Bowsah!

I miss Mario. You know, the pudgy plumber with the mustache that looks like a barber’s comb.

Maybe you don’t know, which means you either grew up prior to the video game era, or you have what we nerds like to call a “life.” To us, such a thing is a mythical concept, like Zeus, and you should enjoy it. Life, I mean, not Zeus.

But you probably have a vague inkling of who Mario is, or at least have seen him in some context. I was introduced to him at the wee age of eight, when I unwrapped a birthday gift and beheld the Nintendo Entertainment System, an ugly gray box that promised cutting-edge interactive adventures of the future. Considering these adventures looked blockier than a pile of Legos, the future apparently was a long time ago.

Our plucky plumber looked a lot different on the screen in those days. His red cap, perched atop his head like a stray animal, had the rough, jagged contours of an off-the-rack trucker hat; his mustache was depicted by an ugly brown smudge, which coincidentally is how many men’s mustaches are depicted in real life. His red overalls were barely discernible through their rudimentary illustration, and his square nose stuck out in front of him like a gravitationally-bound UPS package.

At all times, there are a million child’s drawings on a million refrigerators that are more skilled, and truer to life, than the pixelated mess that gave birth to the iconic video game character. But if you were a kid in 1989, and had only heard about the sun from eyewitness reports, then there was nothing better than curling up in front of the TV set with a square four-button controller, and saving the world from giant talking turtles with red mohawks. I’m not having a stroke; that’s a real bad guy.

If you leafed through the instruction booklet, you could see drawings of what Mario was supposed to look like: Hat a little more streamlined, ‘stache a little more stylish. It just took imagination to see him like that while you were playing. That’s exactly what made the game worthwhile, and not just a frittering away of precious childhood: Imagination. In that Disney-esque fantasy was a storybook quality – a whimsy that inspired a child to envision what an adult can only see with the aid of powerful hallucinogenic drugs. Which reminds me, the weekend’s coming up.

It may seem odd that I’m waxing nostalgic about an industry that’s only slightly older than I am, but the changes that have taken place over the intervening decades – advances in technology and graphics – have sucked away some of the otherworldliness that made those old titles such a head trip. Games aren’t content to just be games, anymore; they have to mimic reality in some way. As if I don’t get enough reality in my day-to-day life. If developers really want to hold a mirror up to reality, they’ll make a game where you wait for twenty minutes at the supermarket checkout while someone in front of you counts out exact change for a can of peas.

I was visiting a friend of mine recently – we’ll call him “Rex,” to make him sound as much like a Labrador as possible – and he was playing what’s called a “first-person shooter,” in which the goal is to navigate a real-world environment and mow people down with a bevy of intimidating weapons. Because the graphics were so advanced, the terrain was photographic in its realism; if it weren’t for the computer characters gushing blood after a grenade explosion, it could have passed for a tourism ad touting Afghanistan’s hot vacation spots. And of course, Rex was playing the game on a 50-inch high-definition TV, which I think is one size bigger than the screen the President consults in the Situation Room.

The effect on me was to produce an odd sense of vertigo. Leaving Rex’s man-cave was like stepping off a roller coaster on legs made of wax paper.

Violence issues aside (a topic I won’t even touch here), the super-realism made the game seem more like a stressful ordeal than a light pastime. It relies too heavily on a serious, real-world situation. That’s wholly unlike the imaginings of a generation ago, in which the controllable character’s most dire fate was getting bitten by a cartoon beetle with wings and aviator glasses.

I guess every generation has its nostalgia-inducing technology. My parents have upgraded to a high-def TV, but still reminisce fondly about their first black-and-white sets. My grandfather thinks most modern cars look like electric shavers.

And now I’ve got games, un-romantic as they may be. Luckily, Mario’s still around – he looks a bit better these days, more like something out of a Pixar movie than a Lego builder’s fever dream. I just miss the days when that’s all there was: A Dr. Seuss fantasyland, the colorful realization of a child’s half-baked whimsy. That the genre still exists at all is heartening.

 Because if I want reality, I don’t buy it in a store. I just put the controller down.