This article is not and will not be an attempt at how to tell parents how they should regulate video games with their respective kids. Nor will it be a guide on telling parents how to decide which games are right for their children or appropriate for their respective age range. This two part series (today, and the following Monday, August 25th) will comprise of a retrospective on my own upbringing around video games and Part 2 will cover how both Conklederp and I are approaching the same topic with The Squire, who is a bright and young 5 years-old who will be entering public elementary school in a few weeks where he'll be interacting with kids upwards of seven years older than he is on a semi-regular basis and thereby might be drawn into conversations about Roblocks, V-bucks, and why any game your parents decide you're allowed to play is totally cringe. We'll all be entering a strange new world here, folks!
Let's start back at the beginning.
The first time I recall playing any kind of video game with either of my parents was sometime prior to 1987 before The Kid was born. I think we were at Dr. Potts' house, and they might have recently gotten their Atari 2600 because I don't know why else the adults would've been playing it in the evening. All I really remember was asking to play whatever game was being played and my Dad saying something like, "Not now," or "In a bit," or "You have to wait," or something to that effect. Whatever it was, it made me upset enough that I remember crying in my bed later that night. Typical 4-6 year-old stuff. What's funny about this amusing little anecdote now is that my Dad is the most un-video-game person I know. My Dad's always been of the mind that video games are something that other people do because they're apparently beyond his comprehension. I recall trying with different games that I liked, like Tecmo Bowl, John Elway's Quarterback, Major League Baseball, and Al Unser Jr.'s Turbo Racing, but why play a video game when you can watch the real thing? He never said that specifically, but that was the feeling I got.
All of that being said, he was responsible for our family getting the Nintendo Entertainment System Power Set for Christmas in 1988 because it was the biggest set that either Toys R Us or Price Club had and my Dad is definitely one of those, "Well, I'll just buy the biggest one because that must be the best one" kind of person. I also remember that he had something to do with us renewing our Nintendo Power subscription in time so that we could get the copy of Dragon Warrior along with the November 1990 issue. There's also a memory of him calling into Nintendo Power to renegotiate whatever our subscription was after we renewed, but didn't receive issue #26, the one with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on the cover. He wasn't an active participant, joining us whenever us kids would play video games, but he also didn't tell us that "video games will rot your brains," or that we were only playing "those dumb video games." For what it's worth, my Dad's also not a big reader, so we never heard anything like, "Why don't you read a book instead of playing those stupid video games?"
My Mom, on the other hand, actively played some of the games we got over the years. I've mentioned several times the summer my Mom, Shramp (older sister), and I played Gauntlet, keeping track of our progress through several sheets of passwords, only to get stuck somewhere around the 70s (it might've only been the 50s for all I know, but it definitely felt like the 70s). She also played a bit of The Legend of Zelda, along with Super Mario Bros. After we got Tetris, that was where she found her niche. Us kids would regularly ask her to beat Type B Level 9 Height 5 because we all knew we couldn't do it, and Mom could, sometimes taking a couple of tries if she got a poor selection of blocks at the start. After Tetris, it was Dr. Mario that I think Shramp got for Christmas, but my Mom was able to beat all of us in vs. mode. One year, we got her a used copy of Tetris Attack because it had "Tetris" in the title, and that was another game that she would handily destroy us at. The same thing happened with Tetris vs. Dr. Mario on the SNES. In the N64 era, she stuck with the SNES and the NES since they were both hooked up to the TV and would remain so until I moved out in 2000, and I took the SNES with me; eventually, the NES went out to the proverbial pasture in the garage.
I have Dr. Potts' Dad to passively thank for some of my early RPG purchases on the NES. I bought Ultima: Exodus because of how much fun I had creating characters at Dr. Potts' house. I remember being told by Dr. Potts when we were kids that I could play their copy of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but I wasn't allowed to save because it could ruin his Dad's save file. I also remember Dr. Potts telling me that his Dad really liked a game called Final Fantasy, but that the instruction booklet gave away too much information, although I might already have gotten the Final Fantasy Player's Guide from Nintendo Power at that point. I recall seeing the game somewhere, but nothing specific about it like Ultima: Exodus. I do have a memory of wanting to buy and play Final Fantasy just to see if the instruction book gave away too much. I don't have an answer to that 35-year-old thought.
Something important to point out is that the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) didn't exist for the majority of my childhood. Formed in 1994 in building and direct response to specifically "violent" video games (the original arcade version of Mortal Kombat and the SEGA CD home console title Night Trap*), during the tail end of the SNES run. So any NES or SNES games we bought with my parents' money, they had to rely on the word of kids, possibly Dr. Potts' parents, and their own research rather than a simple rating. But that didn't stop my parents from being informed on at least some level. When I bought the SNES for my birthday in 1993 (after the price had dropped to $99 and I had that amount saved up), my parents specifically told me that I could not borrow Street Fighter II from my neighbor Chuck with my Dad later saying that him and my Mom talked it over and they decided they didn't like the game because you could play as a man and hit women. Yeah, I was pretty upset about that, although I did still play the game. Sometime in 1996, I was able to convince them that I could buy Killer Instinct on the Game Boy because the graphics were severely reduced compared to both the arcade game and the SNES port.
By the time the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996, and I got the system sometime in 1997, every Nintendo game that came out had a rating emblazoned on the box. I think if Goldeneye 007 had been rated M, they would have said something, but because it was rated T and I was playing the game out in the living room for everyone to see, I never heard anything from them about the amount of violence in the game. The first M-rated game I played, I think, was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter at Dr. Potts' house, but that's because Delaños' Splatterhouse had already been out before the ESRB existed. The first M-rated game I bought was Perfect Dark, which was released in 2000. Not that it mattered, but I was moving out a few months later to live with Dr. Potts and some high school friends who were also attending the same college. In 2001, I would also buy Conker's Bad Fur Day, partly because it was an M-rated game, but also because of the history of the game and how it ended up as an M-rated game made it all the more desirable.
Looking back, what involvement there was from my parents, specifically my Mom, was primarily around the beginning when we got the NES. I'm sure that they would sometimes ask what game I was playing and likely ask me to turn down the TV so that the noise wouldn't bother them. With the exception of Street Fighter II and Killer Instinct, I don't recall us butting heads, and that could also have been likely from Nintendo's continued position as an entertainment system that put out family-friendly games.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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The following are tidbits both related to the article above, but also anecdotes that either didn't fit my attempted narrative above, or were simply edited out.
*I had played a little bit of Mortal Kombat in our local arcade, probably sometime around 1993, but usually only when other people weren't lining up to play because I didn't know any of the moves, so I would've regularly gotten my ass handed to me. The same goes for other fighting games like Primal Rage and Killer Instinct. I also watched a bit of Night Trap during a sleepover at a friend's house with a couple of other friends, where I also watched people play Sewer Shark. The only game I played that entire night was one that I can't remember the title of, but was, I think, an FMV car chase game where I kept crashing into a large construction vehicle and eventually gave the controller back.
The first time I ever saw DOOM (1992) was either in 1994 or 1995, after tennis practice. One of the players on the team took a bunch of us into a side office at the country club where we had our practices, and played the first couple of levels.
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