Bunnies and Bullets

When I was five years old, my parents left my brothers and me with a babysitter and went to a church auction. They returned–fantastically, inexplicably, unprecedentedly–with a secondhand ColecoVision and a box of games, and I hopped from foot to foot as my dad delicately connected the console’s wires to the back of the TV in my parents’ bedroom. The controllers had a joystick at the top and a numbered pad below, like a phone, and the buttons needed to be pushed hard.

I had never played a video game before. And I didn’t play them much now, choosing instead to lie on my parents’ bed and watch Dad beat Looping, Fury, and Carnival. Mom was good at Venture, which featured a skull-like character that made an undulating moaning sound when it attacked. My brothers and I called it the Wah-Wah Monster. I couldn’t believe that my parents–adults!–liked playing the games as much as I liked watching them play. They were 28.

Eventually, my brother Nick became a better gamer than my dad. We moved to a bigger house. We got a Nintendo. My parents divorced. My mom bought Nick a Super NES. We sold the ColecoVision in a garage sale somewhere along the way.

Published by Sally

I’m the deputy managing editor at strategy + business, a freelance editor at Belt, and the former web manager at The New Yorker. My writing and editing also has appeared in The New York Times, The Independent, the Observer, the Rumpus, the Cleveland Clinic Press, and Northern Ohio Live. Additionally, I was a founding team member of Maven, a healthcare app for women. I live in Brooklyn with my husband, the musician and writer Mike Errico, and our daughter. Follow me @sally_errico.