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The Nintendo Project is a chronicle of playing every game ever released for the NES1.

The Nintendo Project is a chronicle of a life.

My earliest memory is when I was two and a half. In my earliest memory, I was already playing video games. That is, my earliest memory is not of playing my first video game, or getting a video game system. It is of playing the games. My first system was a Commodore 64. My first game was Dr. Seuss Fix-Up the Mix-Up Puzzler. Thus I am forced to consider myself as a video gamer. My entire remembered life has been at least partially ordered by video games.

I am also part of what others have called the Nintendo Generation. I got a NES when I was six. And I played it faithfully and avidly for years. I went on to other things, yes - a SNES when I was nine. A few years from 1995 to 1999 where I was primarily a PC gamer. Then college and the like. But the NES is the system I have the firmest memories of. It's the system where I can sit down with a game and discover that twenty year old muscle memory is still good.

This is not a review blog of NES games. Rather, it is an attempt to understand myself and my life. I am 27. I have been married, am in the final months of my PhD program, and I think too much. I want to understand myself. And so I'm playing every NES game ever, in the hopes that by understanding them I can understand my childhood, and somehow understand everything.

1. Some terms - I am going to play every game released for consumer purchase in the United States of America for the Nintendo Entertainment System that received the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality (i.e. that were properly licensed games). I will not play unlicensed games, foreign releases, hacks, weird demo things, or anything like that. I will play each game for at least half an hour. I will have to avoid games that I do not have the peripherals to play - that at the very least means no R.O.B. or Power Pad games.