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I know I’m technically a little late for Mother’s Day, but I was so busy with related activities over the weekend, that it wasn’t until this morning that I really got around to thinking about my own mother and her own history with video games. My house was a serious gaming household from the day we got our first NES, with my brothers and I being rabid and obsessed with the world of video games from a very young age. The original perception she and my father (and a lot of the general public) had about video games in the late 80s and early 90s was that video games were childrens’ toys. However, that came to change.

My mom used to play the Super Mario Bros. games on NES, but never got very far. Every time she wanted to make Mario or Luigi jump, or was frantically trying to get away from a goomba, she would physically move the controller with her hands as she mashed the buttons. It was a hilarious sight. She soon moved on to Dr. Mario, the first game I remember her really, really loving. We were both really good at it, better than my brothers or almost anyone else I knew, and would play each other constantly. This went on for years, long after the NES and its games had been discontinued.



In 1995, the PS1 launched, and my brothers and I wanted it more than anything. We had always been a one-console household, skipping the 16-bit generation entirely because my parents didn’t want us spending too much time on these newfangled games. However, this time around, we got in at the beginning of the new generation, and we got a PlayStation for Christmas that year. We were among the first kids in our neighborhood to have one. After that, the NES was all but abandoned by my brothers and me, so my mother moved it to her bedroom to have uninterrupted sessions of Dr. Mario and other random games she found around the house (and later, on eBay).

Somewhere around this time, she somehow scored a free Atari Lynx from her work, along with a bunch of games. At that point, I had never even heard of the Lynx, but it was the first (and only) handheld system our family ever had. The thing was huge and clunky, and it didn’t work 100% of the time, but it was free, so we loved it. The Lynx wasn’t really practical as a portable system the way the DS and PSP are today; it was too heavy to carry around everywhere, but perfect for long car rides (assuming you had a good supply of AA batteries on hand). In my adult life, I’ve made a habit of collecting various consoles, but as she loves to point out, “You still don’t have an Atari Lynx.”



Though she hasn’t really gotten into the recent generations of gaming (unlike Dad, who loves the Wii and Rock Band), she did receive a DS Lite for her birthday last year, (my idea, naturally). At first, she didn’t know what to do with it, but once I showed her how to use it and the games I’d picked up for her (New Super Mario Bros. and Dr. Mario), she was hooked. She played New Super Mario Bros. on and off for a year, and told me that she likes to play her DS every night before bed, much to the annoyance of my father.

Even though my mom is the text-book definition of a casual gamer, she’s managed to stay pretty informed about the industry thanks to my brothers and me. For example, if I got into a conversation with my siblings about drug dealers, gang members, and hookers, she would know that we were talking about GTA IV, and not think that we were just total thugs like the average non-gamer. She has also recently gotten into the habit of borrowing my brother’s hacked PSP so she can play classic games, like the PC point-and-click adventures she used to buy for us.

In conclusion, I would like to thank my mother for helping to make me the gamer I am today, and for being more understanding about this hobby (way of life?) than the average parent. I would also like to wish her, and all of the mothers here on Gamervision, a very happy Mother’s Day (about twelve hours late). If you’ve got your own stories about moms and gaming, be sure to share them with the rest of us.

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