One of my most anticipated aspects of having a child is the concept of getting to share with him my love of video games. My parents weren't anti-gaming like many adults were in the 1990s, in fact my dad had an Atari before I came around. But by the 1990s the stigma that video games were for children were set, and so except for some clear examples (Link to the Past, Microsoft Flight simulator, 80s arcade games like Space Invaders) gaming was mostly a me pastime.
In this way I am not like my parents, as I have had been into gaming for most of my life (except for a small phase in college) and was really into the Switch when Finn was born. In particular sharing with Finn my favorite Nintendo IPs namely Mario has been a dream for me given the outsized influence they have had on my life.
When Finn was very little (less than a year) he used to watch me play Xbox (which are memories I will cherish for the rest of my life), but as soon as he could talk he was quick to tell me he didn't want to watch me play games. He wanted to play too!
At the end of last year when I was upgrading my gaming PC I put the leftover parts into an old case, installed Linux on it, and gave Finn what I called a "Steambox." That made him really excited, because it was HIS and it made me excited because I hoped it would get him into another hobby I like (building computers). My Steam library was already full of simple games that could play on the machine, and it was cheap to get some more in his favorite franchises (ie Paw Patrol). We spent many hours in his closet playing this computer, and I loved that I finally got him into gaming.
But two things came up. One was his mom and grandma thought it was a safety hazard. I didn't agree with this, but it was getting clear that two there are real limits to the games Finn could play. He is not able to have awareness in a game, and really follow the path set forward by the gameplay to advance (even on simple games). Maybe its part of his autism, but soon we hit limits in my Steam library of what we could play together and what he could do without my help. So eventually the Steambox went away.
This year I tried to get him into what to me was a more obvious platform: the Switch. Gave him the Switch Lite I had and got him some kid level games like Peppa Pig. But again completing in game goals were beyond him, and eventually he just used the Switch Lite to watch Youtube. I tried playing with him on the big Switch (aka on the TV) Co-op games we could play together, but I could not find any that would give him enough lives or chances for us to really move through the game. We really needed something like I had as a kid with the Game Genie- something that could break the games and give unlimited lives. But that isn't how games are anymore.
Then I had a HUGE revelation.
When I was a kid arcade games ruled the world, and the basic way they worked was if you inserted a quarter you got another life period. The only limit was the budget of the player (which was a significant limit for a kid in the 1990s). Console ports of arcade games, like for example the SNES version of my favorite beat-em-up Turtles in Time, have a set number of lives to make the game challenging. But by 2024 there exists many arcade ports on every console including the Switch, and these are straight emulating the arcade machine down to a button to emulating inserting a quarter. It clicked in my head- basically arcade games can be setup for infinite lives.
So night after night I would take Finn upstairs and put on one of the emulated arcade beat-em-ups. I would "insert" what would have been $100 in quarters back in the 1990s so he could die over and over without the game stopping. I would carry him through the gameplay, and BOOM suddenly we were beating games. We went through the arcade version of Turtles in Time (his favorite), the original TMNT arcade game, Final Fight, Knights of the Round and more. I even asked my favorite gaming community for tips for new games, and I bought and we beat titles I never even heard of in the 1990s.
Eventually Finn got bored with the beat-em-up format (I kinda forgot how much they repeated content in the 1990s) and we already ran through the best ones, but I feel very happy that the quarter munchers of my youth have become the bridge for gaming in my son's future.
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