Or, reliving Banjo-Kazooie
Three mere years ago I would walk around Brooklyn and Queens for hours every day, daydreaming in ironic bebop. My hair was dark and my glutes were pert. Now I change diapers and try but fail to explain to a toddler the difference between the glyphs “O” and “0.” Of course I would not have it any other way but anticipating an upcoming trip back to New York is giving me some sort of anticipatory whiplash. I hope my old friends recognize me in spite of my grayer hair and doughier glutes.
Parenting makes you think of your parents. The basic project of parenting has not changed much but each generation inherits new unknowns that become knowns a generation later. Videogames are huge now. They were semi-huge in the 90s but not like today; in particular to young parents born in the 60s, videogames surely seemed dangerous, tempting, hyper-intense compared to TV, let alone books. That conservative assessment was right, actually, and even if DOOM didn’t “make” the Columbine shooters, it is obvious after even a moment of thought that violent and addictive videogames extract a cost on the soul of the child who plays them. Get real!
But what about the less extreme case? When I, five, clicked in that plastic cartridge and before me appeared the bright, primary-colored, C-major world of Banjo-Kazooie, I instantly compared what I was seeing to the muddy, confusing real world and vowed, subconsciously, never to turn back. The designers of that game built a world like an instrument, made to cohere, jingling at the slightest stimulus, fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, the jigsaw puzzle-piece indeed a primary symbol in the game itself. When I jumped off a ledge at the real-life playground, I imagined I was pressing and holding “A” to float down just like Banjo did, slowed by Kazooie’s wings. When I ran in P.E., I huffingly-puffingly hummed the “running shoes music.” I dreamed in that world, conjecturing inner lives and extra dialogue of side-characters, imagining the feeling in my toes of the grass in this area or the sand in that.
Then I turned six. My tastes matured and darkened in anticipation of the moodier GameCube. I still played Banjo every now and then, but always as a nostalgic, almost guilty indulgence, pining for a simpler time when my parents were married and the analog stick on my preferred orange controller hadn’t yet loosened. You can take the “young” out of the Sensitive Young Man, but…sigh.
Now I am very old and my heart hurts all the time. I have no reason to play Banjo-Kazooie. Or at least I did not until I started to curate for my daughter the appetizers of a first course in videogames. She doesn’t watch TV and she sure as heck ain’t laying a finger nor an eyeball on no iPad. But videogames — that’s the artistic medium of our century, is it not? And whereas my mom had no mental frame for what videogames meant to her son, I have all sorts of cultivated opinions on which games are good, which are canonical, which are healthy, which are appropriate… These opinions conspire into an imperative: I need to be the shepherd-gatekeeper for my daughter’s taste in games, just as I always planned to with music, and math, and indeed the moral universe.
So, twenty minutes at a time, once teeth have been brushed and toys have been returned to their buckets, we play. I mean, I play. She’s eighteen months old. Every once in a while she’ll grab the controller and thumb a few As but most of the time she sits, leaned just a bit forward, drawn in, curious brow perked, and watches worlds come to life. She giggles at cartoon slapstick. She points a finger and calls out animals she recognizes. She has learned the names of her favorite NPCs and she blurts out numbers when numerals appear onscreen. I feel proud and uneasy at the same time. The danger is obvious: the speed and brightness of these digital universes, even of the most kid-friendly and mellow ones, has no match in our boring real world. Game design flirts with the psychology of addiction — what do we really mean by “engagement” or “gameplay loop” after all? — and my daughter’s budding mind is as impressionable as it will ever be. And yet I do not want to keep her away out of fear. She loves these twenty-minute bursts and so do I. I read out all the dialogue and count the numbers with her. I yelp at a risky jump and she learns to yelp too. We live in Southern California — she only knows what snow is through a handful of winter levels, and when we take a trip somewhere cold she will have all this built-up anticipation; she’ll already know the ground is slippery and reflective and bright.
On a broader timeline I am seeding her taste. Chibi-Robo, Pikmin 2, Ape Escape 3, Yoshi’s Island, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy — ah, but Mario 64 most of all, what an astounding work of art! Monitoring the reaction of a toddler freshens my own eyes; I can place a version of myself in 1996, expectations yet unformed, mapping the 3D space with my eyes and my thumbs, calibrating the springy friction of Mario’s little meatball-body, a triumph of geometry and rhythm, the joie de vivre of a triple-jump resonating up the tendon of my right arm.
“Penguin!!!” calls out my daughter, followed by a cuteness-induced squeal. “Yay!!!” with applause every time I nab a star. She spots a yellow coin in the corner of the viewport and points it out to me so I don’t miss it. These are the unforgettable moments where you see yourself from outside yourself, in the past, in the present, in the future, the joy of play a chain-link across time and across generations, the miracle of Nintendo radiating its warm light. As much as I prefer the taut momentum of Sunshine and the linear musicality of Galaxy, it is the abstract, open perfection of 64’s ballet which now stands tallest in my esteem, newly so because of my daughter’s unfiltered, uncompromised, uncynical reaction to it.
Yet, all the while, a hesitation in the back of my mind, a scab of a thought, bugs me. I am afraid of Banjo-Kazooie. I have been holding off! All this churns way beneath the surface of consciousness, but even when I try to indulge a peek at the feeling, a rationalization blocks it: save it for when she’s a little older; don’t spoil the first time. Huh? Why wouldn’t that apply to all the other games? I am hesitating — I am avoiding something!
Or, at least I was. Four days ago, I faced the strange, murky brew of my feeling. I caught a glimpse of what was really going on: I didn’t want to corrupt a perfect happy gem preserved in the amber of my entire life after childhood. I didn’t want to notice the seams on the textures, or the tedium of the challenges; I didn’t want to hear the music with my own adult ear as opposed to my memory’s ear. In a word, I didn’t want to realize Banjo-Kazooie was bad. Tim Rogers’ old article thumped in my memory, as did vague impressions of unimportant forum-comments I had read and then scoffed at over the years. It would shatter whatever innocent granule remains of the boy I was in 1999 to conclude, however correctly, that Banjo-Kazooie’s design failed to stand the test of time. Online punditry has soured on so-called “collectathons.” Framerates under thirty per second might as well be guns of seasickness — no good, they say. The humor would deflate, panned by an imagined online critic with a distaste for the Bri’ish. And then what? I’d shade all those old memories as those of a raisinbrained kid swindled by predatory, time-wasting game design. I’d be afraid to uncork any others and thus I’d be stuck adrift, unconfident in the foundations of my taste. That could get real bad. Nothing good happens when you pull out a bottom-layer Jenga block.
Suffice it to say I spiraled over this ridiculous nonsense. What yanked me out of the Agéd-Sensitive-Young-Man-Cloud-World and back to reality was my daughter’s courage facing a robot, her grandfather’s advanced Roomba coldly mopping the floor, showing no warmth to the soft, innocent creature in its sensor’s gaze. She tiptoed to and fro, her curiosity fighting and ultimately overcoming her fear, at which point she realized she was the superior being and had nothing to fear at all. That evening, with teeth brushed and toys bucketed, I grasped the three-pronged controller and braced myself for a flood of memories, wincing at the opening transition, an empty light-blue realm across which an animated logo lurches, flexing the polygonal magic of the time. Each audio sample — low, honking accordion; metallic squeaks; the buzz of a dragonfly — triggered a geyser of memories, a hundred parallel moments where I’d waited for the game to load, that waiting a ritual during which awareness of my surroundings evaporated. “That’s Banjo the bear.” I pointed to show her. “That’s Kazooie the red bird.”
Soon enough we were in bucolic Spiral Mountain, the unthreatening tutorial area, Banjo’s home. My daughter yelled “carrot!” at the giant bouncing orange cone with googly eyes on which you practice your basic roll attack. “Swimming!” she remarked, jealously — she saw the bear doing one of her favorite activities. I released the tension in my throat and looked over at her beaming face and its unbreakable smile. The C-major music sounded no different than how I remembered it, nor did the programmed gravity and momentum feel anything but familiar. Her absolute joy flushed away all my self-conscious spiraling; I saw, in that moment, that these blokes, thirty years ago, constructed with their hearts a game world that would and did stand the test of time. I had been right to fall in love as a five-year-old and I was right to treat my daughter to a little dose twenty-six years later.
Whereas Mario 64 has you fling your character over bottomless pits onto smaller and smaller platforms, pushing you to be nimble and confident, Banjo lets you course-correct every jump, not quite with a true double jump but rather with a little winged flutter. You can get a little extra distance or even turn around in midair with a second A-press. As such, Banjo feels heavier than Mario but more stable, presaging Mario Galaxy a decade early. In this design difference lies the key to differentiating to the big two N64 platformers. Mario’s elegance and austerity stand against Banjo’s forgivingness and warmth. Mario’s psychedelic, abstract world doesn’t make any sense if you look too close for too long, but Banjo’s feels lived-in and continuous. There are no death pits in Banjo; even long falls sometimes cause no damage if you’re lucky enough to plop into water. Zany Banjo characters chime in with irreverent dialogue, making Mario feel eerie and silent by comparison. The Mario music sets a mood in the background, but every Banjo tune is just that — a tune, an unapologetic melody right in the foreground. Mario’s levels are built often of big, flat polygonal surfaces you run across but Banjo loves cozy hexagonal pipes and other enclosed spaces wherein the music slows down and chills out. And so on.
Playing the opening levels of Banjo-Kazooie sitting next to my smiling daughter, rather than crushing an edifice of imagined innocence, wrapped me in a blanket and deepened my trust in the Gen X goofball dudes who poured so much love into the game. This comes at a time where my anhedonic tendencies are aflare, where I haven’t played a videogame “for myself” in forever and I have been grumpily mulling on what it is I even like about games in the first place…if anything at all. Indeed I feel no motivation to bang into a Dark Souls-style action/timing challenge — who cares? it’s the same emotional manipulation again and again, triumph in opposition to artificial difficulty; I don’t have time or patience to subject myself to the RPG Treadmill — God, Fortune’s Weave was such a drag, a tangle of menus constricting trivial tactical battles; I get nothing out of the samey arithmetic of the deck-builders and the roguelikes — ah, great, +2 damage under certain conditions…; and the extreme difficulty of conveying a literary narrative in an interactive game only ever makes itself clearer through all the failures. And yet, despite the minimal challenge, the ancient blocky graphics, the sugary score, the dated trinket-centric design, this and that, the voices of critics across time and space, bleating, urging me to realize that Banjo-Kazooie is baby-trash…despite it all, I’m having a blast and so is my daughter. What is the lesson — the moral lesson? You can feel love. Goodheartedness transcends time and fashion and can subsist on a minimal viable technical substrate. Irony and metagaming come and go like the tide but world-creation is just that: the bringing into existence of bedrock, soil, and all that rests on top.
Of course you see it in music too. A year ago I was moving in the wrong direction on my new album: the direction of irony and metagaming, destroying, on purpose, the heart of the album in an attempt to conceal the feelings of the compositions. I was convinced that the coolness of bewildering technology would offset the loss of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Wrong! I turned around and rediscovered the meanings of the songs; now the software I programmed shines light onto the music — sometimes warm, diffuse light and sometimes the light of a microscope, but never a blinding halogen lamp meant to make you turn away wincing. I stopped wincing myself at cracked notes and unbalanced improvisations, for now I hear the goodheartedness of the band, delivering what I admit without modesty, false or otherwise, are compositions written from a place of basic kindness. You could even say the tunes communicate optimism about music itself…well, let’s not go too far…
Happy birthday Warne and happy birthday S••.