The weekly #WedNESday

February hasn’t been very kind to my free time – with my workplace restructuring and changing my schedule on top of getting sick twice, I haven’t done much outside of work and rest. That’s why it’s a good thing I have a couple of simple content creation series I can fall back on when I just don’t have the time to sink into anything meatier.

One of these is the social media tag #WedNESday – a weekly Wednesday tag that highlights something from the Nintendo Entertainment System. For me, I reserve tags on Twitter for concepts I’d like to categorize and return to, which includes tags for when I post a 100% damage fighting game combo video. However, to this date, I frequently use a weekly tag for NES games as well as CIB (complete in box) tag for items in my collection.

I currently have a couple hundred U.S. NES cartridges, and this stems from entering the video game collecting hobby at the turn of the century. I’d finally obtained a more professional job in 1999 so I could start training for my college course of study, and this allotted me a little more money than I was used to earning up to that point.

I was still immature at this point, and this had my wallet burning. My only passion at the time remained video games, so when I was looking for a new game I dropped money on SEGA Dreamcast discs. But this time also came with my parents being a little more comfortable with me driving outside of town, and FuncoLand finally started becoming a viable shopping option for me.

I had seen advertisements for the shop in magazines before this point, but at 18 years of age, proper video game stores entered my life for the very first time. Since my parents had purchased my NES, it was theirs to sell when I had fully moved on to the Super Nintendo. Thus, the NES I owned when I turned five years old, and the games I had built up over those years, were sold away at a garage sale at some point in the 1990s.

I honestly can’t remember what sparked it, but one day in the summer of 2000, I absolutely had to drive to the city and reclaim a Nintendo Entertainment System to scratch an itch of playing all of the games I had owned and rented when my age was in the single digits. Out of the blue, on a day off work, I set off by myself and traveled to the FuncoLand location I had remembered seeing when my parents shopped at a plaza in the city. There were actually four or five locations in the city, but at the time, this is the one I knew how to get to.

This was a time where everyone was going all-in on the PlayStation, so older game systems kind of sat around and collected dust. I’m sure there were collectors around during this time, but the concept of “retro gaming” hadn’t fully taken its shape that people understand today. As such, at this time a common NES cart ran $10 or less, uncommon carts were typically $20-30 and a “rare” cart peaked at $50-60. With a little help from discounts, I ended up walking out of that FuncoLand that day with an NES system, two controllers, a Zapper, Mega Man 2, Punch-Out!! and Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt for less than $100.

I recall making one more trip by myself to pick out a couple more games, and at this point, I found out my friends were more than willing to revisit all of these NES games with me. So up until I left for college, there was a trip up to FuncoLand every time I received a paycheck, and I would bolster my multiplayer catalog with input from my friends. June to September in 2000, came to be known as “The Summer of NES” for us.

With my interest in NES spiked, I found myself being approached by people who had their NES stored away in an attic or garage for the better part of 10 years. They knew I was into the older games, and they would just give me stacks of NES games because they knew those carts would be going to a good home. Even to this day, there are still a couple of people who are willing to give old games they don’t want anymore because they know I won’t turn around and sell them.

Post 2000 and 2001, I started really cooling down on NES collecting. I turned my attention to the Super Nintendo, SEGA Saturn and Sony PlayStation (1), and that largely remains my focus today, although there is also a little bit of Playstation 2 and Gamecube sprinkled in there. I’ve even sold or traded a few NES carts in recent years, but I’m still left with a collection that would allow me to post a #WedNESday feature for four to five straight years before I would repeat a single game.

I’ve been quite loose on the format and have repeated games as a matter of convenience, but I’ve posted under the #WedNESday tag since May 9, 2018. This period of time has predominately been tweeting a photo of a cartridge and a short description of the game, but I experimented with a new format starting in April last year. This format saw a video of the cartridge in a series of gameplay clips that would run from 20-30 seconds.

I started this as a means to have something original for my Hover account, but just as I surmised would happen when I wrote about social media late year, the Hover platform has disappeared without a trace. As a result, I have rolled that content over into YouTube shorts and this has become the standard format for the content as of this year.

What’s great about this format is it has seen me play a variety of games I haven’t touched in years. Recording the content has become a sort of “lunch break” deal where I sit back and enjoy an NES game for roughly 15-20 minutes in order to get footage to roll into a #WedNESday video. I really got into playing Batman: The Video Game by Sunsoft recently, and the process has really got me wanting to finally take a full dive into Hudson’s Milon’s Secret Castle.

The low time commitment has been a blessing, as it allows me to produce a short video in approximately half an hour or less depending on the game. The process has also forced me to learn a little bit about producing videos in the 9:16 aspect ratio, as I’ll definitely need to lean on that format a little more in order to see online growth through mobile-based applications. Hover was a fantastic experimentation grounds, and I do feel that I learned a lot that could be placed toward another landscape if I decide to do so.

I’ve learned to take a few liberties and zoom in on certain aspects of the gameplay to get the most out of the aspect ratio, and I’m pleased with some of the quick action snippets I’ve gotten out of games such as Super Dodge Ball and Super Spike V’Ball. On the other hand, I’ve found the vertical orientation doesn’t lend itself well to some games, as the video for Dragon Warrior didn’t exactly match what I had envisioned.

We’re now 13 entries into the new format on YouTube, and it’s also let me see how terrible the visibility of Shorts are on the platform. I’m guessing the shorts do not get filtered into the autoplay system of YouTube, and that’s why it’s been difficult to get eyes on these videos. That’s why I’ve been considering a platform such as TikTok, but I’m still not fully convinced I want to pursue that at this time.

Still, I have about 180 cartridges to go through for #WedNESday, and that’s with my current collection. I’ve developed a short list of NES games I’m actively looking for in the shops, and my latest purchase, SNK’s Guerrilla War, became the topic of this week’s entry. What probably makes this process work is how simple and straight-forward so many NES games are. I can just dive into a game immediately and get some instant gratification from the gameplay and easy content to roll into a video.

People throw out the phrase “work smarter, not harder,” but perhaps this #WedNESday process is a case of “work fun, not hard.”