Christmas 1990, my dad bought me a Nintendo. My dad, who was freshly divorced from my mom, was down in Florida visiting. We had just moved from Chicago six months before. I was five at the time, so of course I didn’t understand how much my mom disliked that he was there. My theory is that he showed up uninvited but was allowed to stay when my mom saw how excited her children were to see him.

Even though by 1990, the Nintendo had been out in the US for five years, my siblings and I marveled at the video game console like it was a brand-new invention. It was a gift from my dad, a person that we had moved away from, and that I suddenly wasn’t allowed to see any more for reasons I didn’t understand, so I coveted it like it was plated in gold.

My dad stayed with us for two days, and I only playing Nintendo nonstop until I finally beat the first level of Super Mario Bros. with him.

With my skills limited to only being able to get to the first flagpole, I mostly watched my brother play as he was able to progress further in Super Mario Bros. as the weeks went on. The first time my brother made it to last world, World 8, I held my breath in anticipation. It was so exciting, jumping over Bowser’s fireballs, watching him fall into the fiery pit, the sweet reward of seeing the princess, and not yet another toadstool, on the other side of the bridge.

My brother was two years older than me and felt like my protector. He walked me and my two younger sisters to the bus stop every morning, made sure we didn’t swim in the deep end in the pool, yelled at neighborhood boys who made fun of us. When my mom had to work late, we sat around the TV and watched him play Nintendo until my mother came home.

Soon, our game library grew with The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. 3.  These were played exclusively by my brother, whose effortless navigation of Zelda’s dungeons blew me away. The only player better than my brother was my cousin, who’d already had a Nintendo for years. He would take the controller away and unlock new areas we’d never seen. I would wait eagerly for the next time he would come over so I could see again that marble floor and red brick of the final palace in Super Mario Bros 3.

My cousin had moved to Florida a few years before us, after my grandparents moved into a retirement community on Florida’s gulf coast. With a set of grandparents, an aunt, uncle, and two cousins already in Florida, my mother knew where we would run to, if need be. Even though the location was set, the decision to leave Chicago couldn’t have been easy. I think about that often: how my mother, at twenty-six years old and with four young children, left her husband and drove for two days in a battered Toyota from Chicago to Central Florida.

When I was twenty-six, my life was different from hers in every way: I was partying most nights, studying for my master’s degree and working part time jobs. My biggest decisions in life had been choosing which colleges to go to and which apartment I should move into next year. I had never been pregnant, though I had taken the morning after pill twice. At twenty-six, when I would bring boys home, ones I just met from whatever party, we would sit on the floor in my living room and play Super Mario Bros. on my twenty-year-old Nintendo, a gift from a man whom my mom had left when she was that very age.

***

I finally beat Super Mario Bros. in its entirety while in college. Having watched my brother beat it so often, I didn’t feel the urge to complete it myself: I’d seen how it ended. But when I realized that college boys liked watching me play, I figured might as well get good at it. The cheat in the game is to take the warp tunnels to World 8, which can get you to the end of the game in under five minutes: or, as fast as 4 minutes and 55 seconds, the current world record.

The world record for Super Mario Bros. was achieved by a player just a year older than me, named Brad – which is coincidentally my brother’s name, too. I liked watching this Brad control Mario, too, as he livestreamed his world record attempts. I remember my quiet cheers from my bedroom as I watched him set the world record one night back in 2018, posting my “GGs” in the chat with the thousands of other viewers.

I met Brad in person last year at a video game conference, and naturally felt as nervous to meet him as if he were a celebrity. I’d watched him play Mario online so many times; he had taken on some sort of importance in my life. Any time I saw him around the conference I’d smile with a little wave. Of course, he didn’t understand how important the game was to me. How could he know that even though he’d played Super Mario Bros. over 20,000 times in attempts to achieve a word record, it was still not as important as my first playthrough, because mine was the one I had played with my father on Christmas day in 1990, my father who was now dead.

***

I never saw my dad after age ten. My mom had no longer allowed him to visit or call. At ten, my knowledge of their divorce was no clearer: all I knew was that they fought a lot over the phone and that he was a bad man.

He tried reaching out twice more – once on my 18^th birthday, and once again when I graduated college. My mother took his greeting cards away from me, not letting me have his return address or see the phone number he scrawled at the bottom of the cards. I wish I tried to find those stolen cards, take his number, try talking to him. But I thought I had more time, perhaps another chance to reconnect one day. When I was 22, just a year after my father last tried contacting me, after graduating Cum Laude with my Bachelor’s degree in English, my dad passed away from a heart attack.

My sister got the call of his death. It was from my grandmother – my own mother was not able to tell us until three days later. I was with my sister when she got the call. We were in a parking lot, walking to her car, after shopping and getting lunch in Tampa. She told me quietly after she hung up what my grandmother had told her.

Afterwards, my sister and I sat in silence, unsure what to say or feel. It was hard to mourn someone you didn’t know that well but who you thought you were supposed to mourn anyway. Someone who you were never allowed to know, and now someone who you would never be able to get to know. It was confusing, to not feel sadness, when you think you’re supposed to. I only felt certainty: there would never be that reconciliation that I hoped for.

That night after getting the phone call, I went back to my sister’s house; we were both quietly feeling the need for companionship. As we were sitting around in our own versions of grief, instinctively, we powered up the Nintendo.

***

Of course, my obsession with Nintendo is nostalgia-tinged. Like most of us, it harkens back to a day when life left pure and untouched by adulthood’s mess. It’s why I’ve kept my same Nintendo from my father for twenty plus years. Even though the objective of Mario remains the same, I am not the same person each time I turn on the console. Even as fathers die, and brothers get married, and sisters have children of their own, the objective remains:

                      I will turn on my console and sit on the floor close to boys to impress them;

                      I will watch as boys with the same name as my brother achieve faster world records;

                      I will laugh as friends throw controllers and give up;

                      I will use it to cope when I am grieving a heavy loss.

The consistent presence of this console is a comfort. No matter the circumstances, I am always my happiest as I run, leap, and grab for the flagpole.

– Rachel Kolman