The Nintendo Seal of Parenting

Some people say that divorce is damaging to children, but I consider myself lucky. It meant that I was raised by three parents: a mother, a father and a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

There are literally tens of books about parenting as a Mum or Dad, if you are interested in that sort of thing. (A few parents of kids I teach could stand to maybe pick one of these up some time.) But not much attention is paid to the important lessons children learn from that third, some would say ‘completely inappropriate’ parent. But what those stuffy blowhards don’t realise is that the NES taught many valuable life lessons to my brother and I, its willing disciples.

Sure, we learnt practical stuff, like if you run into a tree hard enough a fairy might fall out, or the benefits of plumbing as a means of cutting down on your transport time.

But we also learnt a lot of abstract concepts. Nintendo helped us become better people. Well, helped me.

Lesson #1: Be a Goddamn Man

Nowadays every second Nintendo game is about grooming your horse or getting your hamster from the vet to the mall before the timer counts down to homework. But 20 years ago the only reason a horse would be in a Nintendo game was because you would be riding it into the middle of a massive battle against a 12-foot Pig-god; a hamster even less likely, unless maybe it had been mutated into a fierce warrior. Back then, games were made for men, and by men I mean pre-teen boys. In a very-hard-to-find game entitled Earthbound (or Mother, if you’re Japanese. No, I don’t know why) you learnt that when aliens invade the Earth with the help of local gangsters, it’s up to a bunch of cap-wearing kids wielding baseball bats and yoyos to protect the populace. That’s called responsibility, bitches.

A-well, better grab ourselves some baseball bats and yo-yos, mosey on down to that there meteorite and beat the tar outta whatever comes out.

Lesson #2: If at First You Don’t Succeed

Remember the Virtual Boy? No, but with good reason. It was terrible. What if Nintendo had thrown their toys out of the cot after the resounding failure of the Virtual Boy? We never would have seen the likes of the Nintendo 64, the Gamecube or the Wii! Remember that time, I wrote that blog that sucked? Me neither, they’re all solid gold. But in the event that that happened would I give up? No way! Because another thing Nintendo has shown me is that persistence is key.

Lesson #3: Modify your Expectations

The first game I chose to buy myself for my NES was Legend of Zelda, which pretty much set my life on its present course. I was taken by the gold box, by the gold case and I was also intrigued by the little gold ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’ starburst. ‘This seal is your assurance that NINTENDO has approved and guaranteed the quality of this product,’ it said reassuringly. That’s nice.

I think it was about 2006 that Nintendo realised that consumers don’t want quality interactive entertainment. What they want is to spend all their disposable income on games developed poorly by Korean developers. Hold on though! What about the Nintendo Seal of Quality, guaranteeing the quality of the games released for Nintendo systems? It turns out that employing that clairvoyant division was a great idea, because 14 years earlier Nintendo removed the words ‘approved and guaranteed’ from its seal (which had since also been renamed simply Nintendo Official Seal) And replaced them with ‘evaluated and approved.’ In all honesty, that is still a little bit optimistic for some of the stuff coming out nowadays. It’s only a matter of time until the Nintendo Seal will represent that ‘Nintendo has recorded on the back of a napkin that this game exists and will be unable to look you in the eyes while they sell it to you.’ Even though it’s not always for the best, Change is constant.

Lesson #4: A Hundred Bucks!

Have you ever paid $150 for a video game? It’s getting a little excessive, in my opinion. I’m no economist, but if games keep going up in price by $20-$25 every generation, I may have to revise my cryogenic head-freezing life insurance plan. Because who wants to be revived in 3027 just to find that Final Fantasy 607 is going to cost $28000?

Games have always been expensive though. Back in the NES days it used to cost me $100 for a new game. That’s $100 Australian. This is how much I paid for the Addams Family back in 1991. I don’t know how I got such a sum of money at the ripe old age of 9, probably through a combination of plaintive begging and the mowing of 1100 lawns. I put my money down and took my new game home, reading the instruction book from cover to cover in the car (because you had to read the instructions back then). At home, I put the game in the machine and fired it up. Then I turned it off, ejected the game, blew into the end of it, put it back in and turned the machine back on.

The amount of time it took me to do all of this is pretty much equivalent to how long it took me to ‘clock’ (win) the game. That’s right; I dropped the GDP of Micronesia on about an hour’s entertainment. I could have played the game again, but since replay value wasn’t invented until 1996, there wasn’t much point.

From this I learned... um... that hard work is its own reward? The value of a dollar? Truth be told, I’m still pretty dark on the whole thing.

You can see in this screenshot that the player has no money and only three lives, which means they have only just started and, paradoxically, have nearly finished the game.