Eight Bits Were Enough

My best friend at the time lived in the flat directly below ours, with his mother. He owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, which meant the two of us spent every afternoon parked in front of it—Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—until his mum called us in for her pasta bake. Those sessions are embedded in me in a way I can’t fully explain. Not nostalgia exactly. More like the memory of a room I can still navigate in the dark.

The NES was Nintendo’s first real home console, a machine for people who are now around forty—which is to say, old. In 8-bit, on flat monochrome backgrounds, you cut down small clusters of pixels and most of the action happened in your head. Without a functioning imagination you were just staring at soulless dots on a flickering CRT. But if you had the mental architecture for it, you became an adventurer, a treasure hunter, a hero. The graphics weren’t a limitation. They were an invitation.

The question is what happens when you hand the thing to someone whose brain has been comprehensively destroyed by 4K televisions, 3D cinema, Dolby surround, and high-end consoles—someone who doesn’t even flinch when photorealistic soldiers explode across a screen in stunning choreographed detail. Maisie Williams and her friends took that experiment on. The results are about what you’d expect, and also somehow more painful than that.