1-800-How's my Gaming?

I can sit and watch my 11 year old play Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for hours and it never ceases to amaze me how proficient he has become.  Clearly it didn't always come this easy to him, and that makes me think back to my younger years.  Whereas now companies like Brady Games put out catalogues giving players the in-depth scoop on EVERY aspect of the games and YouTube-rs post video walkthroughs (virtual spoilers if you will) that tell you step-by-step how to beat a game, gamers from MY generation were forced to spend hours trying to figure out the puzzles by ourselves.  In effect, Nintendo and other such companies raised an army of Beta testers.  It was the gamers of the 70s and 80s who exposed every glitch, bug and weakness of the game designs.

When we didn't have time to beat our heads against the wall trying over and over to figure out the obscure puzzles that each game presented (think Castlevania) we had 2 choices:

1)  we had to subscribe to Nintendo Power magazine and hope that they articled our exact dilemma between their pages (or be one of those lucky enough to have this magazine in their supermarket or bookstore so you could peruse its contents on the newsstand).  This would suffice temporarily until the owner caught you "sneaking a peek" and then you might as well have had a men's magazine in your hands for the ire it brought.

OR....

2) as a last ditch effort we called the Nintendo Game Counselor Hotline.  The adverts would always require you to get a parent's permission before calling, but once I placed the call I don't ever remember them asking to speak to my mom before I was connected to one of their "Gurus". It wasn't as though I would call for every little problem I encountered in a game, but I remember all too well the expression on my mom's face when the phone bill arrived...  I could have made a long distance call to Guam during peak hours for less than it cost to defeat the last few palaces of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.  Don't get my wrong, despite the invoice amount at the bottom of our phone bill you really couldn't put a price on being able to forge ahead in your game (not to mention the bragging rights you had for being the first person on your block to get that far -- even if you needed help).

Looking back on it now I realize the value these challenges had in terms of making us better problem solvers.  For those that didn't have the option of calling a Hotline they became stronger through trial and error (employing EVERY item in their inventory for EVERY possible purpose regardless of how ludicrous it seemed) and for those who did end up making a call (or several) we became experts at shorthand (furiously jotting game codes, cheats, and secrets into our spiral notebooks like crib notes for an exam) and experienced negotiators when it came time to repaying the debts incurred trying to advance further in our games.