Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Growing up tragically deprived of video games until somewhere around the age of 10, I have the unshakable feeling that I missed out on some essential skillset that I’ll never be able to fully make up for.  Additionally, the intermittent exposure I had to gaming up to that point narrowed my enthusiasm for the genre to such a degree that I had no clue what I was missing out on.

It all started with Sonic the Hedgehog.  I don’t remember why, or how, but but my first real encounter with console gaming was the original Sonic on the Genesis.  If it had happened to be Mario, my retro gaming ineptitude might not exist as it does today.  Alas, fate caught me in its insidious web.

I loved Sonic.  I wasn’t very good at it, but that hedgehog had attitude.  Not that I knew what a hedgehog was, either.  And my parents weren’t quite down with videogames.  They did their best to encourage me to spend my time other ways, reading or playing outdoors like good little boys should.  Their main method of encouraging me not to play games was to simply not buy me a game console.

This worked pretty well.

But every year, for my birthday, a family friend — whose inner child was, more aptly, an outer child — would go out of her way to rent me a Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog.  And for a few days, every year, I’d play as far into the game as I could make it (which probably wans’t very far) and then do it all over again.

Fast forward a few years — the Nintendo 64 has been released, and an older cousin sends me his old Sega Genesis.  And, gradually, as I owned my own console and began saving up money to buy my own games, I became a gamer.  Pretty soon the Genesis wasn’t enough to contain me — I hoarded my money until I could afford an N64, and my allegiance smoothly transitioned from Sega to Nintendo.  Unfortunately, I missed everything else.

Hell, I hardly even touched a Super Nintendo for the full span of my childhood.  By the time videogames had their hooks into me, my friends were playing Saturn and N64 games.  When the Super Nintendo was dominant in the 16-bit era, I had a laughable knowledge of the wonders it contained within its grey shell.  I distinctly remember listening to kids at the lunch table discussing games, and at the time I had no idea that “Super Nintendo,” “Super NES,” and “SNES” all meant the same thing.

It wasn’t until years later that  I began to understand the sheer volume of unmissable games that I had unforgivably missed without a clue.  You could write a book on game design based on Mario alone, and the Super Nintendo’s vast library contained so much beyond Super Mario World.

But now I’m all-too aware of the treasures of the 16-bit era still waiting to be plundered.  And I still enjoy old games — in many cases, more than new ones.  But here lies the rub — I’m tremendously bad at them.

Somehow, I missed out on something important as a child.  I’m not sure what it was, exactly.  Maybe it was simply the skills gained by playing games ad infinitum until every nook had been explored, every secret uncovered, and every level mastered.  I didn’t get them.  Or perhaps it was something more innate, a magical familiarity with the medium absorbed through prolonged contact with Nintendo’s classic controller.

Either way, I didn’t get it.  And now, when I fire up games like Mega Man 2, my self-image as a gamer crumbles.  More than crumbles.  Implodes.  Even Super Mario World, a game children could finish in an afternoon, utterly torments me.  In fact, I’d challenge anyone to find someone worse at 2D Mario than me.  I’d go into that one pretty confident in my own ability to utterly fail.

At 20 years old I’m still trying to learn how to ride this particular bicycle.  it’s like being a kid, wobbly and unsure, but without the finely-honed instinct of youth.  And there’s a diamond in the rocky terrain of my fail-strewn path — I can still discover, with child-like glee, games that wore out their freshness for my peers years ago.  There are still moments for me to unearth that convey an incredible amount of emotion with so little.  When a midi and a sprite can make you feel more than the most incredibly choreographed, orchestrated and narrated games of the current generation, you know there’s something magic there that is rarely recaputed in 2008.  And when I dig back into the past and experience one of those moments, it’s like Christmas every time, and that is something I wouldn’t trade the world for.