mario, daddy

or, today you are four

I remember Mario the same way I remember my siblings.

They’ve always been with me, since memory first sparked and began eating itself like Jörmungandr.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mario, which I’ve only been doing because I’ve been playing a lot of Mario with my son, which I do because I love him and myself.

I love us boundlessly and so I want to be there every time he smiles as he pushes that perfect button that makes Mario jump. And Mario’s jump is, perhaps, the most important action in videogame history.

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My son turns four today. I feel struck dumb by the simple fact that time keeps happening to us, that my son has become more and more himself over the last year. Like every parent of the smartphone era, we have thousands of pictures and videos of him throughout his brief life and we often revisit moments from his infancy, from his toddlerdom, but even already it’s shocking how much he has changed since last year.

Even the sound of his voice has changed. Filling out and becoming deeper than the high-pitched squeal that was his voice for so long. His pronunciation and enunciation improve continually and in such an alarming way that I didn’t know I heard the last strawbaberry or we’s house until I heard him say strawberry and our house for the first time and now every time ever after.

He’s begun memorizing things. Songs and books and even the little bits of random trivia we all acquire in life. Like the names of all the enemies Mario must jump on and all the Koopalings.

Where once I only read him stories from books, I started making up my own stories for him so that every night, right before bed, I tell him some new story. This didn’t start this year, but the last year saw him becoming an active agent in these stories.

I ask him what he wants to hear and he tells me, sometimes briefly and sometimes in great detail, what he wants out of that night’s story. Sometimes, hilariously, he’ll interrupt my story to tell me that I’m wrong, that, instead, this other thing happened or this other character showed up.

Often, these stories end up being about Mario and Mario’s friends and enemies.

My favorite is when he says, Think about it for a minute and then tell me.

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I’ve played every 2D Mario with my son over the last year. Some of them multiple times. Occasionally, he takes the controller and gives it a go, but so far, he prefers to watch me play.

I remember Mario like a time of day. I remember him perfectly in a very specific context: playing in my best friend’s basement when I was five years old, the room dark and cold, or playing in my parents’ family room, the sun streaming through the blinds, glaring against the TV while I dug around for every secret buried in Super Mario World.

Mario has always been with me. I don’t even remember the first time I saw Mario or the first time I played a Mario game. When consciousness sparked and I began remembering my own life, it was as if I emerged from a blackness shrouding the first years of my life. But Mario was with me even then.

I’ve been playing Mario my whole life. I haven’t played every Mario game, but I’ve played nearly every single one, whether 2D or 3D or RPG or sports or party - I’ve lived my life running alongside Mario, as if he were some great river defining a border of my life.

But because of this, part of me had begun to think of Mario games as easy. In truth, it had been maybe ten years since I played a Mario game until I began playing them with my son.

I mean, I had played a Mario game here and there. What kind of freak doesn’t just boot up Super Mario World or Mario 3 every once and a while to play a few levels? But I hadn’t sat down with the intention of really playing Mario for a long time.

But because I had only been dabbling here and there in the first world of these old Mario games, they’d come to define Mario for me, though I hadn’t realized this. And so Mario, in my head, became a series of easy games meant for kids and not brutally difficult platformers meant for Big Boys like me.

The truth is that Mario’s both. He leads you into each game gently. You’ll find your Lives counter going up during the first handful of levels in the game. You may not even die once, leading you to think that dying is an uncommon element to these games.

So it was when I began playing Super Mario World with my son while he watched. It had been a long time since I’d played a game with an audience, but I found the experience as fun as I remembered it being when we were all young kids sitting on couches, controllers in hand, while we played the many different games we were always playing.

Super Mario World begins quite simple and easy. The game teaches you how to play it and is quite forgiving. The difficulty increases as you go, but the slope is gentle enough that it’s quite a while before the challenge really hits, and by then you already have, like, fifty lives. Those ancient memories of what the map is meant to look like even gets you searching for the hidden exits and secret places that brush against your ears like the echo of an ancient melody.

Your confidence grows. You remember how to get these secrets and even how to take alternative routes through the game. You keep gaining lives and though you die more frequently with each level, you’re still well ahead, far away from a Game Over.

But then you come to that Forest of Illusion and you know you need to find the secret exits, but you just can’t figure it out. The levels aren’t punishing and they get easier as you keep playing and replaying them, trying to suss out where those secret exits might be so that you can make your way through.

Couldn’t remember. Couldn’t figure it out. And so I looked it up once my son went to sleep. And, of course, as soon as I looked, I remembered. Knew exactly what to do.

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The first year of my son’s life was a nightmare. He had colic, which meant he spent 12 hours a day screaming in our faces. We googled every possible thing you might google in desperation and still had people try to be helpful, offering unsolicited advice that made me want to dig a hole in their skull with my bare hands because not only had I not been sleeping, but I spent the night being screamed at while I rocked and sang to this little ball of flesh that we actually had on purpose. The child we wanted so desperately, even after crying through two miscarriages, wondering if maybe it would never happen for us.

We were so happy to have him.

And then, man.

I love my son. I even loved him back then. But sometimes I sure did fucking hate him.

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When Super Mario World gets hard, it feels like sprinting as fast as you can into a brick wall that you thought was made of styrofoam. I wasn’t particularly worried. I’d made it through lots of challenging levels in this playthrough. Even a few levels that took me twenty tries, while my son sighed and told me to be more patient, told me to quit making mistakes.

It’s making me laugh to remember this. His exasperation with me sucking at this game I’ve been playing since before I even have a memory.

I had upwards of seventy lives, even still, but I ended up throwing all of them at Chocolate Island and the Sunken Ghost Ship, walking into the Valley of Bowser with literally five lives left.

I would say the first half of Super Mario World took me about an hour. Maybe, really, the first two thirds. But Chocolate Island and the Sunken Ghost Ship took me about an hour by itself.

I couldn’t believe it, honestly. I remembered beating this game when I was six years old. There I was, almost thirty years later, unable to even get through it.

So frustrated did I become that I eventually switched over to Mario 3. Figured, foolishly, that it would be easier. I had beaten Mario 3 so many times that I can still remember every level in World 8. It was a hard-fought completion, sure. I remember dying there countless times, too. Remember the first time I saw the ending when my older brother beat it.

I knew that could be me and, one day, it was.

But, man, I gots to tell you - Mario 3 is fucking hard!

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Every day since that first year, parenting my son has gotten easier. He is such a joy. Such a pleasant, kind boy. I have delighted in watching his personality develop and grow.

The things he says. The smiles he shares so freely. The tenderness he shows his mother, his cats, his little brother. The buoyant excitement of every new experience.

This newsletter, in truth, exists because of him. Watching him become who he is and experiencing the world and the things I love have sent me spiraling through time. His smile at Mario’s jump carved a tunnel through time and space to reunite me with the child I once was, delighting in that perfect, beautiful, ecstatic jump.

Reuniting with that child who was me and all the other versions of me has led me to write all these hundreds of thousands of words.

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Mario is his jump. And his jump feels so damn good. I don’t even have the words to really convey this fully. The best way for me to explain it would be to hand you a controller and make you play a level. Then, if you still don’t understand, I’d make you play dozens of other platforms whose jumps feel like steaming yet wet garbage in your hands.

If you truly want to appreciate Mario’s jump, try playing any Castlevania game, for example.

Mario’s jump is all about friction and momentum and weight. The friction is most important, as it’s what gives you the illusion of momentum and weight. When you push the D-pad to the right while holding down the run button, Mario runs, of course. But first he accelerates. Mario’s run feels alive because of the way his speed changes. While running, if you hit the jump button, Mario can jump not only farther but also higher.

The real magic is what happens when you don’t jump.

When you stop running to the right, lifting your thumb from the D-pad, Mario doesn’t immediately stop. He slows. If you immediately push left on the D-pad after running right, he even slides a bit.

It sounds so simple but this is everything.

This exact experience is why, decades later, you still play videogames.

Mario feels alive. He feels tangible in a way that Megaman and the Belmonts and so many others never did. This friction to Mario’s movement allowed you, all those years ago, to tumble headfirst through your screen to land in the Mushroom Kingdom and believe in a world where jumping—and only jumping—could tell an entire story, could immerse you so fully that you spent hours tracing Mario and Luigi from the instruction manual, spent nights dreaming of Bowser and Ludwig.

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Parenting is hard. Even when it’s easy, it’s still the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You are everything to your child and they exist because of you, because you had the audacity to bring another life into the world.

This world that you love and hate. This world of beauty and terror. This life that has broken you yet also given you so much.

This life that is everything, that is the only thing.

Now that I’ve met my son, how could I ever imagine this life without him?

How could I even be myself without his laugh, without his smile, without those nights when his fever spiked and I held him, rocked him, paced with him asleep in my arms until the sun rose?

Parenting is hard but to leave it there is to tell a lie.

Yes, parenting is hard. And it’s not that it’s worth it or that it makes you whole, but that the little life you made that now lives beyond you becomes everything to you.

I have given my heart away so many times to so many people throughout the saddest years of my life. I gave it away so compulsively and recklessly that I sometimes wondered if I had given too much away, afraid that maybe I had lost the capacity to love, to feel.

But then I met my wife and then she brought forth our son and I knew that I had spent my entire life a fool.

I don’t know that my shattered heart ever healed, but a new heart began growing the day my son was born. This one, though, exists outside my chest.

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Super Mario RPG has been one of the most important games to me throughout my life. Thanks to the generosity of a friend, I was able to play it again this year. This time with my son.

I cannot express the wonder my son experienced when that little doll, Geno, became inhabited by a star or when Bowser became an ally or when, finally, we defeated Smithie.

But I remember how it felt way back in 1996 to spend days in the glow of my TV while this very simple story blew my dang mind, but also showed me the power of comedy, the transcendence of laughter. Because even playing this game in 2022 as a much older person, I found myself laughing out loud way more than you might expect.

And again, this tunnel carved through time brought me back to who I once was, decades gone. But it also allowed the child I once was to meet my son.

When I look at my son, my life resonates at a terrifying frequency. I remember paging through Yoshitaka Amano artbooks with my son and at the same time I’m twelve crying over Vivi, the only Black Mage, or Freya’s tragic love. I’m listening to Nobuo Uemetsu’s classic scores with my son but I’m also thirteen again running through fields while Zanarkand fills my chest and makes me believe in a world so much more wondrous than the one I’ve lived in. I’m telling stories of Mario and Bowser to put my son to bed and I’m seven again, staring at the moon on one of those many nights I spent not sleeping, when my older brother thought I slept with open eyes.

My life shivers and quakes and I fall apart from the overwhelming beauty of this tremendous gift given to me.

A gift I don’t know that I’ll ever deserve.

A gift I was given anyway. A gift he gives me daily.

A gift I hope to never let slip through my fingers to break against the earth.

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Daddy, do you like me?

Are you my friend, daddy?

Will you always love me?

Yes, always and forever.