Old Grandma Hardcore

[Tortolia]

Awesome.

[SineSwiper]

Nice. I want to be like that when I'm 70 or so.

[Julius Seeker]

Hmmmm, strange, I must be missing some sort of plugin, the video came up and played as a sound file.

[Agent 57]

I'd like to share part of an entry from my personal blog from a couple years ago, that is actually highly germane to this discussion:

Another thing that came out of my NES obsession in those days was my ability to spread it all over the place. When I was younger and we used to take trips to visit my grandparents in Connecticut, the way things usually went was the four older people would spend the time talking, and us three kids would end up trying to find ways to amuse ourselves - either with TV or some of the really old toys that my grandma had lying around. After enough of these trips, I got bored enough into talking my parents into letting me bring the NES with me when we visited - which wasn't too hard, considering that meant that they could shut me in a room for four hours and wouldn't hear a peep out of me the whole time. At any rate, when I started bringing the system with me, one of the weirdest and most wonderful things happened - my grandma got hooked. Eventually she bought a system herself and started collecting games - some for herself to play, and some for me and my younger cousins to play when they came over (and they caught the gaming bug from my grandma, thus the cycle continued.) At any rate, the fact that my grandma was a gamer now meant that she and I had a common bond and something to talk about or do together when I visited, and the two of us became much closer than we ever probably would have been otherwise.

She died suddenly when I was 15, and when we drove down for the funeral, my parents told me that we were going to split her games between my cousins and myself. Since I was the first one there, I was older, and I already had an SNES at this point, they told me not to take too many. When I walked into her bedroom, the first thing I did was walk over to the system itself and flip up the lid. Inside the cartridge tray was her copy of Dr. Mario - her favorite game, which she had played a ton and was incredibly good at. Right then I knew that I didn't care how many other games I ended up with - I just wanted to make sure that I got the last game she ever played.

And I did. It's sitting in a plastic container with all of my other games in my new living room, right now.

I wonder what Gramma would have thought of the advances they've made in gaming in the last few years. My guess is she wouldn't have cared too much - not unless I'd have been able to convince her that there was a game out there somewhere that's just as fun and addictive as Dr. Mario was. I can just see her right now saying something like, "Oh, I'm not interested in those flashy graphics or boobies or any of that crap" in that gruff, lovable way she used to say everything. It's not hard at all to imagine her playing Dr. Mario to this day.

Maybe she still is.

Although I have to say, after seeing the OGHC site - and especially the video clips - I could also totally see my grandma being a lot like her, too.