A day not long ago I got quite nostalgic. It was the first time I have experienced nostalgia just by riding on a highway, but there I was, sitting next to my son in the back seat, looking out of the window at the mountains flying by, and nostalgia hit me. It was not seeing the mountains, not dreaming back in time reminiscing old road trips, it was not seeing my son next to me and thinking back at how cute he was as a baby lying in his child seat. No, it was just the act of looking through the highway fence, that brought me back in time to when I was not even a teenager.
I remember how fascinated I was by the first Nintendo Game & Watch consoles. My best friends brother got a Donkey Kong game and seeing it made me feel envious like I never had before. Even more envious I became when I could touch and play with a Game & Watch that my grandfather had gotten as a present. When I finally got a game myself, it was a Snoopy tennis game and more than playing with it I liked to use it as a clock sitting on my desk and I felt very happy every time I looked at it (although I was a bit disturbed by the fact that the clock was not very accurate and I had to set it all the time).
When the Nintendo TV console was released I got aquatinted with Super Mario. My cousin and I rented a console and the Super Mario game and let ourselves get drawn into Mario’s world, jumping around, collecting coins and banging our heads (in the game that is). There were mushrooms, and bosses to fight, and I remember feeling so free when Mario was swimming in the water or jumping around among the clouds. It was in a way the image of the freedom of childhood, being on summer holiday playing Super Mario.
What stood out to me apart from the characters and the music, was that the graphic was very pixelated. And when riding on the highway recently, looking through the fence, the whole world looked pixelated to me, just like in the game. I felt transported from the car back to my cousin’s living room floor sitting in front of the TV playing Super Mario. The jfeeling remained in me so when I got the chance I found my old Nintendo Gameboy and popped in a little few batteries, and to my surprise it still worked. Now my mission is to find a second hand Super Mario game for it, and see if I can relive even more nostalgia.
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