Nelsonic Mario Watch Instructions
Once again, it's time for me to tell a personal story around the topic of this post, if you don't care then make like Jack Webb and get just the facts by skipping to the last paragraph.
A Long Almost Irrelevant Story
In 1989 it's safe to say that my brain was soaked in Super Mario Bros. fandom. It was a gradual progression that started the previous year (1988) when a friend and I had begun playing through Super Mario Bros. 2 together. It was only by a stroke of fortune that I ever got to play it at all. It was October and the game had instantly sold out everywhere. Nintendo had sent out the first issue of Nintendo Power with Super Mario Bros. 2 on the cover to build anticipation and I guess it worked. The national news was carrying footage of mobs converging on Toys R Us in vain to fight over a handful of copies of the game. The local news also ran stories about the new phenomenon. TV Guide ran a two page article about it.
If I hadn't been in the right place at the right time, that TV Guide article might have been the closest I ever came to playing it. Perhaps it's more correct to say that Jason's father was the one in the right place at the right time. As was the fashion in the late '80s, a local grocery store was renting VHS tapes and Nintendo games as a side hustle. Their distributor had included a copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 for them to put out on the shelf. My friend's dad happened to be in the store and saw the clueless clerk unwrapping it to put on the shelf. He snatched it out of the woman's hand to rent it before it ever touched the surface of the shelf. I was visiting the afternoon Jason's father arrived home with the bounty, and we each took a turn experiencing this Nintendo masterpiece in the prime of its youth. That first night when I reluctantly left his apartment to return to my own, my eyes were softly burning and my imagination was engulfed in flame.
Jason's father had no intention of returning the rental. Every day after school, and every Saturday and Sunday morning I returned to my friend Jason's house to play, and every day he and I and occasionally his father discovered new enemies and devised new strategies. Each time I picked up the controller my jumps were more precise and I was able to progress further. We discovered new worlds, fought unexpected bosses found secrets. It was one of the most memorable experiences I've ever had with a video game.
The night we reached Wart's chamber, it was late and we had just gotten there minutes before I had to return home. The boss music engraved itself onto my memory while we tried over and over again, in vain, to defeat the evil toad king, Wart. Nothing seemed to hurt him, and everything hurt me. There were a couple of lives left - a couple of more chances for one of us to find a weakness in the enemy and prevail, but Jason's mother politely and insistently sent me home because it was already well after dark. That night when I closed my eyes, all I could see was Wart's chamber, and all I could hear was that haunting boss music. In my dream I tried over and over again to win, but I was always powerless and always defeated. I awoke in a cold sweat but when I laid back down to sleep, I went right back to that chamber and trying in vain to win against this new and powerful adversary. My mind would not let it go. The next day I came to Jason's house to join forces with my friend and put an end to the toady menace, but his mother answered the door and told me that he was outside playing. I was confused - we were supposed to be bringing the adventure to a close, what was he doing playing outside? It didn't take me long to find him and his little brother playing "Army" with toy guns and the playground as their battlefield. Jason told me that he and his father had stayed up late last night and finished the game without me. He was done. The battle was finished. Simple. No big deal. I didn't recognize or have names for the feelings of betrayal, and the emotional pain of incompleteness let alone know how to respond to them. I picked up a stick which became an M-16 and joined in the imaginary firefight, but the inability to finish the fight with Wart left an indelible mark on my mind and was the fuel for occasional nightmares over the following months.
By the summer of 1989 the tumultuous nature of my childhood had moved me from the custody of my first step-father to my mother and her new husband in a new town. That summer I had a magical day I will never forget. My step-father had campaigned on my behalf to convince my mother that it was not an egregious waste of money and threat to my mental health to rent an NES and let me pick a game of my choosing to play. Super Mario Bros. 2 was still a highly sought-after game that was always sold out or rented out, but against all odds the same day my step-father talked my mother into letting me rent a game, the rental store had a copy available.
As a parent I now recognize that this is what parents do to keep their kids busy while they do...other things. That was the first day that I can remember that I was left by myself with a Nintendo all day long - no time limit, no sister, no mother who kicked me off the TV to watch some stupid sitcom rerun; just hours of uninterrupted focus; just me and the game melding into agency and a tool to accomplish it. On that day I finally closed the loop and stitched in the loose thread that my friend had left hanging in my mind. On that day I finished Super Mario Bros. 2. Spoiler alert: the adventure was all a dream! What a revelation! What euphoria! What could top it? After I don't know how long just staring at Mario snoring in his bed with the words "The End" written in cursive across the screen as the adrenaline and endorphins reluctantly began to ebb, I finally switched off the NES.
I was still high from the exhilaration of finished business when Channel 3 came into focus. I was about to turn the TV off when what of all things should just be coming on but The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Prior to that moment I didn't even know there was such a TV show, let alone what channel or time it would be on. It was complete serendipity. The show was based on the game I had just spent all day playing, and gave even more traction to the things my imagination was doing with the experience. What could possibly top this?
During the commercial break, I had my answer. A commercial for the upcoming movie "The Wizard" came on. When the announcer screamed out "Super...Mario...Brothers...3!" followed by a familiar yet somehow new "kapling!" coin sound effect, my jaw hit the floor. It was almost too much excitement to take. When my mother and step father returned from wherever they had been I tried to share the thoughts racing through my mind but I'm not sure I made much sense with so many ideas trying to escape at once.
All of this is to say that at that point in my life, I was hooked. I loved and wanted all things Mario. That summer when I went with my parents to the one general store in town, the store had stocked a couple of Nelsonic game watches - two of which were Super Mario Bros, one white and one pink. My pre-existing fixation with digital watches and newfound obsession with Super Mario alone would have been enough to make me want one, but it was also a working electronic game. Mind blown! 1989 truly was the future.
I begged my parents for the white Super Mario Bros. watch. They capitulated and I actually owned it for one night before my mother guilted me into returning it to the store. She considered it an egregious waste of $20. Cigarettes, though--those were an investment. Yes, its a little awkward to cart out the familial dysfunction of my childhood, but it's what happened. Life isn't straight edges and square corners and you only get happy endings when you learn to accept joy where you can find it.
I Bought A Nelsonic Mario Watch
Fast forward 32 years (holy baloney, was 1989 really that long ago?) and thanks to the bittersweet magic of Ebay I was able to buy another Nelsonic Super Mario Bros. watch. This time I was able to get the black one I really wanted (although my brief ownership of the white one still holds some fondness for that variant). After my experience with the Zelda watch counterparts, I decided not to lay down for a complete-in-box watch or to bite on the incredibly marked-up "buy-it-now" listings. Instead my quarry was a good old-fashioned Ebay auction for a loose watch where I outmaneuvered and outbid the other hopefuls in the last 5 seconds and scored a pretty good deal on a very clean looking and mostly functional watch.
I Fixed the Sound On The Watch
When the watch arrived, the sound was so faint it was barely detectible - a very common problem, but something the seller conveniently neglected to mention. Like most digital watches, the watch beeps by sending electrical pulses through a piezoelectric buzzer which is a little disc embedded on the metal watch back. In order to do this the watch back is connected to "ground" which is the negative terminal of the battery, and as with most digital watches the positive end of the circuit is completed by a spring that touches the buzzer disc.
I don't know why exactly but the contact surfaces of the buzzer oxidize readily over time. If the watch stays closed and the contact points don't move, they're usually okay because oxidation occurs less readily where the surfaces are pressed together, but when you open the back to change the battery, the contact points shift ever so slightly and the now-oxidized buzzer surface has too much resistance so when you reassemble it very often the watch has little or no sound output from the buzzer. Unfortunately someone out there thinks the problem is that the spring has collapsed so it isn't pushing hard enough to make contact and the solution is to grab the spring with pliers and stretch it out. I've seen several watches damaged this way. While stretching the spring probably "works", it's not because the spring had collapsed, it's because with the spring bent out of shape it increases the contact surface with the buzzer and causes the spring to scratch through the oxidation. It's a terrible solution and defaces the works of the watch. Thank God no one had tried to fix this before I got to it. I opened the back to find a beautifully clean and untampered works. In fact the back had a little rubber gasket around the circumference - I didn't even know they came with these. All that was necessary to restore full sound function was to use a fiberglass pen to polish away the very obvious oxidation (rust/tarnish discoloration on the disc) on the buzzer and re-assemble it.
Instructions for the Nelsonic Super Mario Bros.
What I found really bizarre about the experience was how impossible it was to find a scanned copy of the instruction manual. Not only could I not find it, but every other search result on Google was some obvious malware or scammer website. You know the kind where there's a fake forum post with two imaginary people having an imaginary conversation trying to make it look like it's legit even though it seems sketchy: "Does anyone know where I can find X", "Here is the link: ", "But that link asks for credit card", "Don't worry, I am real person and I just gave them my credit card and got X, it's perfectly legit and safe." Uh huh...sure.
As I say, I couldn't find these instructions ANYWHERE. What I could find were a couple of photographs of parts of the manual. I tried to put them together to make a whole manual, but they were uneven and difficult to read. I tried several tools to digitally flatten them out and make them legible, but in the end they were unsalvageable. What I decided to do instead was use a combination of GIMP, bigjpg.com and Scan Tailor to clean up the illustrations and re-create the text portions of the manual using Google Docs.
The re-created document retains the same basic layout as the original instructions, and I tried to keep the font and sizes relatively similar. The lines don't all wrap in the same places but it's close. I left all of the grammar and punctuation mistakes as they were in the original to keep at least that part authentic.
Exporting this to a PDF in an orientation that matches the original manual proved to be something of a challenge because most PDF export tools do not let you print 4 pages side-by-side. My first attempt was with the Foxit PDF printer module. I defined a custom page size that was 34" x 11" - which is four standard A4 pages wide. This worked, but unfortunately Foxit Printer renders everything as images instead of text so the resultant file was several megabyes in size and no longer had it's text indexed so you couldn't copy-paste or search it. In the end I exported the Google Doc to a normal 8-page PDF then used use pdfresizer.com's N-UP function to print in 4x1 orientation. The drawbacks were that the resolution was somewhat reduced, and pdfresizer doesn't seem to render to anything that isn't A4 size so there were huge areas of whitespace above and below. Fortunately pdfresizer.com also has a cropping tool so I just re-uploaded the results of the N-UP conversion, cropped the top and bottom, and viola, the original manual orientation.
Of course Blogger won't let me upload the PDF directly so instead I posted it to Archive.org where it joins a couple of other Nelsonic Game Watch Manuals.
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