i bought my childhood back for 10 bucks. how? thru wii. wow, the wonders of modern technology!

my younger sister bought me and my hubby a wii as a belated wedding present (took her that long but i’m not complaining as it paid off). she told me that i can download old school super mario brothers for a very cheap price. i got excited at the prospect of playing it once again and reliving the glory of finishing the game so i wasted no time and made the purchase. and as expected, i got nostalgic.

mario and i (ok, luigi too. though i rarely played him) go back a long way and by that, i meant the age of family computers. ugh, i’m that old. my mom gave us a famicom as a christmas present when i was in sixth grade.and i remember spending christmas break that year playing and mastering  as many games as possible and as much as i could. actually, i can’t remember anyone in the family playing as much as i did. possibly because i hogged it. but there were a few times when i caught my mom or my dad playing past midnight.

i was an innately skilled player back in the day. i finished a number of games when no one else in the family had. but finishing the super mario after countless attempts (thanks to hundred lives) would always be the peak of my famicom career. soon after, i grew up and stopped playing altogether. in a way, saving the princess signified the end of my childhood and became the threshold of my youth. indeed, i finished the game when i was a high school freshman, at a time when my interest already shifted to boys living and tangible and mario, the small, plump, mustached mario, obviously was an alternate reality and no more than a childhood friend whom i needed to help save her princess.

yesterday, i played super mario with the same level of enthusiasm that i had when i was a kid. and it’s comforting to know that i haven’t lost my skills yet. i managed to get the hundred lives and navigated myself thru world 8. i haven’t finished the game yet. i figured there is no hurry this time. when my mom saw me playing, she said that i still sat the same way as i did before while playing. and she too remembered the other games she used to play – circus, galaga, 1982, rainbow island and the car race. all those memories. wouldn’t it be nice to have a hundred lives and some ‘one-up’ in between, so we can have the luxury of dying if we’d rather start a new life over or we can get as many chances as we want when we err? it’s ok though that we don’t get these life bonuses in the real world. at least for now, technology has enabled us to relive snippets of our childhood for a few bucks. in truth though, what it’s done to me is something that cannot be quantified. priceless, it truly is.