1990: “Our comic readers have only heard of one video game ever, but we need to stretch this to look like an entire newspaper page.”
I think it’s a nested joke, where that one game totally dominates the kid’s free time, with the clueless parents thinking that’s the only relevant game in existence.
Also, at the time every game was “the Nintendo” to parents, and still was for a couple decades after. Mario had an enormous impact.
I didn’t understand that as a kid and I still don’t understand it. Why would you take so little interest in what your kids like? I don’t even have kids and I still know who Mr Beast is. I can’t imagine having people I love, living in my house, who are into this stuff and not knowing all about it. The only way this kind of parental apathy can possibly make sense to me is if those parents just don’t love their kids. It doesn’t make sense to me.
You actually could work as a Nintendo expert, even back then. Nintendo had a help line for people who got stuck in games, and you could call it and talk to somebody.
Now, did it pay well? Almost certainly not.
This aged well
My life:
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Play video games despite my father’s immense disapproval.
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Learn to program so I can make my own video games.
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Get a job where I’m paid to program.
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Never actually finish any of my own games.
I do still play video games and he does still disapprove but I’m older now than he was when I started playing and he started disapproving so that’s probably not going to change.
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