Painted Worlds

I grew up alongside Nintendo.

Not in the abstract way people say they “grew up with” something now, when what they mostly mean is that it was around. I mean Nintendo was part of the geography of my childhood. It lived in aisles, department stores, mall corridors, glass cases, cardboard standees, neon tubes, magazine racks, demo kiosks, and the overheated imaginations of kids who had no internet and therefore had to manufacture hype the old-fashioned way: through rumors, waiting, and lies told by someone’s cousin whose uncle supposedly worked at Nintendo.

That uncle was very busy, by the way. He knew everything. He knew when Super Mario Bros. 2 was coming. He knew secret codes. He knew what games Japan already had. He knew which cartridge had hidden levels. He knew things no adult in our actual lives seemed to know.

And we believed him because we wanted to.

That was part of it.

Nintendo, in those days, was not just something you bought. It was something you orbited.

I remember Toys “R” Us during the NES years. That huge aisle with box art stacked from top to bottom like stained glass for children. You didn’t grab the game itself. You stood there, paralyzed by possibility, staring at painted covers that promised entire worlds, and then you pulled a little paper slip from beneath the display. That slip was the claim ticket. The game lived somewhere behind the counter, in a secure room, protected like medicine or diamonds.

You carried the paper to the register. You paid. Then someone disappeared and returned with the real object.

It was absurdly ceremonial.

It was wonderful.

I remember wandering those aisles with no money and no realistic plan. Just looking. Just absorbing. The smell of plastic shelves and fresh cardboard. The hum of fluorescent lights. The low-grade chaos of a toy store. Kids arguing. Parents bargaining. The terrible possibility that the game you wanted might be sold out.

Scarcity was annoying then. I do not wish it back. I do not romanticize disappointment.

But waiting did something to us.

Waiting gave the thing shape.

There was time for imagination to work on you.

There were Nintendo Power subscriptions and strategy guides. There were screenshots you stared at until they became scripture. There were playground conversations where half the information was wrong and all of it was thrilling. There were release dates that felt less like product launches and more like weather systems moving slowly toward your town.

You did not “watch the trailer” and move on.

You lived with the idea of the game.

I remember going to Fred Meyer to buy Super Mario Bros. 3. I remember going to Dillard’s, or maybe Macy’s, at Scottsdale Fashion Center because they were the only place around with a demo Super Nintendo. It was running F-Zero and Super Mario World. That sentence may not mean much now, but at the time it was like seeing the future plugged into a department store television.

F-Zero looked impossible.

Super Mario World looked like Nintendo had learned how to breathe in color.

I remember MetroCenter in Phoenix. There was a Babbage’s there, and another smaller game shop, a mom-and-pop place if memory serves, in the corridor that led toward the food court and Metro Midway. I would stand there and let it all wash over me.

That is the phrase that keeps coming back.

Let it wash over me.

The box art. The CRT glow. The mall carpet. The smell of food court pizza. The distant arcade noise. The racks of games I could not afford. The sense that each cartridge was not just a product, but a portal.

It was an all five senses experience, to be young.

And Nintendo knew how to stage it.

The company had a strange kind of theater to it. Retail kiosks. Demo units. Big cardboard displays. Weird peripherals. Thick boxes. Colorful manuals. Hardware that looked like it belonged in a child’s room and a science fiction movie at the same time.

I was a day-one purchaser of Star Fox 64. I worked at Best Buy then, in the actual Media department, back when “Media” meant something tactile. CDs, movies, games, jewel cases, security cases, endcaps, signage. Star Fox 64 arrived in that big, thick shrink-wrapped box because it included the Rumble Pak. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Before you even played it, the box told you this was an event.

Then you got it home, plugged that little brick into the back of the controller, and suddenly the future had a pulse. You felt the Arwing take damage. You felt boosts and impacts and tiny mechanical drama in your hands.

Nintendo has always been at its best when it remembers that games are not only seen. They are held.

I remember the big Nintendo pillar at Best Buy, visited and updated by actual Nintendo employees. That felt important. Like the store was merely hosting the object, and someone from the mothership had to come maintain it. I think I was there when they finally removed the Super Game Boy/SNES demo from it. At the time it was probably just another retail reset. Another task. Another changeover.

Now it feels like a historical event I happened to witness under fluorescent lighting.

That is how memory works. It adds ceremony later.

But it did not invent the ceremony entirely.

It was there.

I remember going to Toys “R” Us with my friend Neal to play Super Mario 64 on a freshly released Nintendo 64. I remember what that felt like. Not “a new Mario game.” Not merely “3D graphics.” It felt like the rules of the world had changed. Mario was no longer moving across the screen. He was inside a place. You could run around him. You could exist in the same space.

The first time you see something like that, really see it, you do not forget.

Later, Nintendo followed me into adulthood.

My GameCube was a wedding present from my then wife. That is a funny sentence and a very specific kind of beautiful. A game console as a wedding gift. Purple, lunchbox-shaped, proudly strange. Nintendo did not always win the generation, but they almost always had nerve.

She also stood in line for me to get a launch Wii. Christmas morning, 2006, we opened it and discovered it was one of the duds. Dead on arrival. Nothing quite like finally getting the impossible object and realizing the impossible object does not turn on.

But Nintendo delivered a replacement by December 27th.

That mattered.

Not just because I wanted to play Wii Sports, though I absolutely did. It mattered because the company still felt personal somehow. Human. Quirky. Accountable in its own very Nintendo way.

Then my son and I both got Wii Us for our birthdays, which are around the same time of year. The Wii U is often treated as a punchline now, and I understand why. It was confusing. It was badly explained. It was not what Nintendo needed it to be.

But I will defend its library to the end.

That little misunderstood machine had oomph. Super Mario 3D World. Pikmin 3. Wind Waker HD. Mario Kart 8. Splatoon. Super Mario Maker. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Nintendo Land. It had personality. It had ideas. It had the strange glow of a company trying things, even if not everyone came along for the ride.

Then came the Switch.

I bought one as soon as I could. That first Switch was stolen out of the back of my car when I got divorced. That is not a console-launch story so much as a life story with a console-shaped bruise in the middle of it. My mom, kindly, bought me another one.

So even there, Nintendo became something more than hardware.

It became a thread.

Childhood. Work. Friendship. Marriage. Fatherhood. Divorce. Family kindness. Christmas mornings. Birthday gifts. Retail aisles. Mall corridors. Rumors. Waiting.

Each generation arrived with a little less pomp, maybe. Or maybe life got louder around it. Maybe the ceremony faded because the world changed. Maybe it faded because I did.

Probably both.

The handhelds had their own parallel mythology. I had the Game Boy. I was on my mission when the Game Boy Color came out. The Game Boy Micro was a miss for me, but the Game Boy Advance and SP were glory. The SP, especially, felt like Nintendo perfecting an object. Clamshell. Front light. Portable in a way that made sense immediately. It was elegant before Nintendo was usually described that way.

The Nintendo DS, when it arrived, gave me a feeling not entirely unlike the one I have now with the Switch 2. So much potential. So many questions. What is this thing? What will it become? Is this for me? Is this for someone else?

Then New Super Mario Bros. was announced.

I still remember the thrill.

Not because it was the most ambitious thing Nintendo ever made. It was not. Not because it was a revolution. It was a bridge. It was Nintendo saying, “We remember the shape of this joy.”

That is sometimes all you need.

Which brings me to now.

I bought the Switch 2. Of course I did. I have been a day-one Nintendo person since the SNES era. At some point, your habits become biography.

And it is a beautiful machine in many ways. Capable. Polished. Socially relevant. My son seems happy with it. He loves Pokémon and Fortnite and the things this generation quite reasonably loves. He is not wrong. His Nintendo is not fake because it is not mine.

That is important.

I do not want to become the guy who thinks the version of joy he had at eleven is the only valid one.

But I also cannot pretend the feeling is the same.

Right now, I am waiting for the Switch 2 to give me its moment. Its real one. Not just a better screen. Not just better performance. Not just ports and upgrades and multimedia synergy and brand management. I am waiting for the game that makes the object feel necessary. The one that says, “Here. This is why.”

A new Mario could do it. A bold Zelda could do it. A great Star Fox could surprise me and do it. Metroid, if it lands right, could do it. Something entirely new could do it, too. I am not asking Nintendo to live forever in 1991 or 1996 or 2006.

I do not need the old world back.

I just want a little ceremony.

I want the sense of occasion. The feeling that Nintendo has not only shipped a product, but opened a door.

Because that is what it used to feel like.

It felt like walking into Toys “R” Us and seeing a wall of painted worlds.

It felt like standing in a mall corridor outside Babbage’s, letting the neon and box art and arcade noise work on your imagination.

It felt like waiting by the mailbox for Nintendo Power.

It felt like hearing impossible rumors on the playground and half-believing them because childhood runs partly on bad information and hope.

It felt like cardboard standees and demo kiosks and thick shrink-wrapped boxes.

It felt like holding a paper slip in your hand and knowing the real game was waiting somewhere behind the counter.

It felt like the future had weight.

I know the world is different now. I know retail changed. I know kids do not need to stand in a store to feel connected to a game. I know hype moves faster, and access is easier, and downloads are convenient, and trailers are everywhere, and the old scarcity was not always romantic when you were the kid going home empty-handed.

I know.

But sometimes I miss when video games occupied actual space.

When they had smell and texture.

When anticipation had a sound.

When the whole experience was bigger than the software.

The Switch 2 may yet have its moment. I hope it does. I am not rooting against Nintendo. I could never. Too much of my life is filed under that red logo.

But for now, I find myself looking at this sleek little machine and thinking about the places that made me love Nintendo before the machine was ever in my house.

Toys “R” Us.

Fred Meyer.

Scottsdale Fashion Center.

MetroCenter.

Babbage’s.

Best Buy Media.

A department store demo SNES.

A Nintendo 64 kiosk.

A Christmas morning Wii that did not work, and a replacement that arrived two days later.

A stolen Switch.

A replacement from my mom.

A son who has his own Nintendo now.

The geography is gone, mostly. The home screen remains.

Useful, yes.

Magical? Rarely.