FC, Games, Childhood Memories
It’s the weekend. Sitting alone in my dorm room in front of the computer, bored and not wanting to do anything “productive,” I grabbed a few FC ROMs and started playing. Big mistake. It triggered a flood of childhood memories. They say nostalgia is a sign of getting old — I’ll be 24 soon. By industry folklore, programmers peak at 30 and decline after, so starting to age at 24 isn’t so strange. Looking back, playing games probably had something to do with me ending up in this profession.
My hometown is a small county in the far south of Shandong (you wouldn’t know it — Junan County. Can you even pronounce the first character?). In the 1980s, the spring breeze of reform and opening-up swept across the divine land (this phrase was a staple in my elementary school essays) and reached my hometown too. When I was about 6 or 7 — around 1987 — people started setting up game stalls on the street. A table, a TV, a console (I later learned it was called Atari), playing airplane games — five cents a life, squatting on the ground. That was probably China’s earliest gaming arcade (last week I walked through the arcade at Zhengda Plaza with some buddies — 20 years later, what a difference). My family lived in the busiest part of the county, so after school with nothing to do, I’d often run to the street to watch others play. Later came FC consoles. The earliest games I remember include Super Mario and Contra. Prices back then: 3 yuan/hour on black-and-white TV, 5 yuan/hour on color (adjusted for income levels back then, that’d be like 500 yuan/hour today!). I was a poor student with no money (20 years later, why does this still apply?). But I’d regularly get some pocket money from my parents and play. The first game I paid to play was Double Dragon 2. My most vivid memory: one Mid-Autumn Festival, I took 5 yuan and went out to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, got completely absorbed, stayed out very late, and ruined the family reunion dinner.
I was born into an ordinary working-class family (ha, that line sounds professionally scripted!). My father worked in sales at a state-owned factory. My mother was an accountant at a state-owned guesthouse. Finances were tight. Due to his job, my father was constantly traveling, especially to Shenzhen and Guangdong. He was away about half the year. In those days, business travel was nothing like today — no hotels, no airplane seats, no expense reimbursement, no phones (long-distance calls from our town could only reach Shijiazhuang), no mobile phones. He had to bring his own dry rations. Whenever he left, he’d be completely cut off from us. It was usually my mother raising me alone, and she endured a lot. I remember my mother and I once rewrote a popular song at the time:
In that distant meat-processing plant, there lived Director He, Away from home every day, never caring for his family…
By today’s standards, I doubt many women would want a husband like my dad — always away, made no money, no car, no house. But my parents’ relationship was always good. I often proudly tell people that in all my years growing up, I never once saw my parents argue or complain about each other — not even raise their voices.
Every time my father came back from a trip, he’d bring me something. Eventually, as finances improved, having my own game console became realistic. After multiple requests, my father finally bought me an FC when I was in third grade. It came with a “168-in-1” cartridge with Super Mario, Contra, Kung Fu, etc. These “xxx-in-1” cartridges were everywhere back then, but most had high game repetition rates. Kids with cartridges would compare: my xxx > your xxx, I’m cooler than you. This got so out of hand that I once saw a “9999-in-1” cartridge that only had four games. That console cost over 100 yuan — probably half a year of my father’s salary. Game cartridges were incredibly expensive too — around 100-200 yuan each. Looking back, it was a seriously profitable industry.
The FC consoles available were all domestically assembled gray-market goods. Mine was no different — brands like “Little霸王 (Little Tyrant)” that even ran TV commercials with Jackie Chan. I wonder why Nintendo didn’t sue these companies back then. I guess it shows China’s market economy has been gradually improving : )
Later, all the kids in our compound had consoles. Every weekend or holiday, there was only one thing to do: play games. But since gaming was supposedly bad for your eyes, my mom limited me to two hours a day. She had to work though, so she couldn’t actually supervise me — I’d always sneak in extra time. Sometimes she’d suddenly come home for a surprise inspection (state-owned enterprises were great — you could go home mid-shift to cook and then go back to work; what white-collar worker today could pull that?). There were times I got caught and scolded.
The action and “brain-training” games (which I now realize were more like brain-numbing) that I mastered and beat countless times:
Contra: Need I introduce it? Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A. Anyone who doesn’t know this code definitely wasn’t born in the 80s. There were also legends about the underwater 8 levels. Eventually I got so good I could finish with 3 lives and the spread gun, still having 5 lives left. This game has tons of hacked versions — invincible spread-shot Contra, start-with-spread-gun-30-lives Contra. Apparently it wasn’t that popular in Japan, which checks out given the release history. Later versions on MD, SFC, and PS just got less interesting.
Super Mario: Big-mustached Mario and his brother Luigi. This game influenced me enormously — 20 years later, I’m still playing it on SFC, GB, GBA, N64. It also had a huge impact on the whole industry — just count how many games involve stomping on enemies. Back then I called Bowser “Ku Ba” (fire dragon). I remember once beating the game at an arcade and the owner commented, “Solid fundamentals, a true master.” I was ecstatic. There were hacked versions too — “Moon Mario” where you could jump to the top of the screen.
Double Dragon: Frantically pressing A+B would do the spinning leg kick. I once got into a fight with a kid in the compound over this game cartridge, and he ended up crying. This game was probably the ancestor of later arcade brawlers like Dynasty Warriors and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles): Male and female protagonists, two weapons — a whip and a sai. Holding down B would do a “cross slash” but at the cost of your own health.
Renegade: Kicking people with your feet. The most vivid memory is the enemies’ foot sticking way up when they fell down.
Super Cobra / Twin Bee: Two little planes. Wipe out a row of enemies for energy to upgrade weapons. After the final boss, there’s a big escape sequence.
Bomberman / Ikari Warriors: Two little cars, throwing grenades. The cannon could upgrade to “double shot” and “quad shot.” Final boss was a big tank.
Green Beret / Rush’n Attack: Stabbing people with a knife. Final level: fighting rockets with a big cannon.
Jackal: A helicopter and a jeep. The final level’s boss had insanely heavy firepower — the whole screen filled with bullets. Like those “how many seconds can you survive” games today.
Journey to the West (Saiyūki World): Sun Wukong, you could buy various treasures. The final boss was tough, but if you corner it and hold down auto-fire A+B for ten minutes, it goes down. What a boring design…
Later, as we grew up a bit, we started playing strategy games like Saint Seiya and especially Dragon Quest / Wangwu Continent (or might be 霸王的大陆 - a Chinese translation of a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game). When I first bought that cartridge, it had no battery, couldn’t save/load. The pain! To this day I remember the battery model: CR2032 Li-Mn. My hometown was so backward they didn’t sell them. I had to ask someone to bring two batteries when they traveled. Only then could I finally beat the game. After conquering China countless times, I discovered I could even read the Japanese katakana used for writing general names. Ten years later when we studied Japanese in the software school (I never attended a single class), I could already read those katakana perfectly without any issue.
I wonder if this counts as Japanese cultural invasion of China — taking Chinese history, adapting it into a game, and selling it back to China to make money.
Tangent: good thing there was no anti-Japan boycott back then. In the 80s and 90s, electronic games were almost all from Japanese companies: Nintendo, Konami, SEGA, Data East, SQUARE, Enix, BANDAI… As a kid, I was exposed to a lot of Japanese stuff — also Japanese manga, Japanese children’s shows. They seemed fine to me at the time (I haven’t watched Japanese drama unless adult films don’t count). Probably because I was young, and I never heard anyone talk about anti-Japan sentiment back then. So I never had a negative impression of Japan — it was hard to connect Japanese games and manga with the “Japanese devils” on TV. To be bold, I think I was quite influenced by Japan as a child. It’s only in recent years that public anti-Japan sentiment has risen. Personally, I think we should look at this rationally.
— To be continued
(Note: This post had encoding issues in the original — characters were garbled. Translation based on partial recovery and context.)