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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my favorite game on the Sega Master System was Shinobi, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I was also a big fan of Double Dragon, Out Run, and of course, the Sonic games, and I’d say Rocky IV was the best combination of fun and frustration. What was it about boxing games in the 80’s?
The 80’s were a great time to grow up. We had a great selection of video game systems, professional wrestling was exploding in popularity, the Lamborghini Countach reached its peak styling, and MTV actually showed music videos. The internet and social media had not yet taken over as the brain rot for our youth, and we actually spent time with our friends in person. What a time to be alive!
I have a ton of great childhood memories and quite a few that are not so great. Like all parents, I wanted to create a better childhood for my kids than what I had, and I aspired to do that in several ways. Today’s story is about a time where I missed the mark.
My dad and stepmom got married when I was nine and my brother was eleven. Sandwiched right between us at ten years old was our new step-brother. After the wedding, my dad, my brother, and I moved in with our new stepfamily. That house was way too small for us all, and once the school year ended we relocated to a place better suited for us.
On one end of the house was my parents room, in the middle of the house was the living room and kitchen, and on the other end of the house was our space. My brother and I shared a room as we’d always done and my step-brother had his own room as he’d always had. Between our rooms was a large, wide hallway. I mean, it seemed large as a kid. I’d very much like to go see just how big it really is now as an adult. But I digress.
That hallway was our space to be boys. At times we took on the personas of Ric Flair or Kerry Von Erich putting each other in a figure four leglock or crushing their skull with the iron claw. When friends would come over we’d tag team and become the Rock and Roll Express. At the far end of the hallway between the doors to each of our rooms was a TV just for us.
I vividly remember the day our parents took us to KB Toys in the mall so we could buy a video game system. We’d pooled our money together and we stood there staring at the consoles behind the counter with the weight of the world on our shoulders. Should we choose the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Sega Master System? There were advantages to each, and it was a tough choice.
As the intro suggests, we ended up going with the Sega Master System. Some of my favorite childhood memories are sitting in that hallway playing Sega with my brothers and our friends. We eventually upgraded to the Sega Genesis and loved swapping games with our friends at school.
So as I got married and had kids, I dreamed of what sort of childhood I wanted for them. I reflected on things and considered how I could make a life for them better than the one I had. I wanted to give them a home environment that didn’t include arguing or shouting. I wanted to prevent them from going through a divorce.
I not only considered the difficult things from my childhood. I thought about the best parts too and pondered how I could even improve upon those things. I cherished the strong work ethic my dad had taught me and strived to make sure my kids were taught that too. I appreciated how we never looked down on anyone or thought less of anyone based on their race or economic status and strived to make sure my kids respected everyone.
In 2009 we moved into the house we still call home. We had the house built from the ground up, and had the opportunity to customize it to suit our needs. One option we had was whether to use the space above the garage as extra storage space or to turn it into a bonus room. During those months when we were regularly visiting houses and trying to figure out what would be best for us, our kids often tagged along. They were six and four years old at the time, and they absolutely loved any house with stairs. When they learned that going with the bonus room would mean our house would have stairs, they begged us to choose the bonus room option. And so we did.
We were super grateful for the house and aspired to not only make it a wonderful place for our kids to grow up, but we dreamed of making it a place for ministry too. In the years that followed, both of those dreams would come true. When I was a kid you could always tell where your friends were by finding the house with all the bicycles laying down in the front yard. We also dreamed of turning that bonus room into a place that our kids and their friends loved to hang out.
Our first step in making that dream come true came in Christmas of 2015 when we surprised our kids with a ping pong table. It fit perfectly in the main space of the bonus room and I was super excited to give it to them. The table was fun for a few weeks, but didn’t really have much lasting impact.
The next step came a couple of years later when Colby and I decided to get a Raspberry Pi and play around with video game emulation. Once I realized you could turn that into an arcade cabinet video game system, I was locked in to making that happen. We eventually sourced an old video game cabinet via Craig’s List and set out to restore it. Both kids worked hard to sand it, paint it, and convert it to a functional game cabinet.
Finally, just in time for Christmas 2017, the arcade cabinet was finished. We opted to paint the front and lower sides in a dark gray color, while painting the majority of the sides a lighter gray color. More specifically, we’d chosen colors to match the original Nintendo Entertainment System colors. Addi worked very hard to tape off a section across the top of each side to paint in a series of stripes which matched the look of the ridges that ran across the top of the NES. We topped it all off with some red molding along the edges that matched the button colors of the Nintendo. It was amazing and we were all proud of the fruit our labor had produced!
Here’s what I learned.
Growing up I always enjoyed adventure and platforming games best while my brother enjoyed sports games best. In fact, whether it was in physical sports we played in the yard or virtual sports we played via video games, I never once beat my brother. That is, until one day while spending the weekend with our grandparents we rented Joe Montana Football. That fateful day I discovered he was unable to defend the bootleg pass and I beat him something like 100-7. It was a glorious day and one that I have never let him live down. It was my one bright shining moment in a lifetime of athletic failure.
As we finished the arcade cabinet on that Christmas Eve afternoon in 2017, I was still blind to reality. My brother was coming over to celebrate Christmas, and the arcade machine included Joe Montana Football as part of the games selection. I’d been talking trash for weeks leading up to the holiday, and I had to have the machine ready for the rematch.
Once we finished dinner, we each made our way over to the machine, still positioned in the living room from our work the day before, and the rematch was on! Of course, the first play I attempted was that magical bootleg. It didn’t work. Nate called the right defense to stop it. Knowing much more about football now than I did then, I developed a new strategy using the plays available to me. My strategy worked! While not quite the blowout I’d achieved during childhood, I was once again the victor and watched in joy as my brother, downcast and defeated, made his way over to the couch!
I had greatly underestimated how much the arcade cabinet would weigh, so instead of it going upstairs in the bonus room, it remained in the living room. It seemed silly to keep it there, but when we had family events or birthday parties, it made it easy for people to play with.
Even still, it didn’t get used very much and I found myself dusting it more than using it. Every once in a while Colby and I would break out a game of Mario, but the arcade controls were imprecise and it often made the game more frustrating. It was much more enjoyable to play retro games via the Wii Virtual Console or Nintendo Switch Online.
Eventually I realized that neither the ping pong table nor the arcade machine were for my kids. In reality, they were for me. Back in September in an episode called “Field of Dreams” I talked about living vicariously through your kids. I realized that the ping pong table and arcade machine were exactly that.
I realized that I wanted a ping pong table because several years earlier I’d been invited to a party at the home of the family that owned the bookstore I worked at. As I walked into their home, I walked past a room with the door ajar. I glanced into the room as I walked past it, and inside the room stood a ping pong table. They were very wealthy, and at that moment I saw the ping pong table as a sign of wealth and achievement.
The more I thought about this moment the more I realized the arcade machine was serving the same purpose. When I was a kid, no one had an arcade machine in their house except very wealthy people. I’d quit the bookstore in 2013 to work fulltime in my own business, and now the ping pong table and arcade machine were my trophies. I’d said they were for the kids and their friends, but the layer of dust accumulated on each proclaimed like Maury Povich that that was not true.
Last year my brother-in-law and his family finished building their dream home and I was very happy to offer them the trophies. They have 3 kids and we were confident they would get much more use at their home than they’d received at ours.
So do I regret getting the ping pong table and arcade machine? Mostly, yes. I did enjoy a few games of ping pong with my kids and I’m grateful for that. I’m also grateful that it ended up serving as a catalyst to teach me this lesson. As for the arcade machine, I’m very grateful for the time I got to spend with the kids working on the electronics, sanding it down, painting it, and experiencing that feeling when it was completed. That reason alone makes it worth it.
In the end, they served as a reminder that checking our motivation is worth doing in every situation and it’s not the value of stuff that makes one wealthy. Rather, it’s the value of the relationships you have with those you share life with that makes you rich.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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