Super Mario World

Mario just runs and jumps. On, and over. It isn’t that complicated.

I spent my childhood running and jumping alongside him. I’ve seen proof – videos, pictures – though I can’t say I remember a lot of it. I played a good amount of soccer; I scavenged the lawn, bushes, and trees for Easter eggs; I moved the goal out of the way when a car was coming during street hockey. I remember a big jump – the biggest of my life, really – when my family moved from New Jersey to Wisconsin. We didn’t use a flute; we used a minivan.

So I can’t say for sure that it was the movement or the jumping.

Also, the blues of the sky and the greens of the mountains – they’re just colors. The same playful shades inside that 64-pack of Crayola. My mom has often reminded me that my preferred position was belly down; my preferred spot was the center of the kitchen floor. I’d lay down a sheet of paper, summon some colors, and get to work. Creating lines, then filling them. I cannot pin my motivation, now. Now, I know that you can encounter entire worlds staring at the white pages that others have filled. I hope that’s what I believed, laying it all down – but I can’t say for sure.

So who knows if was the spectrum of color, or its vibrancy.

As I revisit the soundtrack, each song asserts its importance. This is logical art. Pondering clacks hurry you as you consider your next location: “Uhh, could you move this along and pick, please?” In glimmering, teasing darkness, beneath a hollowed beat – an incongruous string whispers: “You are underneath. You are alone.” As you try to escape to the end of a castle, if you managed to make it there in the first place, while attempting to move from left to right, you are thus warned: “HE’S HERE! He’s here? HE’S HERE! He’s here?”

So it’s masterful, there’s no doubt. But I cannot confirm if it was the digitized, orchestral music, either.

I don’t know if I will ever understand why Super Mario World is the first video game I remember playing, and I don’t believe it was the first.

Video games were important to me then, as they are now. It is likely because of their action and art and music and because of everything else they are – and hope to be. In the final reduction, it is likely because art matters to humans. We can never stop making it, as it is our final measure. It is, perhaps, our only measure.

In my life, it is art – and, therefore, video games – that has freed me. I walked the bloodied shores of Troy, and roamed the Donut Plains. I studied the fall of Rome, and controlled hoplites in Age of Empires. I dwelled in Plato’s cave, and raised a family in The Sims. I laughed at Jane Austen’s wit, and then at Jazzpunk’s. I helped Charlotte Gilman Perkins shred yellow wallpaper, and helped Bayonetta shred angels. I crudely painted Guernica, and brutally reclaimed the Pillar of Autumn.

To be born alongside a new artform is a great privilege; I will continue to play, and be grateful.