Gather around, children, and I’ll tell you a story about the Great War. Its name was true to its nature - it pitted man against man, red against blue, and blast processing verses brand name. This was the Great War — The Console War.

What the? You’ve never played an NES game? You stupid kids! Get the hell off my lawn, then! No, wait, stay right there – I’m gonna school you a lesson, then. I’m not gonna let you little cockroaches drain out into society without learning something important. After all, you’re just dumb kids, but I can help you. Let me make sure I heard you right – pappy Mitch is getting hard-of-hearing in his old age: You can’t believe your parents played video games?

Well, you’re not alone; it’s that way with every generation. To this day, I’m still in awe of my mom’s innate ability in 16-bit puzzle games. In fact, that might be one of the most reflected-upon memories of my life in gaming –– my mom could kick my ass in Puyo Puyo, and to this day, I have no idea how.

It’s a mystery weapon that has confused soldiers of the Console War since SNES-Day: gamer parents.

When I was born, I was born right at the beginning of the Conflict – NES had established itself in the United States, the Master System was gaining its legs, and the PC was finely ingrained in every gamer’s life. Like most middle-class suburban families at the time, there were video game systems already living in my house by the time I’d fallen out of my mother, and like any self-respecting nerd, I picked up a controller before I’d learned to pick up my fork. My entire family engaged in games on a regular basis, and I wanted nothing more than to be one of them. As a result, my first controller was the ubiquitous NES brick, followed shortly by the Sega Master System’s very own controller brick. I’d spend entire afternoons perched mere feet from our television, training day after day to beat my brother in Double Dare.

My older brother, like in many gamer biopics, was always a hell of a lot better than I was at basically everything. He could make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches light-years better than I could, he was taller, more popular, and he listened to better music than I did, and of course, he could beat the first stage of Star Fox. In my little kid mind, nothing could dilute my brother’s pure ability. He was, in the video game world, invincible.

But when my mom came into the picture, things started to change.

Back then, she was just a working housewife, mother of three kids. It’s not much of a stretch in any span of the imagination to assume that, after plotzing out three babies, she wasn’t nearly as responsive as she may have been when she was a teenager. Contrasting these traits was the fact that she loved playing games with her kids – especially her rebellious eldest son. She’d consistently lose at the hands of my brother, and that consistent sense of defeat found a way to worm its way into the culture of my family – my brother was the ‘game guy’, and only my dad dared challenge him after he’d taken down a couple glasses of wine on holidays.

But then came the Sega Genesis – and with it, the Sega Channel.

All of a sudden, the entire family had access to every type of game they could possibly have wanted – and being a lower-middle class suburban family, it beat the hell out of paying for rentals every weekend. We plopped ourselves in front of the ol’ Blast Processor on a hauntingly consistent schedule – every day, we’d play our favorite games, usually bickering over whose turn was next. I’d blast through platformers and RPGs, my brother would conquer fighting games and racers, my sister would dabble in her usual sports titles –– nothing out of the ordinary, it seemed; our habits carried themselves from the previous generation fairly well.

But then, one fateful evening, we discovered that my mom had an talent for games that she must have been hiding for all these years. Much to my awe, she sat down and hammered out the entire single-player section of Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine on her first playthrough, in one sitting. There’s no telling what my face looked like then, but it probably wasn’t unlike something right out of a friggin’ Merry Melodies cartoon. My mom was one hell of a gamer, and we’d underestimated her all these years.

Of course, fearing a brutal beatdown from my brother, I went and told him as soon as he’d returned from his part-time job at Toys “R” Us – our mom could very well kick our collective asses and return the title belt back to the Mumsy-Dome. As the weeks continued, she conquered game after game, usually only pausing her slash-and-burn techniques to head off to work or to catch some shut-eye. My brother and I watched in awe as she grappled every Sonic game effortlessly, wasted Super Mario World and obliterated the usual Tetris clones. The sudden mystery caught us off guard and my brother and I retreated into the untouchable SNES –– the Genesis quickly became my mom’s domain.

And like a volcano, every event built up to an incredible display that I’d never seen her replicate ever again –– she’d completed Mario 64, 100%, in three days. I remind you, this was an aging woman with a work schedule of nearly 9-5, three busy kids to corral, two mischievous dogs to tame, and a two-story house to keep viable. To this day, I’m still completely blown away as to how she’d completed the feat. Even in my honed gamer state of today, I’ve been unable to redo what she did that week.

After Mario 64, she’d never played another video game for at least eight years – almost as if that tiny spark of youth had been smothered by her weary lifestyle. She returned to her usual routine of watching Soap Operas and surfing the Internet through her usual AOL screenname and never looked back. I was still reeling from the display, never quite full in my understanding of what’d occurred back then.

Her interest in video games just *poof*’d out of existence, and that was all we’d ever heard about it. Every now and then, my mom would comment on a game I’m playing by asking what ever happened to “The Mean Bean Machine,” and I’d always respond that I could find the game for her if she’d wanted; she always declined dejectedly.

Besides the systems my brother and I still cling to, gaming is more or less an artifact of our suburban past these days. That is, until the Wii came into our house one cold November morning.

Watching my mom and my dad wallop eachother in Wii Boxing got me thinking, though – how did these two people, who spent their entire adolescence glued to an Atari joystick or a Telstar controller, come to become so alienated by the very hobby they helped create during the late 70s? And how did that spark pop back into the fray so spontaneously, only to be extinguished in such a hellstorm?

I’m not really sure, and I’m not entirely certain I’m ever going to become qualified enough to truly answer that question. My parents certainly aren’t aware of an answer and they’ve long-since sold off their old gaming machines to prove it. It seems, all the proof I have of their gaming history is in dusty photographs and the story of my mom’s unholy crusade against Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine all those years ago.

It seems, it’ll remain a mystery for now. All I know for sure is, I’m gonna totally mess my kids up by acting like I’d spent my childhood in the woods. When they ask me to play one of their virtual reality games, I’ll totally kick their stupid little kid butts.