competition and stayed with some family friends. They had an N64 and Super Mario, which I played seemingly endlessly.
Diving back into it now, over 20 years later, was a bit surreal, especially now that I’m introducing our 4 year old to it. He’s slowly picking up basic movement and actions, though mostly just wants to watch me play. Luckily he doesn’t know or care that I don’t really know what I’m doing—I just try the different doors and magical worlds and see if I can stumble upon any Power Stars before I inevitably die through clumsy play.
We’re not planning on having other video games in the house, so he and his newborn brother will just have to get by with Mario & Crew for a while. Which, of course, will make them the coolest kids on the block.
Photo: Mario stuck in a tree with not much life left, so you can tell how good we are at Super Mario.