Sometime in the nineteen eighties, my family, consisting of my mother, father, and their two young children, myself and my little brother, moved from our cozy abode on Clarkson Street in Littleton, Colorado, to another Denver suburb, Aurora, containing a nice little square mile neighborhood called Mission Viejo, and into a ranch style house at the end of a the cul-de-sac that made up East Jefferson Avenue. It would become the house my brother and I would grow up in.
The house we moved into came with a basement that split into two sections at the bottom of the stairs. On the left from the landing was what I guess could be considered a Mother-In-Law suite: a finished room with a built in kitchen, bathroom, and separate bedroom with a walk in closet. Eventually, it would fulfill it's namesake, as my grandmother, my mother's mother, and my father's Mother-In-Law, would live there for a few years, providing me and my brother with her homemade potato pancakes, and tiny cans of grapefruit juice, before she moved to Las Vegas to be closer to her extending family, and eventually passed from this realm of existence. After my grandmother left, my father put a pool table in its living room, despite the room being just a little too small causing players to slightly have to angle their cues for some shots. The table would become the main attraction for my parents social gatherings, and later, when I was a teenager (and my father trusted me to use the table without scratching the felt) it would be a regular hang out for me and my motley crew of punk rocking friends, practicing our unimpressive trick shots, listening, loudly, to a cornucopia of punk rock compact discs, and draining the well stocked basement fridge of Mountain Dew my parents graciously provided us in twenty four packs (we called them tanks) purchased in bulk at Costco. By then it was doubling as my bedroom as well, a place I thought was the furthest away from everybody else in the family and thusly provided me with the most privacy to wile away the nights not doing homework in favor of drawing my favorite X-Men and listening to music. But, I digress...
On the right side was an unfinished, dark, dank, concrete square, something my industrious and handy father could not abide, so he took it upon himself to "finish" the basement, as an eager real-estate agent might say, knowing how much that amenity sweetens the pot.
And finish it he did. First by constructing himself a small but functional workshop against the back wall of the concrete square from which he could have a central location to build and store all materials for said finishing.
From there he built out, sectioning off a smaller area as the laundry room, an incredibly small office for himself that nestled under the stairs, and the main feature, what would become our family rec room, made whole by fake wood paneled walls, overhead fluorescent lighting in the also paneled ceiling, along with white and grey, short carpeting. It was truly a magnificent fete, perhaps my father's crowning achievement as a hobbyist craftsmen. As dated as it would be nowadays, I hope whoever currently owns that house is still rocking with that basement as is. It was then filled with our various childhood toys, furniture, including bookshelves, a computer desk, and an entertainment center all built by my father in his workshop.
But what to do with the basement entertainment center? We already had a family TV upstairs in the living room which we used regularly. Perhaps in a moment of self realized genius, one day my father returned home from work carrying a large black box, and descended the stairs to the rec room. Curious, my brother and I followed to see what he was up to, discovering that he had purchased, as he said "for himself" a Nintendo Entertainment System (the NES, if you're nasty), and one single gaming cartridge. Boxed in pixelated art it read "Golf," and featured the profile of what looked like an angry golfer swinging his club. My father, an avid golfer, pulled the grey Nintendo and all of it's wires out of the box and dutifully set upon connecting it all to our TV as my brother and I sat watching him, anxious to see what this contraption would deliver us.
An eternity later, all the cables were plugged in, the little grey and black controller with it's glaring two bright red buttons was connected (the second sat unused in the box), the TV was on and turned to the auxiliary component receiving channel 3 as the static hiss filled the room. My father pushed in the power button and the salt and pepper dance was abruptly ended by a digitized screen proclaiming that GOLF was about to happen. My brother and I sat transfixed by pixelated art as my father fumbled with the not but 4 buttons on the controller trying to get this video game to start being a game, which he eventually did, perhaps his last purposeful action with a Nintendo, since after that it was a series of confusing befuddlements as he tried in vain to navigate it's selections just to get a golfer, let alone get the golfer to select a club and swing it. Growing frustrated, my father handed me the controller, punctuated with a "here, you figure it out," then stormed out of the rec room, back upstairs to likely sulk in his defeat at the hands of the Nintendo.
It seemed like second nature to me, my fingers swiftly flying across the four buttons and the directional pad, easily configuring the game to my liking and, striking my first golf ball down the digitized course, an in real life game I knew almost nothing about, but I was, as far as I was concerned, I was now the John Elway of Nintendo Golf.
Growing impatient, my little brother asked "can I play?", and I relented, handing him the controller, which he looked at for a moment, before taking it in his hands upside down. Before I could correct him he'd already set up a shot and hammered it further down the fairway, to my amazement. His reversed positioning of the controller was clearly working for him so I just let him roll with it, a technique he'd stick with for the lifespan of the NES.
It rapidly became clear that my father's new toy was no longer his, as if it ever would have been, and wanting to indulge us (and likely not wanting to waste the money he sunk into the Nintendo) he started taking us to the various Mom and Pop video rental stores which, for some reason, were legion in our corner of Aurora (before Blockbuster moved in and decimated the landscape of competition) all of which had started making Nintendo games available for rental. Never shying away from a good deal, my father located one store that had a two day rental policy, but was closed on Sundays, meaning that if we rented a game on Friday it would be due back on Sunday, but since they were closed that day, technically we got an extra day for free.
We fucking haunted that store, almost every Friday, perusing their Nintendo game aisle for anything that caught our eye, relying solely on the brightly colored box art, the gameplay sight unseen. My brother and I quickly learned that two player games provided the most bang for our buck, as we could both play, or at the very least, take turns, and what game was better for two brothers than Super Mario Bros? Of course, as older brother rules applied here, I got to play first, which meant I got to be Mario, leaving my little brother with Luigi on his turn, who quickly developed adept skills at piloting Luigi all through those brick and underwater levels, deftly maneuvering him around spinning fireballs, and jumping off those Koopas with grace and style using his upside down technique. Friends would come over and see my brother's backwards grasp of the controller and tell him he's holding it wrong. It wasn't wrong, I thought, it was just how he figured it out. He wouldn't relent, and their criticisms were quickly squashed when they saw his skills at work.
Of course, we sampled all sorts of games on our Friday night rental outings, but Mario Bros. was the one we'd always come back to. We became Mario Bros. addicts, which dovetailed into the release of Mario Bros. 2, featuring the ability to choose between which character you wanted to play as, Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, or Toad, yet my brother still chose Luigi, guiding him beautifully through the weird worlds of that game, Luigi now featuring his own lofty jump and distinctive features aside from being a color palette swapped Mario.
Much to our delight, when Mario Bros. 3 was released, my parents actually purchased it for us (as did likely every other parent on the planet for their children) that Christmas, and we spent the entire day playing that game together. A curious feature of the third Mario game was the world level map, laying out each stage across it. The first player (me, older brother rules) would go and finish a level, then when it was the second players turn, my little brother as Luigi, they could go to the next level and complete it. If it wasn't your turn, but the second player passed over a level you completed, you could hit the A button as they landed on it and challenge them to a battle made, the loser of which would forfeit their turn. My brother did this to me all the time, and handedly beat me, upside down controller and all, his prowess at this becoming more strategic as we learned which levels would have the best power ups so he could, essentially, steal them from me. It was brutal, but that's the risk you run playing Mario Bros. 3 with your little brother.
Soon after, the follow up to the Nintendo Entertainment System, the mesmerizingly named "Super Nintendo," with it's upgrade from a paltry 8-bit graphics system, to a 16 bit one, was released, and my brother and I knew we had to have it. We hatched a plan to work extra chores, pool our resources, and trade in our regular old non super NES to the local game store to make up the difference. Even with all our games, equipment, chore money, we were still short, and my father, likely knowing how hard we'd worked, chipped in to cover the difference. Elated, we walked out of the store with a brand new Super Nintendo, two controllers, and two games. Two games almost handcrafted for brothers: Street Fighter II and Mario Kart. Games we could play together, at the same time. These types of games became our de facto way of playing the Super Nintendo.
However, now my brother had to contend with the upgraded SNES controller, one that featured not two action buttons, but six, two being on the top of the controller, and his tried and true upside down method would no longer work. He had to acquiesce, and I thought at the time, maybe this was hindering him, because I was dominating him in Street Fighter II, but when we switched to Mario Kart, he went down the roster of selectable characters, picked Luigi, and immediately trounced me, I knew he just needed to recalibrate a bit. Mario Kart quickly became his game, whereas Street Fighter II would become mine. Nevertheless we spent hours in that basement rec room playing both, eventually swapping them for other racing and fighting games, F-Zero, and Mortal Kombat II, which he took to more than Street Fighter II to the point where he didn't even want to play Street Fighter II anymore because, as he'd say "you always beat me." At least in Mortal Kombat II he could hold his ground, before, inevitably, becoming better than me, easily ripping off my limbs, and severing my head in a pixelated display of bloody gore.
The Super Nintendo held sway over us for years until it lost it's super sheen in the light of Nintendo's next home console release, the Nintendo 64, making a miraculous leap from 16-bit graphics all the way to 64 bits. 64 bits?! That was unthinkable at the time, and again, my father came through at Christmas (to this day I don't know how he managed to secure one during the holiday mad dash for that system) and what was waiting for us under the tree that morning but one Nintendo 64, two controllers, and three games: Mario 64, Star Wars Shadow of the Empire, and Wave Race 64. The first two are now heralded as classic games of the era but we mostly just played Wave Race 64 because it was two player and we could play together, which we did, endlessly.
As time marched on I would enter high school, and teenage things like girls, music, friends, and smoking cigarettes would fill up most of my time, and a few years later when my brother joined the denizens of high school the same things would find a similar place in his life. Our time turned to learning the guitar, and much like he took to his upside down controller years ago, he naturally became a talented guitar player. That's just how he was, while I struggled to maintain simple power chords. We still found time to play Nintendo together, but not as much, and eventually, I graduated high school and struck out into the world on my own.
That first Christmas I came back after I'd left home I found that my brother had received the latest Nintendo gaming console, the Game Cube, now so far advanced bits weren't even a consideration. I found him in the basement, the Game Cube already hooked up to the TV, a newer TV but resting on the same old handcrafted entertainment center, playing his new present and the game that he got with it: Luigi's Mansion. I sat for a minute watching him command Luigi through a ghost-filled, ramshackle house, making short work of all the spooky inhabitants, no less skilled than he was at every other video game, long having abandoned his preferred backwards grip in lieu of the ever increasingly complex and bulky Nintendo controllers. As he furiously pushed the buttons, I asked, "can I play?"
"Okay," he said, "but I'm first player."
My brother went on to live a hard life. A life that made him hard to love. It wasn't long after this his became one filled with drugs, alcohol, and various stints in jail. He fathered two remarkable children, yet he never won the battle against his addiction, a battle he lost on January 15th, 2026 when his heart couldn't keep up with the amount of fentanyl and methamphetamines he'd taken that night and decided for him, at age 41, this was where it was going to end.
It's a dialogue that's persisted for as long as I can remember - the "video games are a waste of time" accusation. That if one didn't spend so much of their valuable time on earth playing video games one could learn a new language, start a business, write that book they've always talked about, but that's never struck true for me. How could it when some of my fondest memories were the times I spent in that hand-finished basement playing video games with my little brother? I only hope that right now, in a basement, somewhere, there's two brother's playing whatever version of Mario Bros. they're up to, the youngest learning that Luigi was made for little brothers.