Mark Twain meets today's Tom Sawyer on the NES in February 1989


Now, friends, gather ’round while I tell you of a most peculiar contraption that has found its way into the parlors of the nation this February of 1989. It is called the Nintendo Entertainment System, a grey box of electronic wizardry that promises to transport a body into worlds unseen without ever having to scrub a single fence-post. It seems the folks at Seta have seen fit to take the American hero Tom Sawyer—a boy who, I can testify, has a natural aversion to anything resembling honest labor—and trap him inside a plastic cartridge. They call it The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, though I suspect Tom himself would find the whole business far more exhausting than a Sunday school lesson.

In this digital diversion, you take up the role of Tom, though he’s looking a bit more square-edged than I remember. He’s wandering through his own dreams, it seems, which is just like a boy of his temperament. But instead of the peaceful Mississippi, he’s beset by all manner of fantastical nuisances—giant frogs, birds with ill intentions, and even a pirate or two.

Tom’s primary weapon in this endeavor? He throws rocks. Now, I’ve known Tom to throw many things—mostly tantrums or longing glances at Becky Thatcher—but here he’s a veritable artillery unit. The boy jumps and climbs with a nimbleness that would make a mountain goat blush, all to the tune of a repetitive little melody that stays in your head longer than a bad cold.

It’s a strange thing, seeing the raft and the cave rendered in flickering lights and "pixels." I reckon if the real Tom Sawyer could see himself now, jumping over pits of doom for the amusement of a child holding a plastic controller, he’d find a way to trick some other poor soul into playing the game for him. He’d likely charge them a glass marble or a dead polecat for the privilege, too.

These modern young 'uns, they sit cross-legged on the carpet, clutchin' a little red-and-gray joypad, and make Tom leap from platform to platform like a grasshopper with the St. Vitus dance. The controls, from what I hear tell, are a mite loose—kinda like tryin' to steer Huck's raft with a piece of string—and one wrong step sends you tumblin' into the drink or straight into the jaws of some pixelated varmint. One hit and you're done for, no two ways about it. Hard as nails, they say, and not always fair.

Still, there's a kind of poetry in it, if you squint. That river-raft level—now that's the genuine article. You're floatin' down the ol' Mississippi on a log, dodgin' logs and jumpin' barrels, shootin' at fish what leap out like they got a personal grudge. It's the closest thing to the real feel of raftin' I ever seen on a screen, even if the jumpin' mechanics make a feller want to holler. 

If you find yourself with a few "doubloons" to spare, you might pick up this NES adventure. It’s a fine way to spend an afternoon, provided you don't mind losing a "life" or two. Just remember: it’s much easier to defeat an electronic Injun Joe than it is to avoid a lickin' from Aunt Polly.

So here's to February 1989, when Tom Sawyer traded his slingshot for a game controller, his whitewash brush for a jump button, and the Mississippi for a side-scrollin' dream. If it ain't exactly what I had in mind after readin' that big book, well, maybe that's the point. Adventures, after all, have a way of gettin' away from a body and runnin' off in directions nobody expected.

And if some wide-eyed boy somewhere, thumb on the A button, manages to rescue Becky and wake up feelin' a little more alive—why, I reckon that's adventure enough for anybody. Even if it does come in a cartridge.

Location: Hannibal, MO 63401, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more