The game opens at night. A meteorite crashes into the hill above a small town, a boy in pajamas goes out to see what happened, and the whole neighborhood seems to be awake. Within a few minutes you’re walking through the dark with the neighbor’s kid complaining at your side, and the music is doing that thing it does, half lullaby and half jangle, that I would recognize from a single bar.

The ritual

The rules have built up over the years without my really deciding them. I only play in the evenings. I don’t use a guide; I know the way. I let the game run at its own pace, which means letting every character finish talking, even the ones I could recite. And I call home.

Saving in EarthBound means phoning your dad. You never see him. He saves your progress, puts money into your account and, if you have been playing for a long time, suggests you take a break. Every year I find that more touching. When I was younger he was a game mechanic. Now he sounds like a parent who knows exactly what you’re like.

The notebook of Octobers

At the back of my map notebook there’s a page that has nothing to do with maps. It’s a list, one line per year, of where I played and how far I got.

Some lines are short. Rented room, tiny TV, gave up in the desert. Some are longer. Played on the big TV at my parents’ place over a long weekend, finished on Sunday night with everyone else asleep. One just says Didn’t. Bad year. and I’m glad I wrote that one down too.

Reading the list is strange. The game is identical every time: the same towns, the same jokes, the same peculiar enemies in the same places. The only thing that changes is the person holding the controller. Twelve times I’ve walked into the same town, and twelve times I’ve been someone slightly different walking in. It works like a mirror that only shows you the distance between years.

Why this game

I’ve wondered why it’s this game and not one of the others I love. Part of it is that EarthBound feels like a season. It begins at night, under a falling star, and it’s full of small-town evenings, odd neighbors and a gloomy town with a cemetery that I always seem to reach right around Halloween. It feels like the year turning.

Part of it is the music, which Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka built out of what sounds like every record they ever loved, run through that warm little sound chip I wrote about in June. And part of it, honestly, is that the game is kind. It’s funny without being cruel and sad without being hopeless, and those are good qualities to visit once a year.

The opposite of New Game Plus

Chrono Trigger helped make “New Game+” a familiar idea: finish the game, then start again with your levels and gear carried over, so the second time through is easier and you can see what you missed. My October ritual is the opposite. Nothing carries over except memory. Every year I start at level one, with a cracked bat and the same modest supply of courage.

That’s the point. I don’t want the second playthrough to be easier. I want it to be the same, so that I can see what’s different.

This year

This year is the first time I’m playing it on the kitchen CRT, and the first time with this journal. Last night I walked out of the house in pajamas, found the meteorite and called my dad. He saved my game and told me to be careful. I’m going to try to reach the end before the clocks change, though the list at the back of the notebook suggests I shouldn’t bet on it.

If you have a game like this — one you go back to not to beat it, but to check on it, or to check on yourself — I hope it’s waiting for you somewhere warm. Mine is in the drawer under the television. The phone line is open.

This summer that controller began to fail. Jump worked when it felt like it. The d-pad registered up only if you pressed it as if you meant it personally. So in September I finally opened it.

How a button works

Inside almost every controller from that era, a button is three layers. There’s the plastic cap you press. Under it sits a rubber dome, and on the underside of the dome is a small pill of conductive carbon. Under that is the circuit board, where two comb-shaped traces sit side by side, almost touching. When you press, the dome collapses, the carbon pill bridges the two combs, and the console sees a button press. When you let go, the rubber springs back.

It’s an elegant, cheap, durable design, and it fails in two ways. The carbon pills wear down and get dirty, and the traces on the board pick up a film of grime and oxidation. Either way, resistance goes up and the press stops registering cleanly. The button feels mushy, or works only when pushed hard, or not at all.

The repair

Mine needed nothing exotic. Most controllers of that generation are held together with ordinary Phillips screws rather than the security screws you find on cartridges, so a small screwdriver was enough. Inside, the board had a faint gray film over the d-pad traces, and the membrane under the jump button was visibly grubby.

I cleaned the traces and the carbon pills with isopropyl alcohol on cotton swabs, gently, until the swabs came away clean. I let everything dry properly — half an hour on a towel, longer than I wanted to wait — and put it back together. Up works again. Jump works again. If cleaning hadn’t been enough, replacement membranes are easy to find, and some people restore worn pills with conductive paint, though I’ve never needed to.

The shiny corner, of course, I left alone. Some wear is a fault. Some wear is a record.

Where the shape came from

The cross-shaped pad was born on a handheld: Gunpei Yokoi’s team at Nintendo used it on the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong in 1982, and it went on to define how we move things around on screens. Every company eventually made its own variation. Some built discs that rock on a central pivot, some used separate arrow buttons, some made crosses with deeper or shallower centers. People can argue about them for hours, and they are all a little right, because a d-pad isn’t just a control. It’s a feel, and the feel you learned first seems correct forever.

The Super Famicom pad settled another question in 1990: four face buttons in a diamond, plus shoulder buttons on top. Most controllers still use that basic layout today.

Memory in the hands

What amazes me is how much the thumb remembers. I can’t recall my phone number from fifteen years ago. But hand me that controller and the stage that wore down the corner, and my thumb finds the path before my head has caught up. Psychologists call this procedural memory, the kind that lives in doing rather than in knowing, and it is remarkably durable. Movements you repeated thousands of times at twelve are still there, filed somewhere below words.

It also makes controllers oddly personal objects. A friend’s pad of the same model feels slightly wrong to me — stiffer here, looser there — because it was worn in by different games and a different hand. Two identical controllers become different over the years, the way two pairs of the same shoes do.

A small plea for the wired ones

Old wired pads have no batteries to leak, no pairing to forget and nothing to charge. When they fail, they fail mechanically, in ways you can see and fix with alcohol and a screwdriver. That’s a kind of friendliness I didn’t appreciate until I started opening things. The Bestiary has a page on the monster that lives under the buttons.

The controller is back in the drawer under the kitchen television, cable loosely coiled, d-pad still shining in one corner. It works perfectly. It just remembers more than I do.

A computer just for sound

Inside the Super Nintendo there is a second, separate little computer whose whole job is audio. It was designed at Sony: an 8-bit processor called the SPC700 paired with a digital signal processor that mixes eight voices at 32,000 samples per second. The main console sends it instructions, and it does the rest on its own.

It has 64 kilobytes of memory. Not 64 kilobytes for the music — 64 kilobytes for everything. The program that plays the song, the song data itself, every instrument sample and, as it turns out, the echo, all have to fit in a space a tiny fraction of the size of a single photo on your phone.

Squeezing the instruments

The instruments are short recorded samples, compressed with a scheme called BRR that packs sixteen samples into nine bytes. Most of them are tiny: a fraction of a second of flute or strings, looped so it can be held for as long as the note needs. When the chip plays a sample back at different pitches, it smooths between the sample points with a gentle interpolation that rounds off the high frequencies.

That smoothing is a big part of the sound people remember. It’s why so much of that music feels warm and a little muffled, as if you were hearing it through a wall in a house where someone you like is playing piano. Nobody chose it as a style. It’s arithmetic. But composers learned to write for it, the way painters learn what their pigments will do.

The price of echo

My favorite detail is the echo. The sound chip has a hardware echo with an eight-tap filter, which is how so many tracks from that era get their sense of space: the cave that rings, the cathedral, the long hallway at night. But the echo needs memory to remember what it just played, and that memory comes out of the same 64 kilobytes.

Every sixteen milliseconds of delay costs two kilobytes. The longest delay, 240 milliseconds, costs thirty. That is almost half of all the memory the sound system has. So every composer and sound programmer faced a very concrete trade: a deep, lush echo, or more instruments. A bigger hall, or a bigger orchestra.

Once you know this, you start hearing the budget. Some soundtracks are dry and dense, with many instruments packed in close. Others are sparse and wet, a few voices drifting in a lot of space. Neither is better. They’re different answers to the same question.

Snapshots of a machine

Fans preserved this music in a lovely way. An SPC file is a snapshot of that little computer at the moment a track begins: its entire 64 kilobytes of memory plus the state of the sound chip, about 66 kilobytes in all. A player that emulates the chip simply switches the snapshot back on, and the song plays exactly as the hardware would play it. A whole soundtrack fits in the space of a couple of ordinary MP3s.

I like that the music isn’t stored as audio at all. It’s stored as the machine, paused.

People who wrote inside the box

Knowing the limits makes me admire the people who worked inside them even more. Yasunori Mitsuda wrote most of Chrono Trigger’s score as his first big job and pushed himself so hard that he ended up with stomach ulcers; Nobuo Uematsu stepped in to help finish it. Uematsu’s own score for Final Fantasy VI still sounds far bigger than the hardware should allow. Hiroki Kikuta’s music for Secret of Mana somehow makes eight voices sound like a forest full of birds. And back in 1990, Yuzo Koshiro’s music for ActRaiser made a lot of people realize what this little chip could do.

This year’s longest-day playlist

• “Corridors of Time” — Chrono Trigger, Yasunori Mitsuda
• “Fear of the Heavens” — Secret of Mana, Hiroki Kikuta
• “Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms” — Super Mario RPG, Yoko Shimomura
• “Terra” — Final Fantasy VI, Nobuo Uematsu
• “Onett” — EarthBound, Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka

I played them in that order on closed-back headphones, with the window open and the city slowly going quiet. Somewhere around the third track the streetlights came on. Somewhere around the fifth I stopped analyzing anything and just listened, which, after all the numbers, is still the best way to hear it.

Silhouette first

Before any color, I fill the shape with a single flat tone and look at it at actual size. If the silhouette doesn’t read as a mug when it’s tiny and gray, no amount of shading will save it.

The body of this mug is nine pixels wide, and the handle adds three more on the right. The handle is a loop: a two-pixel stub at the top, a three-pixel bar down the side, another stub at the bottom. My first version had a handle two pixels thick all the way round, which at actual size looked like a second, smaller mug glued to the first.

Pick the palette before you need it

All the icons here share one small palette of about twenty colors, so the keyboard, the cartridge and the mug look like they belong to the same world. The mug uses seven of those colors, plus the outline:

• Mug body #e5484d
• Shadow side #9b2738
• Highlight #f6f5ff
• Rim #c9cce6
• Tea #9a5b34
• Star #ffd866
• Steam #cfd6ff
• Outline #14132b

Consoles of that era worked the same way, only stricter. The Super Nintendo could show colors from a range of 32,768, but each sprite palette held sixteen entries, and one of those sixteen meant “transparent”. Artists spent whole careers deciding which fifteen colors a character got to keep. Choosing the palette first isn’t a limitation you put up with; it’s half of the design.

Decide where the light is

Every icon on this site is lit from the top left. So the mug gets a single column of near-white along its left edge, a column of darker red down its right edge, and a darker row along the bottom where it curves away from the light.

The classic beginner mistake — I made it for years — is pillow shading: darkening every edge and lightening the middle, as if the object glowed from inside. It looks puffy, and it looks wrong. One light source, applied consistently, does more than any number of extra colors.

The little yellow star on the side is five pixels in a plus shape. I tried a heart first. At actual size it read as a smudge of ketchup.

The outline, and the hole in the handle

The outline is a very dark navy rather than pure black. Black outlines look like holes cut in the screen; a dark, slightly blue outline sits comfortably on the window background and lets the colors beside it stay warm.

Here is my favorite part. The hole in the handle is just transparent pixels, two wide and three tall, and when the outline is drawn around the whole shape it fills that hole completely. No extra drawing needed. At actual size, that small dark block is what tells your eye you could put a finger through it. Remove it and the handle turns into a solid red lump.

Steam, and knowing when to stop

The steam is the only part of any icon here without an outline. Outlined steam looks like a solid object hovering over the cup; without one, it reads as something light and temporary. It’s two thin wisps, each three pixels tall, stepping one pixel at a time so the diagonal stays clean. The first draft had three wisps and looked like a cartoon about an angry hot drink.

Clean diagonals are one of those rules that sound fussy until you see them broken. A line that steps one-one-one looks smooth; one that steps one-two-one looks like a mistake, because it is one. Those stray steps are called jaggies, and hunting them down is most of the polishing.

Tricks that helped

• Look at it at actual size, often. Zoomed in, everything looks fine. The truth is at 1×.
• Flip it horizontally. Your eye gets used to a drawing’s mistakes; mirroring makes them new again.
• Squint. If the shape still reads with your eyes half closed, it’s done.
• Stop earlier than you want to. Most of my ruined icons were finished two edits before I ruined them.

Two hundred and fifty-six decisions

I spent about an evening on this mug, mostly undoing things. It’s a small object in the corner of a small website, and nobody will ever look at it as closely as I just made you. But I love working in a medium where every single unit of the picture was a choice. In a photograph, most pixels just happen. Here, none of them did.

It took seven weeks. The save screen says 93 hours, which tells you how often I left the game running while I wrote things down.

The one-hour rule

The rule was simple: one hour a night, no more, and always stop at a save point in a town. Stopping in a town means the next evening begins somewhere warm, with an inn and a shop and music that doesn’t sound like danger. It sounds trivial, but it changed the whole texture of the game. I never dropped into the middle of a dungeon with no memory of how I got there.

It also meant there was no binge. On the nights I wanted to keep going, I stopped anyway, and the wanting carried over to the next day. By the second week the game had become a place I visited rather than a thing I was finishing.

The notebook

I kept a graph-paper notebook next to the controller the whole time. It began as a list of things to come back to — a locked door, a man in a house who wanted something I didn’t have yet — and grew into the most useful object in the apartment.

There are maps in it, badly drawn. There’s a page of Strago’s Lores with a tick next to each one and, beside the missing ones, guesses about which monster might know it. There’s a two-page spread for Gau. Rages are learned by leaping into fights on the Veldt and coming back later having absorbed what he saw, and the game will not tell you which ones you’re still missing. My notebook did. By the end it looked like a ship’s log kept by someone slowly losing their mind.

I deliberately didn’t look things up unless I was truly stuck. A guide would have saved me hours, but the hours were the point. Every time I found something myself, it went into the notebook in ink.

What slow play shows you

When you play this slowly, you start noticing things the game has been doing all along.

You notice the music. A town theme you have heard a hundred times turns out to have a second section you always walked out of the gate before reaching. You notice the small talk: people say different things after big events, and if you’re in no hurry you go back and listen. You notice the inn prices. You start to have opinions about which shop has the nicer tune.

And you notice the structure. The second half of the game, after the world breaks, eventually hands you an airship and lets you find your friends in almost any order you like. At fifteen I raced through it. At this speed it felt like the game quietly trusting me with its whole world.

The grind as meditation

Every long role-playing game has a part most people call grinding: the same fight, over and over, for experience or an item or a Rage. I expected to hate it. I didn’t. With the notebook open and the kitchen silent, repeating the same battle on the Veldt felt closer to knitting than to work. The hands keep busy, the mind wanders, and every so often something new arrives and goes in the book.

I don’t want to romanticize it too much. Some nights it was simply boring, and I stopped early. But boredom in small doses is underrated. It’s the soil attention grows in.

The end, and after

I reached the final tower in the third week of January with a party that was, frankly, overprepared. The last battle was over quickly. The ending was as good as I remembered, and then the credits rolled and I sat in the dark kitchen feeling something that took me a while to name. It wasn’t sadness exactly. It was the feeling of checking out of a hotel you liked.

The next evening, out of habit, I switched the console on at the usual time and loaded my last save, just to walk around for a bit. Then I went to bed.

If you want to try it

A few things that worked for me:

1. Pick a small, fixed amount of time and keep to it, especially on the good nights.
2. Keep a paper notebook. Writing something down is a different kind of remembering.
3. End every session somewhere safe.
4. Keep a “come back later” list, and actually come back.
5. Don’t measure the playthrough in hours on the clock. Measure it in evenings.

The notebook lives in my Inventory now, between the security bit and the tea mug. It has a few blank pages left. Next winter I’ll need a new one.

It now lives on the kitchen table, which is the only surface in my apartment deep enough for it.

The thunk and the whine

Switching it on is a small ceremony. There is a deep thunk as the degaussing coil fires, a crackle of static across the glass that makes the hair on my forearm stand up, and then the picture blooms out from the middle. After a few minutes the case warms up and the kitchen smells faintly of warm dust, which I’m told is normal and choose to believe.

And there is the whine. A CRT paints its picture one line at a time, and the circuit that sweeps the beam across the screen runs a little under sixteen thousand times a second for the kind of signal old consoles produce. Some of that vibration leaks into the room as a thin, high tone. As a kid I could tell from the hallway whether the television in the living room was on. These days I can’t hear it at all. My younger cousin visited last weekend, walked into the kitchen and winced. Age takes the top notes first.

What scanlines actually are

People talk about scanlines as if they were a filter you add on top of old games. On this television they are simply what happens. A normal broadcast picture is interlaced: one pass draws the odd lines, the next pass draws the even lines in between, and your eye blends the two. Most sixteen-bit consoles skip that trick. They draw every frame on the same set of roughly 240 lines, so the gaps between those lines stay dark. That is what people mean by “240p”, and those dark gaps are the scanlines.

Look closely and a pixel isn’t a square at all. It’s a soft horizontal smear of light with a dark stripe beneath it. Step back and your eye fills in the rest.

Painted for the glass

This matters because the artists of that era drew for this kind of screen, not for the crisp monitor you are probably reading this on. A checkerboard of two colors — dithering — looks like a checkerboard on a modern display. Through a composite cable on a CRT it melts into a third color the palette never had. Waterfalls turn transparent. Skies get gradients. Shadows soften.

My television only has a composite input, the yellow plug, which is the blurriest of the common options. RF through the antenna socket is worse. S-Video is sharper. RGB, which in Europe usually meant a SCART cable, is the sharpest of all and was what the purists wanted. I expected to be annoyed by composite. Instead I keep noticing how many games look better with a little bleed, as if the blur were the last layer of the painting.

I don’t want to be precious about it. Sharp pixels on a modern screen are beautiful in their own way, and a good scanline shader gets surprisingly close to the real thing. It’s more like hearing a song on an old car radio and then on good headphones: same song, different instrument, and some songs were mixed for the car.

Rules for living with a CRT

A few things I’ve learned in a month:

• Play at night. The curved glass reflects every window and lamp in the room.
• Give it a deep table and a wall behind it. The back sticks out further than you think.
• Keep magnets and speakers away from the screen unless you want rainbow stains in the corners. That particular monster has an entry in the Bestiary.
• Never open the back. The tube can hold a dangerous charge long after it has been unplugged. Repairs inside a CRT are for people who know exactly how to discharge one, and I am not one of them.

Somewhere to sit

The strangest change has been in how I play. A monitor on a desk is a workstation; this is a place. I make tea, pull a chair up to the kitchen table, and the little screen glows in the dark like a fireplace. I’ve been playing shorter sessions and enjoying them more.

The note that said WORKS is still taped to the top. It turned out to be the most accurate review I read all year.

Someone had renamed the hero to something I won’t print here: five letters, the kind of name you choose at ten when you’re sure nobody else will ever see it. Their party was level 38. The clock said forty-one hours and seven minutes. They had come very close to the end and then, for whatever reason, stopped.

I never overwrote that file. For years I played in slot one, finished the game twice, and every time I opened the load screen there it was: a stranger’s afternoons, frozen in place.

Why saves die

Here is what nobody tells you at ten: the game on a cartridge is close to permanent, but the save is not. The program lives in mask ROM, which is about as near to carved stone as consumer electronics get. Your progress lives somewhere far more fragile — a small static RAM chip that forgets everything the instant it loses power.

What keeps it powered is a coin cell, usually a CR2032, soldered to the board. It has been feeding that chip a tiny trickle of current every second since the cartridge left the factory. Every cartridge with a battery save is a countdown, and most of them have been counting for thirty years.

This autumn I read one too many forum threads that began with “my save is gone” and finally opened the cartridge. The screws need a 3.8 mm security bit, the same one that opens most cartridges from that era, plus a little patience with the plastic clips. My multimeter read 2.6 volts. A fresh cell measures a little over three. Not dead, but not young either.

Three ways to rescue a save

The first way is to do nothing and hope. That is what I had been doing for years, and it is a perfectly human strategy right up until the day it fails.

The second is the hot swap: solder the new battery in place before removing the old one, so the memory never loses power. People do it successfully all the time. People also slip with a soldering iron all the time.

The third is to make a backup first. A cheap USB cartridge reader can copy the save memory to a file on a computer. It is a few kilobytes, far smaller than the photo I took of the open cartridge. Once the save exists somewhere else, the battery stops being frightening and becomes just another part.

I chose the third. The reader copied the save, I checked the file in an emulator, and there it was: slot three, level 38, 41:07. Then I desoldered the old cell, fitted a new CR2032 with pre-welded tabs (never solder directly onto the body of a coin cell; the heat is bad for it), closed the shell and wrote the save back.

When I turned the console on, the load screen looked exactly as it always had. That was the whole point.

A diary I only read the cover of

I didn’t load the stranger’s file. I thought about it. I wondered where they had stopped, which side quests they had done, whether they had left the party somewhere meaningful or just at whatever save point happened to be nearby. Loading it would have felt like reading someone’s diary because the lock was broken. So I only read the cover, as I always have.

What I keep thinking about is how much of my own childhood is gone in exactly this way. Not the games — I could buy most of them again — but the files. The names I typed. The levels I was proud of. The forty hours. They lived in little chips kept alive by little batteries, and one by one the batteries stopped.

Why this journal exists

This journal is my attempt at a save file that doesn’t depend on a coin cell. I want to write down the slow, unimportant things: which games I keep returning to, what an old television sounds like as it warms up, how a 16×16 icon gets drawn one pixel at a time, which soundtrack I put on when the evenings get dark early.

Entries will be irregular. Some months I’ll be too busy playing to write. If you would like to know when a new one appears, there is an RSS feed — no accounts, no comments, nothing to sign up for. Just pages, like the old instruction manuals.

Pull up a chair. The battery is fresh.