When one thinks a 'game,' hears its notes playing and its effects sounding away, like a pot smashing or a brick bashing,
When one smells a game, like the musty scent of an old cartridge,
The sultry cellophane of a case, or the indented rubber of an analog stick,
When one touches it, their hand waving over the box art, feeling that red cap, that blazing helmet, that fluffy puff of pink,
So often does the mind conjure up but a single name out of the great hat of studios and stories,
Of cherished and churned-out Triple-A, of the humble Indiean, and all the histories in between,
An 'N' floats through the third eye, bearing that timeless shimmer in a
Void of lost images and long-forgotten experiences,
Still reminding us of the first few flicks of fun that forever forayed across the psyche.
Nintendo—doth one need to further explain? Thousands of poems have been penned of all but play,
Nay, millions, I say! All written by the rote memory of the world skip pipes or Jabu-Jabu's passageways,
By the fastest route to the ice beam, or the shortest path off PNF
And the requirements needed for Jacob's Ladders,
These and many more have been sung by the nymphs of pleasure into the senses of the players,
Crafting entire worlds of thought and headcanon, these adventures
Of the interactive heart.
O, Nintendo, if I could view 1/1985th of the influence you have had upon my child soul,
I don't think I'd ever escape from the wanting surface of my keyboard,
As I bore out the games of my babehood and the emotions therein,
Baubles of the heart, jingling with fervor at first memory, it's easy to wonder
Why to even bother.
I do it for many sakes, to act as the poetic touchstone for so many a childhood spent
Working away at the buttons, so many brows furrowed in determined strides
To get past from the last checkpoint to the flagpole,
Or to make the thrust of the sword and the throttle of the silver arrow
Reach the foe's chest.
These images, these sensations, these quandaries of the past, baked still fresh in our memories
Like the lines in tree trunks that still have the phloem flowing,
Like a driver's license swiped at the DMV counter, twenty years after the photo flashed
And the potential of a mobile future dangled over our eyes, a means to grow and thrive,
I feel there is something worthy in capturing that evanescent temporal mood
In a bottle, a fairy of fun, replenishing the hearts
Of our childhoods.
But why Nintendo? What dazzles the eye and serenades the ear about that
Unsuspecting letter of crimson, soaked in the white essence of its history,
That entrances to this very day?
For so many hedgehogs, bandicoots, and dragons roam the land
With fur unfurled and fangs unsheathed—at the industry market share!
So many warriors and adventurers; green-capped and amber-visor'd
Soldiers marching across the sands and the valleys, observing the scene,
Who seem to spray bullets through the blue lines of the television screen,
Steel and nickel grasping the eye; the whiz of light blinding the ear.
Is there a magnificence to simplicity? Like some unvarnished gloss to the bits
And bytes of a bright Nintendo image—the single-toned red of Mario's cap,
The four pixels of Link's outstretched mouth at the beholding of a heart piece,
The empty black void canvassing Planet Zebes, the little rivulets of stars so
Geometrically oriented, so computerized and digitized, and yet, still harnessing
That deep emotional quality that compresses a sort of history, inducting
A lineage from 8 to 16, a leap from 16 to 64, a lunge forevermore
Through the sparkles of time and the spindles of age,
So that 'fun' could never sound the same, a thousand times played.
Or is it the insistence on something purer? The incandescence of the benign,
What some would call censorship, others prudeness, still more artistic stifling,
I say there is an immortal speciality to the raised curtains and the lost crosses
As timeless as the Mona Lisa's smile, or Monet's lilypads,
That, stripped of prurience and shot of violence, when the bits are laid bare
They tell a story in fewer words, a song in shorter verses,
And so all the more—to the fore!—were the elements left to imagine
Flowers left to be planted, fuses of life to be lit, in the great cornucopia
Of a child's questions about the world.
Where were the people in Hyrule, they wonder; were they hiding between the
Wooden napes of the trees,
Or the orange slate of the rockslides,
Or the watery abyss that took the name 'Lake Hylia'
But was really just a long block of blue?
Why couldn't the red-helmeter that helmed the voyages into space
Fire at a slant, out those blotches of light, against the crawling creatures of the
Azure caves, painted like a dusky sky, brimmed with danger and driven with the brine
Of an unknown world, wet, wondrous, when and where welded as one,
All for the incipient venturer to delve through?
Why couldn't the plumber who could lope so high into the breezy air
Jump over the block barring the path to the fortress,
Fly past the sands and the swamps and the serendipitous surveys of ground
That marked the land of mushrooms, the cornerstone of biomes limned
By raging suns and the shades of ships flung by the gales and propeller blades;
Or was it the chains of gravity that held him down,
So that he could somersault and spring for us common folks on the ground?
Ironic! Half-witted! Moronic! But ingenious in Miyamotic design, no less,
To grant the most potent form of liberty, the player sprouting a set of angel's wings
By clamping down on the rectangles and buttons in their grasp,
And enacting a most ardent, ordealing, vociferous set of
Limitations: whether by hardware or hard-wired, they endow the soul with a certain
Structure, a geometry by outlining the hard-lines, the boundaries, that enable
Linear movement, a progression, a gentle nudge down a set path.
So what if we couldn't leave off the Princess in her haunt after a septuplet of disappointments,
If the Federation couldn't peg another hired gun to rid the planet of its infestations;
And if we left the Star Rod in its slumbering place, undisturbed by the force of our hold,
Would not such an agency impel
A new dimension of play?
Perhaps when in the right mood for a match with multifaceted destiny,
Aye, but for those gamers dragging along the sloth's path of life,
Backs reeling, hands hotly callused, eyes treating troughs to the other's view,
When the 7up cans line the four corners of the bedroom,
The Police posters falling down the walls, and the stench of numbers inscribed
On dead trees filling the air—this month's electric, the next's heat—
It's easy to fold one's hands against the hair, and muss the granules and tendrils
Of the scalp to a scattered hue, crafting the portrait of a youthful damnation,
A despair in the prime, a loss in what supposes to be
The height of one's existence, yet plays out
As the somberest days to be found.
Did and does Nintendo make us forget the sober memoranda of adulthood?
As if we can find in its panoply of well-designed worlds, of recreational intuition
And iconic figures, speckled with the emblems of their accomplishments
Throughout the virtual realm, trophies of code and accolades of pixels and polygons,
The panacea to our world's ill-planning and ill-conceived chain of events,
An antidote to the arbitrary, where there's always a way to get past that unbreakable block,
Always a key somewhere in the castle to unlock that door to tomorrow, nearby.
That's what Nintendo has always promised, and always delivered, is that not right?
Or is it in the solving of challenges and the conquest of hurdles across the screen,
With each Goomba stomped and Moblin parried, each Waddle Dee slashed away
And ghost sucked up in a great gust of air,
That we don the resolve of triumph, that our mind becomes attuned
To the trials hardcoded into our lives, and so they become just a pinch less daunting:
Just a coin deducted from the electric,
Just a Rupee less to buy bread,
With the renewed purchasing power of a Nintendo-guided psychology.
Nintendo just has that aura, an authority over the consciousness of so many a soul,
Which makes it difficult to grasp, like a fairy's magic seeping through the fingers,
But yet still in the attempt to intone it does a second wind of satisfaction arise
And grow as beans over seven years' time, flowering in a new crop of literature,
An art, a genre of discussion birthed from the games and beheld by the gamers,
Which one hopes only to add but a drop of novelty in an ocean of the said
And unsaid.
So join me, take up hammer and sword, blaster and bow, for a poet's quandary
At the machinations of a company that spanned across the seas of Japan
To comprise the cultural globe like no other,
Having taken ownership over the mindscapes of generations,
A sculptor of the psyche, and a surveyor of the sublime:
O, Nintendo, O—where to begin!