Showing Kids an NES

My best friend back then lived with his mother in the apartment downstairs, and they had an NES. That meant we spent whole days on Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before we’d demolish whatever pasta bake his mother had made. The thing is, most of you weren’t even born yet.

The NES was a revelation for people who are now around forty—which is to say, ancient. In 8-bit pixels they’d hack away at little blocky shapes on plain backgrounds. The real action happened in your head. Without some imagination, all you saw on that flickering tube TV was a handful of soulless dots. But if you had the knack for it, you became an adventurer, a treasure hunter, a god.

But what happens when you put that machine in front of people whose brains have been shredded by 4K televisions and 3D cinema and high-end consoles? Kids who don’t even blink when soldiers explode in pristine graphics? Maisie Williams and some of her friends actually ran this experiment.