One of the Blinn College Stories. The story of a freshman year told through the one Nintendo in Memorial Hall — Mario down the dorm stairs, a pay phone, the Kingdom of Hyrule, and a single random bush that stood between an eighteen-year-old and the rest of his life. Turns out Link and I were on more or less the same quest.
When I left California for East Texas in the fall of 1988, I had a plan. It wasn't much of a plan, mind you, but it was mine. I was going to go to class, play lots of tennis, study hard, and somehow survive on not very much money. I also planned on playing a little Nintendo from time to time.
As it turns out, Nintendo had other plans.
I'd managed to save a little money from my summer job at the Hotel Charlotte in Groveland before heading off to Blinn. Not much, but enough for a few luxuries. I bought a small refrigerator for my dorm room in Memorial Hall. I bought a coffee maker, though it was used more for Top Ramen than coffee, if I'm being honest. And then there was the Nintendo Entertainment System. That was the big purchase.
Little did I know it would become one of the things that got me through my freshman year.
There was only one Nintendo in Memorial Hall as far as I knew, and it happened to live in Room 203. Being the second room on the left at the top of the stairs with our door always propped open, people were constantly wandering in and out. Most everyone's door stayed open back then. Memorial Hall wasn't really fifty people living in fifty separate places. It was more like fifty people living together with an occasional door between us.
By the fall of 1988, Nintendo wasn't just popular — it was a cultural tidal wave. The NES had rescued the American home-console market after the 1983 crash, and by 1989 Nintendo would sell some $2.7 billion of product in a single year, enough for the Los Angeles Times to call it a genuine cultural force. Its characters were on cereal boxes, lunchboxes, pajamas, and, eventually, ceiling fans.
So the one NES in a fifty-person dorm wasn't just a game console. It was a gathering point — a reason for a door to stay open and for people to wander in. In 1988, that little gray box was social infrastructure.
Duck Hunt came with the Nintendo, of course — though I have to ask, did anybody ever really play Duck Hunt? I mean, this was East Texas, after all. Shooting digital ducks wasn't exactly the biggest challenge around those parts.
Super Mario Bros., on the other hand — now there was a game. Tim and I played it so much that on our way to class we'd pretend to jump down and back up the outside stairs of Memorial Hall like we were Mario himself. Looking back, those red brick stairs did have a certain Super Mario quality about them.
I'm sure we looked ridiculous.
I eventually got good enough to finish Mario with one life. I'm not sure whether that was impressive or a cry for help, but it happened nonetheless.
The Legend of Zelda was different, though.
Mario was something we played together. Zelda was more personal somehow. It was a deep quest. Looking back on it now, it was remarkably similar to what I was doing there at Blinn College.
At eighteen years old I found myself wandering around an unfamiliar place trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. So was Link.
There were maps involved in both pursuits.
The Legend of Zelda arrived in North America in 1987, in that unmistakable gold cartridge, and it changed what a video game could be. Instead of marching left to right, you were dropped into the open world of Hyrule with almost no instructions and told, essentially, to figure it out. It was one of the first console games to let you save your progress, and one of the first to reward wandering, mapping, and sheer stubbornness.
It's built on exactly the feeling of being handed a world you don't understand and left to make sense of it — which is either the best possible metaphor for leaving home at eighteen, or just a really good excuse for why I wasn't studying. Possibly both.
The weekends were my favorite time to play. Most everyone went home on Friday afternoons, but being from California that wasn't exactly an option for me. So while others headed off for Houston or home, I'd find myself in Memorial Hall with my Nintendo, some Top Ramen, and whatever game I happened to be obsessed with that semester.
Friday nights meant watching TGIF and then settling in for a good gaming session. Tennis during the day, Nintendo in the evenings, and somehow trying to become an adult in between.
I wasn't completely alone, though. Funny enough, I've spent the last several stories writing about how alone I was in East Texas — only to discover I never actually was. There was always someone wandering through the door of Room 203.
People would come by to play Mario or see how things were going in Zelda. We'd speculate about what was supposed to happen next, or where some hidden passage might be. There were no walkthroughs back then. No internet. No YouTube videos explaining where every secret was hidden five minutes after a game was released.
If you got stuck in 1988, you were simply stuck.
And I got stuck.
Very stuck.
There was one particular place in Zelda that made me absolutely crazy. I was pretty far along in the game, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do next. I wandered around Hyrule for what seemed like forever, checking every possible place I could think of.
There were times we checked every single bush.
No, seriously. Every single bush.
“Did you try this one?”
“Yep.”
“How about over there?”
“Yep.”
“Did you check ALL the bushes?”
“I THINK SO!”
“WELL APPARENTLY NOT!”
Eventually I admitted defeat.
Which brings us to something younger readers may not fully appreciate. There was no internet waiting patiently to explain things to us in 1988. Sometimes there was just a pay phone down the hall and enough quarters to ask for a hint.
So down to the pay phone I went.
There I was, standing in Memorial Hall feeding quarters into a pay phone, calling Nintendo because I was stuck in the Kingdom of Hyrule. Somehow this all seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
This part is completely true, and it was a real institution. Nintendo launched its Power Line in 1987 — a telephone hotline staffed by “game counselors” who sat in cubicles, played games all day, and talked stuck players through the hard parts. It ran out of Nintendo of America's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, about fifteen miles from Seattle, and by its peak nearly four hundred counselors were fielding calls.
It was a toll call, and the cartridges and magazines carried a warning to get permission from whoever paid the phone bill first — a warning a great many kids conveniently forgot until the bill arrived. A pay phone full of quarters in a Texas dorm was, if anything, the honest way to do it. (There's a small irony I didn't appreciate at the time: the people on the other end of that line were sitting fifteen minutes from a city I'd eventually call home.)
Eventually they gave me a hint. Not the entire answer, mind you — just enough to point me in the right direction.
And wouldn't you know it, it was some random bush I never would have found otherwise.
Eventually I found the bush, made it to the next level, and by the end of my freshman year I had finally completed The Legend of Zelda.
Funny enough, something else had been completed around that same time.
My freshman year at Blinn College.
After Zelda, I rode my bike over to the local video rental store to rent the next game. It wasn't quite downtown Brenham, but it was enough of a trek to make it feel like an adventure. The place looked something like the comic book store from The Simpsons — before I even knew what that meant. They rented Nintendo games, VHS tapes, comics, and all sorts of other treasures. Five dollars and I had my entertainment for the next week.
When my bike was eventually stolen, I walked instead. The bluebells were nice in the spring.
Funny what you remember after all these years.
I don't remember what I got on every test during my freshman year. I don't remember how much money I had in my checking account most of the time. I don't even remember all of the classes I took.
I remember the random bush.
I remember Mario jumping down the Memorial Hall stairs on the way to class.
I remember Top Ramen and open doors and friends wandering into Room 203.
And I remember finally beating Zelda.
Looking back on it now, I suppose The Legend of Zelda wasn't really about saving Princess Zelda at all. At least not for me. It was about wandering around an unfamiliar world trying to figure out what came next. Sometimes you make progress. Sometimes you're hopelessly stuck. Sometimes you have to ask for help. And sometimes the door you've been looking for is hidden behind some random bush you would have sworn you'd already checked.
Besides, growing up wasn't going to do itself.