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He can still remember the order they were stacked sideways in the entertainment center. Blades of Steel, then Blaster Master, Ghostbusters, Pinball, Super Mario Bros and Tecmo Bowl. But the one last game that stood on the shelf, end out, that had captivated him. Top Gun. A fighter jet, engines flaming, shooting proudly off the deck of an airship carrier. A blue a red logo with a star and jet below and above respectively, with TOP GUN placed in the center. When he put that game in the system and pushed it down, it was a gateway to something so much different. Street hockey was just as fun as Blades of Steel, he could never figure out how to beat Blaster Master, Ghostbusters was horrible to play, Pinball was fun but boring after a few boards, Super Mario Bros. wasn't much fun after you found the warp pipes and could finish it in 30 minutes, and Tecmo Bowl was nothing like football up at the school. But Top Gun, the game at the end of the shelf, was another world. He could never have flown a jet or fighter, never used an auto focus lens, or had the courage to actually take down another man as an 8 year old boy. When he picked up the rectangular controller and jabbed at Power, he got to escape from dumb school and dumb homework and dumb world events because he could slip into a world of brave pilots willing to risk their lives to take down enemy ships, a world where 16÷4 and the times tables didn't matter, and nobody cared who the President was, and all that really mattered was staying alive and landing the plane.
He remembered his parents thinking the game too violent and unhooking the Nintendo for a while, but after some consideration his parents decided as long as he understood that in real life you can't just go around flying and killing people it was ok. He remembers perkily saying 'Yeah, cus in real life you can't hit reset to start over.' His dad then had volunteered to go to the video store and rent the movie, but he had said no. He remembered thinking about how much different the Ghostbusters movie and game were, and not wanting to find out the movie his beloved escape was based off of was actually a western or something. So when his dad pulled the Nintendo off of the highest closet shelf, he carried it carefully out to the family room, put it down in one of the sunken cubbyholes in the entertainment center, and popped in Top Gun to begin flying, happily escaping his childhood.
He remembered all the times on the bus, talking with friends, and how their conversations had gone from what they found under dad's bed that mom didn't know about or what Timmy did to Sally on the playground to how to get extra 'guys' or '1-ups' and bragging about how many 'Nintendo tapes' you had or how many issues of Nintendo Power you got. Conversations about Mrs. Janis' math assignment turned to Zelda's second quest. Whenever somebody needed help in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, you helped them out just like you would have with problem 2 on Ms. Simmons' science.
Birthdays and Christmas's and other holidays passed, and the line of Nintendo 'tapes' on the shelf got longer, and eventually Top Gun wasn't the end of the line. But that didn't matter. The Game Boy and Super Nintendo could go on all they wanted, he didn't mind being left out of conversations about the hidden 96 goals of Super Mario World, or not being able to play Tetris against friends on the playground, because he had Top Gun. The simplicity and toughness of flying around taking down ships and focusing weapons and landing planes were something you couldn't get from Super Mario Bros. 3 or Zelda or Metroid or Rad Racer. It wasn't something he could go up to the school and do with his friends like Blades of Steel or RBI Baseball or Tecmo Bowl. Those fuzzy pixels made a dashboard and the ocean and radars and airplane carriers and enemy ships and bullets and rockets and the sky and anything else it needed too.
He didn't mind when he heard the parents of his friends and his own parents whispering about rotting their brains out when he had friends over to play the Nintendo. He didn't mind when his parents exclaimed 'There's more of them?!' the first time the kids down on Jefferson brought over their Super Nintendo.
He knows he can boot up his computer and play the game in a better quality and without the need to get out rubbing alcohol and Q-tips whenever he wanted to play, but he didn't feel like it. He felt nothing morally wrong with it, he had a few games and emulators saved somewhere, but he would never play Top Gun. Even with the same Nintendo hooked up to a TV on the desk across from the bed, he would never play Top Gun. He had grown up. The charm of flipping open the door and pushing down on the cartridge had worn off over the years, and he knew then he would never experience Top Gun the same way. It didn't provide any escapism anymore, the excitement of having friends over to play Nintendo was gone.