When one thinks of a ‘game,’ hears its notes playing and effects sounding, 

Like a pot smashing or a brick bashing,

When one smells a game, 

The cellophane of a case, or the rubber of an analog stick,

When one touches it, 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 Indie,

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 our first flicks of fun.

 

Nintendo—doth one need further explain? Thousands of poems have been penned of play,

Nay, millions, I say! All written by the rote memory of the world skip pipes 

Or the flagpole leaps, and the speedrun streams,

These and many more have been sung 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 pull

You have had upon my soul,

I don’t think I’d ever escape from the wanting surface of my keyboard,

As I bore out the games of my childhood and the emotions therein,

Baubles of the heart, with memories a-jingling, it’s easy to wonder

Why to even bother.

 

I pen this for many sakes–to bear the touchstone for so many a childhood spent

Working away at the buttons, so many brows furrowed

To vault over the bottomless chasm,

Or to make the thrust of the sword

Reach the foe’s chest.

 

These images, these sensations, baked still fresh in our memories

Like the lines in tree trunks that still have the phloem flowing,

I feel there is something worthy in capturing that evanescent aura

In a bottle, a fairy of fun, replenishing the hearts

Of our youth.

 

But why Nintendo? What glimmers about that 

Unsuspecting letter of crimson,

That entrances us today?

For so many hedgehogs, bandicoots, and dragons roam the land,

So many warriors and adventurers; green-capped and amber-visored

Soldiers marching across the sands and the valleys, observing the scene,

Spraying bullets through the blue lines of the television screen,

Steel and nickel shots grasping the eye; the whiz of light blaring out the ear.

 

Perhaps there’s a grandeur 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 a chest’s opening,

Geometrically oriented, so computerized and digitized, these scenes, and yet, 

They still harness that je ne sais quoi 

Which hallmarks our history, inducting us into

A lineage from 8 to 16, a leap from 16 to 64, a lunge forevermore

Through the sparkles and cycles of time

So that ‘fun’ could never feel 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 charm to the 

Lowered curtains on kisses and the cessation of blood to bleed,

That, stripped of salaciousness 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 were the elements left to imagine,

Flowers left to be planted 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,

And all for the venturer to delve through?

 

Why couldn’t the plumber who could lope so high 

Jump over the block barring the path to the fortress,

Fly past the sands and the swamps

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?

 

It’s ironic! Half-witted! But ingenious

To grant the most potent form of liberty, giving the player a set of angel’s wings

By clamping down on the rectangles and buttons in their grasp,

And enacting a most emancipating set of

Limitations: hard-wired, they endow us with a

Structure, a geometry by outlining the hard-lines, the boundaries, that enable

Linear movement, a progression, a gentle nudge down a set path.

 

But what if we could leave off the Princess in the cage after the iron bars clinked close,

If we allied with Ganon and secured the Triforce for our own wishes,

Would not such an agency impel

A new dimension of play?

 

Perhaps when in the right mood for destiny, aye,

But for those gamers dragging along the sloth’s path of life,

Backs reeling, hands hotly callused,

When the 7up cans line the four corners of the bedroom,

The Police posters falling down the walls, and the stench of numbers filling the air–

This month’s electric, the next’s heat—

 

It’s easy to burrow one’s hands into hair, and muss the granules and tendrils

Of the scalp, our youthful flower wilted,

A loss in what supposes to be

The height of one’s existence, yet plays out

Like an elegy melody.

 

Did Nintendo make us forget the bills and whiskers of adulthood?

As if we can find in its panoply of worlds, of recreational intuition

And iconic figures, marble statues of code plastered in pixels,

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 next entryway. 

 

That’s what Nintendo has always promised, no?

Or is it in the conquest of challenges 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, and our mind becomes attuned

To the trials hardcoded into our lives, so they become just a pinch less daunting:

Just a coin deducted from the electric,

Just a Rupee less to buy bread,

With the wealth of the child spirit instead clattering in our pockets.

 

Nintendo has that aura, an authority over the consciousness of so many a spirit,

Which makes it difficult to grasp, like water quickly streaming through the fingers,

But in the attempt to fathom it does a second wind of satisfaction arise

And grow as beans over seven years’ time, flowering in

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 from Japan

To comprise the cultural globe like no other,

Having molded the mindscapes of generations,

A sculptor of the soul: 

O, Nintendo, O, my memento.