Revisiting Childhood Memories
Today I tip-toed through the cobwebs of my memories of childhood using the Internet.
It all started when I stumbled on an article from Wired Magazine title “Japan’s Reality-TV Gamer Just Keeps Playing and Playing and Playing…” It chronicles a ultra-geek reality show where our hero, Shinya Arino, must play and beat some of hardest video games ever made. In one episode, Arino is defeated by a Nintendo game called “Quest of Ki“.
Wikipedia provided some information about “Quest of Ki”, but I wanted more than mere word description. Doing a search on YouTube, I found many YouTube videos on this game by gamers that have jaw-dropping mastery of Nintendo controllers.
This led me to thinking… some of my memorable childhood joys and frustrations were tied to video games. I can still remember the sweet explosion of nirvana when I finally beat a game, as well as the feeling of deep frustration when I still could not pass a level after weeks of trying.
Although, I have long closed the door on these games for maybe twenty years, I was tempted today to revisit my video game triumphs and failures. Slowly, I teased out the names from the deep recesses of my memories of the games I could not beat. They knows slowly came out of me…. “Blaster Master“, “Black Tiger“, “Ninja Gaiden“….
For each of these games, I watched some brilliant player on YouTube run through the entire game at warp speed…. conquering levels that I never had the ability to conquer. This whole exercise was extremely cathartic. Like scratching an itch that I had long forgotten about, and the two decades worth of time that has passed has made it that much more satisfying.
One scary thing is that for many of these games, I still remember the way around the maps like my childhood homes in Maryland. Who said virtual landscapes are not real… tell my mind that there is a difference.
In my wanderings today, I came across these two games… so beautiful… but so hard to play…
