The Tolerance Break

Pezh J. was on a break

- Pezh J.

It's 1994. Pastel colours and awkwardly balanced haircuts run wild. I'm leaving England for the first time and heading to California with my mum to visit my family there. It's a special trip that I still remember fondly, although I don't know how much of that is memory of the actual trip and how much is from watching home movies or seeing snapshots in old photo albums. I do certainly remember one thing, however: the first time I played a videogame.

My cousins owned a NES, and just as much time spent outside playing in the sun was also spent inside huddled around the TV, whether it was Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 (we don't talk about Super Mario Bros. 2), Duck Hunt, or Kirby's Adventure. I was hooked, completely charmed by every aspect: the music, the colourful characters that filled the screen, the challenging precision that kept most of each game a mystery hidden behind my own capabilities, and even the crude rectangular controllers.

Returning home, I didn't get as many chances to play video games, aside from the times when going to friends' homes or when they'd bring consoles over to mine. It wasn't until my mum got me the cornerstone of the Argos-Catalogue-Summer-'92Through-To-Winter-'96TM, the TV Boy, that I got to play video games regularly. Even then, it was a mere clone of an Atari 2600, which, although still plenty of fun, didn't fulfil me as much as the NES I had fallen in love with, or even hold a candle to the newer generation of consoles that were starting to fill the market. I started to play less and less, eventually stopping altogether.