From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Balloon Fight & Ice Climber - Formative Fun
Because some games were created to serve a simple-yet-oh-so-important purpose.

Almost as a rule, the Internet shows itself to be a cruel place whenever its denizens are asked to reflect upon and judge the simple arcade-like games that were released during the NES' earliest years. Truly it's a rare moment when your mere mentioning of games like Pro Wrestling, Donkey Kong 3, Urban Champion, Gumshoe, or any of those other first-generation NES titles isn't immediately met with expressions of scorn or eye-rolling dismissal. "Those cheaply made, shoddy black-box games?!" forum-goers disdainfully react. "They're all old, forgettable junk!"

That's usually how it goes: You evoke the name of a Gyromite or a Hogan's Alley and then observe as scores of angry gamers tear into your comment and therein explain to you that the game in question is nothing but unplayable trash and that you're an idiot for thinking that it's worthy of any recognition.

Such reactions are always disappointing--particularly so when they come from people in my age group, many of whom were part of the scene from almost the very beginning. It's a shame that there are so many gaming enthusiasts who either don't understand or have forgotten about the importance of the legacy systems' foundational games--of what they truly meant to the people who enjoyed them within that context.

For those of you who are either new to the retro scene or are in the process of exploring the medium's history, I suppose I should explain to you what that context was. You see: The NES is popularly known for having two distinct phases of life. If your knowledge of the NES' history is informed by forum conversation and best-of lists, you're probably most familiar with the latter phase, wherein games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Metroid came along and in executing a new creative vision worked to establish the pure "console game." Those representative of this new, inherently unique breed were quite different from the types of games that were produced during the earlier phase, at a time when, really, the NES lacked its own identity;that was when the console played host mainly to ports of Nintendo's and third-parties' coin-op games and as well as a collection of simple, unique creations that all the same embraced arcade values.

We're talking about an era when games were designed to be immediately accessible--when what mattered most was achieving simple goals, setting high scores, and having quick bursts of fun as you attempted to scale a critter-infested building or collect all of the dots before the timer could expire.

In the mid-80s, it was these types of games I'd find myself playing whenever I was visiting an NES-owning friend's or cousin's house. Early on, during my introductory period, the pickings were really rather slim: You had Baseball, Golf and Clu Clu Land, which were interesting, sure, but couldn't hold our attention for very long. We'd play them for, say, ten minutes before moving on to something else. Those I more fondly remember came into my life later on in 1986; it was then when my friend Dominick started introducing me to such games as Gyromite, Pinball, Excitebike, Tennis and Wrecking Crew--games whose impact was so indelible that I constantly desired to return to them, even years later, when we were deep into phase 2 and big, groundbreaking "console games" now ruled the world.

Included among them were two games that for us encapsulated the entire era. Two games that provided us so much joy and entertainment that we found ourselves returning them again and again for years in following.

I'm of course talking about Balloon Fight and Ice Climber.

Yeah, yeah--I know: These aren't exactly two of the most highly regarded NES games in existence. Neither offers a master class in control or level design. Even back then we knew that they were flawed. However, that didn't matter to us because both were able to meet one very important qualification: They offered some of the most fun and entertaining multiplayer action you could find anywhere! We simply loved playing them.

Balloon Fight and Ice Climber appealed to us for the same reason games like Mario Bros., Bruce Lee and Gauntlet did: They invited us to choose how we wanted to go about playing them. We could elect to play cooperatively--work together to expeditiously pop enemy balloons or break through icy surfaces--or we could opt to compete with each other. And by that I mean screw with each other in the most devious ways: Pop each other's balloons, interrupt each other's movements, purposely bump each other into enemies, or generally force each other into hopeless predicaments. You know--all that fun stuff.

Or, if we so desired, we could reverse ourselves--play nice at first but then give in to our childish impulses and suddenly turn on the other. I could, say, help out my lower-positioned pal by carving a easily navigable path through the ice and then, after seeing how grateful he was, instantly betray his trust by mischievously scrolling the level upward before he could even start moving and in doing so wipe him off the screen, all the while chuckling about how gullible he was (not that I did such a thing ... much).

Those other multiplayer games also held great appeal, sure, but none of them could bring us together quite like Balloon Fight and Ice Climber could. None of them could generate that same type of exuberance or inspire that particular brand of playful banter. The Balloon Fight- and Ice Climber-style experience was distinct in the most wonderful way, and we could feel as much any time we were playing either of these games.

We valued that experience so much that we were sure to make it part of any get-together. Really, Balloon Fight and Ice Climber proved to be such reliable sources of continuous entertainment that we assigned them a specific role as twin cappers to any of our usual afternoon- or night-long play sessions, our balloon-popping and ice-breaking shenanigans serving as the perfect exclamation point to the conclusion of a day whose hours were otherwise spent playing the likes of Contra, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! and Metroid.

That was the routine: Right after finishing a meal, I'd head over to Dominick's house, where friends and associates would be waiting. We'd then gather into his small den, whose windows overlooked that quiet 85th-street corner, and spend the next couple of hours playing video games. And after taking home some trophies in R.C. Pro-Am, wiping out the Red Falcon's alien army, and getting roughed up by Mr. Sandman and Super Macho Man, we'd close the day out on the highest note by popping in Balloon Fight and Ice Climber, in succession, and then proceeding to hammer some shorts-wearing polar bears, bounce each other into pits, send birds to a watery grave, and have contests to see who could last the longest in Balloon Trip mode.

Those were great times, man.

Though, sadly, by the end of 1988, things started to change. It was right around then when just about all of Dominick's time was being consumed by new releases--big-hitters like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link--and both of us began to start up new friendships and thus weren't seeing as much of each other (it didn't help matters that our school, St. Bernadette, broke our single oversized class into two separate classes and placed Dominick and I in respective groups).

Times were changing as were my friends' interests. Still, the changes didn't have to be drastic, I felt. "Some of our traditions are worth preserving," I told myself.

The most significant change happened on my end: On Christmas Day in 1988, I became an NES-owner. That gave me less reason to rely on my friends for NES gaming experiences. "Why go over to Dominick's house to play Zelda when I can instead do so here, in a personal, more-intimate setting?" I thought.

And that list of reasons continued to diminish because my NES library quickly started to balloon. Within a few months, I came to own somewhere around 30 games (if you want to know about the events that contributed to this ridiculous purchasing spree, please read my previous Memory Bank pieces)--many of them the same games I'd been playing at my friends' and cousins' houses over the previous two years. None of this was a coincidence: During this particular period, I'd become something of a "copycat gamer"--a term I invented to describe someone who impulsively desired to own any game he or she had previously played at a friend's or family member's house. The game's quality or lack thereof didn't matter one bit; if a copycat gamer played it, then he or she had to have it.

And that's how I behaved for most of 1989. As the year went on, my game racks came to be filled with black-box classics and a bunch of questionable titles like Rambo, Dragon Power, Ghostbusters, Jaws and a whole lot of others that I would never have considered purchasing had my friends or cousins not owned them. (To be perfectly honest, though, I kinda like Rambo and Jaws. Still, do me a favor, reader, and don't tell that to the message-board people, OK? They're not big fans of any of these games either.)

Then there was the most relevant event: During the early summer months of 1989, I spent a couple of days helping to paint the exterior of a house on 73rd Street. It was 1051, a three-story, multi-apartment residence within which lived my aunt and grandmother and two sets of family friends. It so happened that my father owned the place. Looking for some other way to reward me for my labor, since he had no intent on paying me, my dad offered to buy me some games.

I wasted no time in accepting the offer. And I knew exactly what I wanted: a couple of older games whose prices by that time had dropped dramatically to where they were now dirt-cheap (when someone else was buying, I always felt better about going cheap). Among them were two games I'd long desired to own: Balloon Fight and Ice Climber.

Now, it was normal that I'd quickly shelve the games that I'd bought on copy-cat impulse, since in reality I wasn't actually interested in playing them, but I didn't have any intention of doing as much to Balloon Fight and Ice Climber. No--I needed them to be front and center. I needed for them to perform a very important job. Mainly, I was going to need their help if I was to have any hope of rekindling an old flame--of bringing back a time when we'd spend the afternoon or nighttime hours playing our favorite NES games and making sure to cap things off by loading up Balloon Fight and Ice Climber and engaging in that old brand of frenzied multiplayer madness.

The only difference would be the location. Now that I was the one with by far the largest game library, my house became the mecca towards which all of the neighborhood's NES-loving, game-hungry kids were gravitating. I'd taken the reigns as the local scene's leader, and using that sway I was able to get the old crew back together and even expand our circle by pulling in a few new people, including my separately existing friends Mike and Chris from 73rd Street (this was the first time they were meeting Dominick and company). And together we re-established the tradition and made it last a few more years; we saw to it that old favorites were granted new life, and we kept things feeling fresh by mixing in some of those we'd since come to love--an assortment that included Trojan, Renegade, Double Dragon, Metroid and Rygar.

And, of course, at the end of each session, we were sure to load up both Balloon Fight and Ice Climber--the intrinsically linked pair--and let them work their magic--let them provide us a cherished brand of entertainment of that only they could capably deliver.

That's how it remained until the early 90s. We continued to have a great time and create many memories.

Still, my most fond memories of Balloon Fight and Ice Climber remain those that were created during the earliest years, when it was just Dominick and I playing them. This painfully missed period was when we invented our long-enduring funny associations and running gags. The one I remember best involves our linking a certain aspect of Balloon Fight to a despised St. Bernadette personality. We thought it was hilarious, that is, to refer its voracious bird-snatching killer fish as "Ginetta"--a name you might remember seeing in previous pieces. Well, "Ginetta" happened to be the name of our 5th-grade teacher--a person who waddled her way into our lives and promptly began carving out a legend of infamy.

Oh, Sr. Ginetta. Never was there a more memorable character. I recall how our class was introduced to her: We were standing there in the schoolyard, waiting for the bell to sound, when suddenly our classmate Joseph ran in from the street and informed us that he'd seen our new teacher and that she "looks like a penguin." A few minutes later, we met Sr. Ginetta, our newest nightmare; she was a nun from the St. Bernadette Convent and quite frankly the largest, roundest human being we had ever seen. She was also the meanest, most sarcastic teacher our school had ever employed. I mean, seriously: She'd make fun of students' hair, looks, mannerisms, speech impediments and personality quirks as if she were Don Rickles wearing a habit. So Dominick and I, who had felt the sting of her insults, decided that the best way for us to get revenge on Sr. Ginetta was to spitefully caricaturize her in our drawings and video games.

Naturally, we focused mainly on her considerable weight, which she had proudly gained via a diet that consisted of chocolate and, well, just about everything else that could potentially be consumed. That is, any time we encountered a human character or creature that was fat or gluttonous, we immediately termed it a "Ginetta." Characters who were given this unfortunate label included Kim from Renegade, the green sumo from Bruce Lee, and certainly the ever-hungry fish from Balloon Fight. Woe be the players who foolishly decided to hover too close to a stage's water pool, for they would hear the dread cry, "Stay away from Ginetta! Haha--she'll eat us!" Being eaten was better left to the birds, which we'd intentionally send plummeting to the water below for the purpose of seeing Ginetta dive out and eat them; that way, we could mock her together.

Now, don't think that we were completely oblivious. We realized that both of games had their share of flaws. Ice Climber, in particular, had two serious issues: Its controls and physics were fairly terrible. Nana and Popo's jumping controls were stiff and combative, and often they'd execute jumps with a type of momentum and arcing movement that was wildly different from what the player had thought himself to have inputted. Also, it was all too common that they'd fall or clip through platform edges that apparently weren't as solid as they appeared to be, and this worked to make the game's physics feel arbitrary. You could never assume that you'd land solidly on an upper platform.

Balloon Fight was the better, more-polished game, but admittedly it was lacking for content. It featured a limited number of stages (12 phases on loop) and no variety of environments (though, successive loops, in true arcade fashion, would add in more hazards); and the Balloon Trip mode, while a fun distraction, was merely filler. Really, you could see the entire game in about five minutes.

So yeah--we knew what their shortcomings were; we just didn't care. They didn't detract from our enjoyment of the games. That's because Balloon Fight and Ice Climber's flaws were heavily outweighed by their most appealing aspect: their power to bring us together, make us laugh, and help us to bond in a way that wasn't possible on a playground. So what if we lost our chance to earn the big bonus because we fell through platform edges while diving toward eggplants? We were too busy laughing to give a damn. If we were to play these games today, we'd feel the same way.

My biggest lament is that such an opportunity isn't currently available to me. It really is a shame that Nintendo's online service doesn't extend to the Virtual Console content (save for the two or three games that feature specially added online components). If these games ever were enhanced for online play, then I'd have a chance, however slim, to reconnect with old friends, who just might be hanging out in a server somewhere, waiting.

You might think that such a scenario is improbable and that I'm letting nostalgia get the best of me, but I get by on believing that it could happen. I'll continue to hope for a day when I can get in contact with a couple of old friends through a digital network and spend a few hours on a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon frantically flailing away at icicle-pushing Topis and dropping hapless birds into the unwelcoming gullets of hungry Ginettas.

It might be true that you can never go home again, but still you can always take the time to get in the car, drive through the old neighborhood, visit the former hangouts, and all the while reminisce about how things used to be. That's the experience you get whenever you replay games like Balloon Fight and Ice Climber.

That's the true value of those first-generation black-box games.