Start Press: Pining is Evergreen

My most vivid childhood memory of my dad involves his obsession with classic rock. The '80s were winding down and our family had relocated from Ireland to Southern California. If there was music on his car radio, you better believe a DJ at K-Earth 101 FM was serving it up. My dad lost his mind every time they spun “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” a psychedelic slow-jam from 1969 by Tommy James and The Shondells. Singing along wasn’t enough; he compulsively slapped his fingers, tabla-style, on the steering wheel of his ’78 Toyota Celica. The loose fit of the horn buttons in that car produced a pleasing ‘clack, clack’ noise when you hit them with your hand. And my dad was a horn-button drummer par excellence.

We don’t usually discuss popular music in terms of it being an escapist breed of entertainment like Hollywood summer blockbusters or role-playing videogames, but it certainly was for my dad. In fact, so-called ‘golden oldies’ offered my dad a far more potent sort of escape. What he experienced while listening to rock from his college years on K-Earth was something more akin to quantum transference. He became his college self again for those four time-suspending minutes. My dad didn’t need plastic surgery to feel young again. He had a working radio.

The right song makes me nostalgic as well. Any time I hear the acoustic finger-picking and dreamily reverbed harmonies of Harrod & Funck’s Dreams of the Colorblind, I’m reminded of a roadtrip to South Carolina I took with my older brother right before I started college. We’d been playing the album on repeat most of the trip, at least until the car’s alternator crapped out and we got stranded on the shoulder of I-95 at dusk with a dead battery.

Densely swarming mosquitoes effectively trapped us inside the car, where we withered beneath the muggy summertime humidity. Paranoid characters, the two of us, in a b-movie remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds (‘A new winged menace has come to Bodega Bay!’). We all but prayed aloud for the tow truck’s hastened arrival. To keep ourselves from liquefying altogether, we’d wait until an 18-wheeler approached and fling open the passenger-side door so the gust of wind from the passing semi would blow our hair back, offering momentary relief. Then we’d slam the door shut again before the mosquitoes picked up our scent. Rinse in sweat, repeat.

Speaking of mosquitoes, the memory of that ‘dismal-then, hilarious-now’ roadtrip snafu feels strangely akin to the amber-encased specimen in Jurassic Park. When I listen to Harrod & Funck’s wistful ballad “Nethy Bridge” today, the DNA contained in that now-extinct summer evening takes on a fresh, monumental life of its own.

There are important difference between my generation and my dad’s. His generation had The Doobie Brothers; mine, Super Mario Bros. I listened to music growing up, but I was raised on videogames. Retro gaming is my K-Earth. 8-bit is my summer of ’69.

After hearing it celebrated on a “Best Games of ’09” installment of Michael Abbott’s excellent Brainy Gamer podcast, I picked up a copy of Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS. The game is a digital head trip, centering on a gamer who's transported back to the ’80s where he proceeds to lounge on the floor with a buddy in front of an old Nintendo Famicom console, playing a variety of 8-bit videogames. The games in question are fully fleshed-out, playable doppelgangers, paying homage to retro titles such as Galaga, Mega Man and Dragon Warrior.

The developers at Japanese studio indieszero applied subtle polish to these classic gameplay templates, incorporating contemporary wisdom in game-design best practice. Between completing gameplay challenges dished out by Max Headroom’s Japanese game-master equivalent Shinya Arino, the kids pore over copies of GameFan (a pitch-perfect parody of vintage issues of Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly). The kids banter about tips, tricks, cheat codes and rumors they’ve picked up from friends at school. They drop slant reference to late-'80s DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, saying things like "Take it from me, parents just don't understand."

I’ve played plenty of games that aim for—and nail, bulls-eye—my brain’s nostalgic pleasure center. Capcom's delightful Mega Man 9, for instance, returned to the franchise’s 8-bit roots, going so far as to simulate screen sprites in the same way a modern song might sample the crackle and pop of a turntable needle against a vinyl LP. But I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that uses videogame nostalgia as part of the narrative framework itself. Retro Game Challenge fondly reminds gamers of a certain age (read: my age) what it felt like to unwrap a new NES cartridge, press it into the console and hit the power button with breathless anticipation.

When I play Retro Game Challenge, part of my head is in the game. But the remainder is being ushered, just as the Ghost of Christmas Past led wizened Ebenezer, back to childhood. In my case, through a parade of grade-school sleepovers spent playing Excitebike and Super Mario Bros. 3 and Cobra Triangle with friends. Running frantically in place on the Nintendo Power Pad until my friend’s entertainment center rattled and neighbors ducked and covered in response to the Richter-scale vibrations. Forever jostling with my two brothers Trey and Josh for the Nintendo controller. Waiting for our parents to go on a date, leaving us home alone for the evening so we could break into their walk-in closet and play the Commodore 128. We posted younger siblings at the bedroom door on lookout to warn us when mom and dad's car pulled into the driveway so we could quickly lock up and return the bedroom key to its not-so-hidden hiding place in the Cadbury's tin full of sewing supplies on the laundry cabinet's highest shelf.

The kind of game-related memory I cherish most refuses to be measured in bytes. How do you quantify something as profound and ineffable as joy? How do you begin to bottle a feeling that flows over, around and through you with the inertia of frothing rapids? Obviously you can’t, and you don’t. You simply relax and let the current bear you effortlessly downstream... Wait, what was I talking about again? I spaced out contemplating River City Ransom all of a sudden.

Jason Killingsworth is Paste’s games editor. He is based in Dublin, Ireland, and writes about music, film, tech and games for a handful of outlets. You can follow him on Twitter @jasonkill or drop him a line at jason [at] pastemagazine.com.

Watch the trailer for Retro Game Challenge: