Nintendo goes old school
By Sid Lipsey
CNN Headline News
(CNN) -- On a recent trip to my parents' house, I unearthed a long-forgotten treasure: My beloved old Nintendo NES game console, circa 1986. Right next to it was a shoebox filled with my old games.
The discovery reminded me of a much simpler time when joysticks had only two buttons and "online gaming" was when you had to wait behind the older boys to get to the drugstore's "Defender" machine.
Thanks to Nintendo, you can now get an '80s nostalgia rush without having to dig through your old toy box. Nintendo has released a collection of classic NES games for its portable Game Boy Advance. The list reads like a video game Hall of Fame: "Donkey Kong," "Super Mario Bros.," "Pac-Man," "The Legend of Zelda," "Excitebike," "Ice Climber," "Xevious" and "Bomberman."
It's easy to see why Nintendo is throwing its own "I Love the `80s" party. "The whole retro movement is huge right now," says Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo's vice president of marketing and corporate affairs. From clothes to music to video games, Kaplan says '80s-related items are being devoured by teens and those of us who were teens in that era.
The Game Boy itself is also undergoing a retro makeover. Nintendo is offering a new Game Boy Advance SP that looks just like the old black-and-red NES controller from the `80s. It's a limited edition, so Kaplan recommends (in pitch-perfect Valley Girl-speak) that you should "get them, like, 'rilly' early because they'll be gone soon."
Yes, an executive from a leading multinational corporation actually said "rilly." And that's the appealing part of these reissued games: If you're of a certain age, they make it impossible not to reminisce. "Pac-Man takes me back to a bowling alley in my hometown," Kaplan happily reflects. "I used to hang out there and play Pac-Man with all the cute guys."
In fact, it was only a few short years ago that we all had to venture to bowling alleys, skate rinks and arcades to play these games -- which came in expensive, high-tech (for their day) cabinets that had to be delivered by truck. Now we can play those same games on handheld systems. The time will come, I suggest to Kaplan, when current high-tech games like "Halo" are old-school classics that Kaplan's nine-month-old daughter may someday play on a gadget she keeps in her pocket.
 Look familiar? Along with its reissue of 1980s classics, Nintendo is offering a limited-edition Game Boy Advance SP modeled after the original NES console. |  |
Kaplan's reply is instantaneous: "She will NOT be playing 'Halo.'" (Here's a "Big Video Game Hunting" tip: When talking to an executive for Nintendo, it's best not to refer to her child playing a game made for Microsoft's Xbox.)
Breaches of corporate etiquette notwithstanding, part of the fun of gaming is fantasizing about how cool the next generation of games will be. And as the Nintendo classic games reissue shows, it's also thrilling to rediscover the games that blew your mind when you were young. It's true in video games, it's true in life: You can lock your memories away, even in a red shoebox, but you will never "rilly" forget your first love.
