Amnesia Lane: Meeting the Super Nintendo

At my age, it’s hard to believe that any length of time has ever passed. Such is the case for the 30 years and a month that have passed since the Super Nintendo Entertainment System first graced store shelves in North America.

While the Sega Genesis had a generous head start, I had never seen it outside of Nick Arcade, where it was not well-explained. So the Super Nintendo was my first in-context experience with a 16-bit system. And what an experience it was.

I couldn’t have been older than 8 or 9 at the time, wandering through a Rich’s department store while my mother shopped.

The electronics department there was a little odd compared to other department stores, then and now. With four long display counters forming a square, it bore more than a striking resemblance to an oversized jewelry counter. Surrounding the square were racks of smaller goods (think VHS movies) interspersed with clothing racks that always seemed to be threatening to overrun every department in Rich’s.

It was at the southeast corner of that square that I first laid eyes on a SNES demo unit running Super Mario World. Demo units back then were rare and unusual, at least in my neck of the (literal) woods. I remember forming an odd obsession with the Sears that had a NES set up that we only ever stopped at once but often drove past on cross-state trips to my grandmother’s house.

As I recall, the legendary Sears NES was simply acting as a display model, not unlike the TV it was hooked up to. But this SNES was a marketing kiosk straight from Nintnedo itself. A large plastic hood covered the console and monitor-like TV, which a clear window to see the screen and show off the SNES itself. The cables for the two controllers were protected by rigid, ribbed plastic sheaths that also held the controllers sticking in place out in the air. Crowning the entire curiosity was a red, glowing sign of the Super Nintendo logo.

It was unusual. It was unique (despite obviously being mass-manufactured). And, for the next 10 minutes or so, it was MINE.

To this day I remember how struck I was by the increases in resolution and color palette. Mario was very red. Yoshi was very green. P-switches were very blue. Everything looked so… actually rounded. I couldn’t even compute the advances in gameplay and design; I had an Atari 2600 at home and I was so enthralled by the looks of the Super Nintendo that it would take a lot more exposure than this to consider any other element of it.

Still, the imperfections that plague the real world dared to sully the purity of this experience. The kiosk would reset itself every 5-10 minutes. I had and still have no idea if it was due to a faulty power source, or a feature of the kiosk to discourage people from monopolizing it. Despite that limitation, my first experience was brought to a doubly premature end when an older teenager waltzed up to the player 2 controller, hit a shoulder button and transferred all of Mario’s lives to Luigi. A feature of Super Mario World I certainly had no idea about. That dude was a master hacker and probably bought a mansion with stolen money.

Though considering how little couch multiplayer goes on these days, especially with retro games, I’m willing to bet knowledge of this feature is long forgotten or never known by most. So the next time you have your SNES Classic Mini out at a party, pull that on an unsuspecting guest.

While I’d have other run-ins what that kiosk over time (it would eventually switch over to Star Fox) and became better acquainted with the Genesis, it would be another year or two until I could really sink my teeth into some proper playtime.

Back in the day, we used to have stores where you would rent movies. People also wore hats on their feet and hamburgers ate people. I had to walk to school uphill (both ways) through blinding snowstorms with nothing but a baked potato in my pocket to keep me warm. And then I would have to eat the potato for lunch and walk home cold. Life was tough and you don’t know how good you have it today because you will never live through the hardships that we lived through. You used to have to buy a set of 20 books that weighed 50 pounds each just to look things up because we didn’t have a Bing. Nobody could call you if you weren’t in your house. And if you wanted to see a movie, you had to drive into town, go to a store, and scour the shelves until you (hopefully) found what you were looking for, drive it back home, watch it, and then bring it back to the store on a strict deadline or else pay double before you could watch another movie.

Now, you’d need to hook a device called a VCR to your TV in order to watch these movies. Some people had their own (my father had won one in a contest at his work), but the store could rent one of those to you, too, if you didn’t own one. While not as common as VCR rentals, some video stores also rented game consoles.

It was at one such store, Home Vision Video (that would eventually be devoured by Movie Gallery, which snuffed out the store’s character and eventually ran itself into the ground), that my father noticed a sale was going on. You could rent a Super Nintendo and four games for a long weekend for some sort of limited-time reduced price. I couldn’t tell you just what the price was; I would not be doing my family’s accounting for some time yet.

Dad did have the foresight to let my sister and I pick out the four games (not that we had much of a clue ourselves). Super Mario World made the cut immediately baced on my experience at Rich’s. The other three were selected purely on brand recognition: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania IV, and Hook. Yes, one of these things was not like the others, but with no Mega Man games in stock, we had run out of characters from Captain N and the Game Masters. So we got our bangarang on.

And much like my first experience with Super Mario World, at least two of these games left an indelible impression.

Playing Super Castlevania IV for the first time was akin to stepping into a monster movie. Everything looked larger than life, which played great against the atmosphere. And my goodness did the music blow away anything I had ever heard from a video game. You could even say the soundtrack is recommended. Though the B section of “Theme of Simon Belmont” always reminded me of the Scorpions’ recent hit, “Winds of Change.”

I didn’t get very deep into any of the games, being somewhat new at this and also only have bits and pieces of a weekend to get it done in. But I clearly remember how far I got into ALttP. I rescued Princess Zelda and did everything I could in Kakariko Village… and then never made it to Eastern Palace. Not because I kept dying, or couldn’t read a map, or just plan ran out of time.

Nowadays, basting through randomizer seeds as one does, the overworld of Zelda 3 feels rather small and well-trod. But my first time leaving Kakariko and heading out into Hyrule was like I was playing Breath of the Wild. The world was vast and unexplored, with new things to be found down every path and around every corner. I wandered through the Lost Woods, seeing if maybe the next sword was the Master Sword. I combed the entire southern half of the map, too, with now real goal in mind. Just seeing what was out there was rewarding all on its own.

And Hook was…. well, it tried.