Thinking about the Famicom's 30th birthday, I find myself running through a sort-of rolodex in my brain, remembering all the NES games I adored as kid. Despite glaring difficulty spikes or unforgiving/idiotic level designs, I'll never forget falling in love with the dull, flickering sprites parading around my TV, defeating that evil or rescuing this princess or defending that kingdom over there. There were the plumbers, the ninjas, the elf boy, the turtles, the commandos, and so many others. But what I enjoy most are the marbles.

Marble Madness is insane. I mean, you are controlling marbles through washed out, isometric stages while avoiding pools of acid and evil green Slinkies. The marbles get dizzy bumping into walls too hard and shatter into a million pieces when falling from a high platform. I never really got why I was navigating marbles through tight corridors and snaking walkways, but damn it, there's a timer and there's a finish line; what more reason do I need?

I always think of Marble Madness strictly in a nighttime setting. Countless sleepovers at Brandon's house--who was later homeschooled and eventually disappeared from my life--were spent trying as hard as we could to beat Marble Madness. We'd stifle laughter in the living room, lit only by the TV screen, as his parents and three sisters slept. The first couple of levels, which were a breeze, were played competitively; we'd each try to finish first for that precious timer bonus, and there were no shortages of bumping each other off of suspended platforms to the abyss below.

But things changed as we got to the Silly Race, where the game boldly prompted that "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG." Without fail, we began to work together to try and reach the end in tandem, hurriedly trying to beat out our dwindling timers. Enemies that once cracked the hard outer shell of our blue and red marbles were now miniscule, and running over them awarded a time bonus. "Hurry, hit those guys, your timer is low!" one would invariably urge the other. Not once, though, did we both reach the finish line together, and whomever was lucky enough to move on the final race perished long before reaching the checkered flags. No matter, there was always next weekend, and the weekend after that, until there were no more weekends at all.

Maybe that's why I love Marble Madness so much. It's a game I left unfinished, almost entirely built around a friendship grown to a point and then abandoned. Two pieces of my life, interwoven, that are frozen in time, unlikely to ever flourish or recede. I still have my copy of the game, and even though the dirty grey cartridge can't save high scores, when I see the top scores, I don't read the stock names of programmers with their perfectly even scores ending in a row of zeroes, I see SCOTT and BRANDN, his name shortened by the character limit, alternating up and down the list. Everything I know might be wrong, but I like it this way.