Contra is My Most Vivid Childhood Memory

When it comes to memories of my life that predate my getting hair down there, there’s precious little I recall. I owned a red bike with weird plastic plates over the spokes that I thought looked cool but made it a bitch to pump the tires. I loved pizza day in the cafeteria, even though, in retrospect, lunchroom pizza was like a disgusting, open faced sandwich made by the world’s laziest lazy Italian mother on bread even Auschwitz inmates would have turned their noses up at. I always got an “N” for “needs improvement” when it came to the self-control category on my report card because I was an impulsive brat who couldn’t shut up in class and needed to be the center of attention (glad to see I’ve matured). Other than that, there’s…really nothing. Well, there’s one thing: You could blindfold me, hang me upside down facing away from the TV, put an NES controller in my hands and I could play through Contra losing three lives, max.


I never owned a copy of Contra. It belonged to my neighbor, Bobby Irons, who had been a friend to me before the purchase of the game, but became a brother to me afterward. Every day after school, my actual brother Will and I would hop over to Bobby’s house for (conservatively) four hours of gaming, where the two of us would take turns as player two. (It was Bobby’s game and Bobby’s house, thus he was always player one. That’s just video game law.) The three of play through Contra multiple times, then my brother and I would walk back home as I hummed the game’s music to myself, my thoughts preoccupied with playing it the next day. Sure, I’d dabble in other video games now and again, but it almost felt like cheating on a spouse. (Actually, it didn’t, since I ultimately regretted playing other video games.)


20 years have passed and they still haven’t made a video game as good as Contra. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer an eight year old kid preoccupied with being Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. Maybe it’s because there’s now a magical thing called the Internet, filled with on demand pornography and footage of monkeys peeing into their own mouths, that I seem to be quite a fan of. All I know is, sad as this sounds, I’m thankful for the memories.

Tagged as: video games.