The Nintendo King and the Midlife Crisis

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, black hair wet from the shower and curling above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever released; the wall, floor to ceiling, was amazing to behold, Contri as small as Ahab in front of his whale. He read from the spines of gray plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter, with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987; Jaws, which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two later; Zelda II, a game he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it took forever to arrive.

The wall was both a shrine to his life’s hobby and the backdrop for his work. For a decade, Contri has played a character called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 viewers on YouTube. Fans recognize him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not just an expert on Nintendo but a public face for anyone who grew up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros. theme song thumping in their heart.

The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri—a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Games are the Punk’s life, and thoughts of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 minutes, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game. Each is a combination history lesson and review, delivered with a narrative voice that lets Contri (as writer, director, and star) show off his sense of humor, his knowledge of Nintendo, and occasionally even the depths of his introspection—about being boxed into an endless childhood by videogames, about the inherent sadness of trying to fill a hole in his life with them.

One of Contri’s best videos, a 12-minute piece from 2013 dedicated to the rare and expensive NES game The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, begins with the Punk rustling awake from a fever dream, choking out “I need help.” And, looking at his games: “What am I doing? They’re just videogames. I’m holding like a thousand bucks’ worth right in my hands. That could be going to something useful, something memorable. Like a vacation! I could go anywhere I want. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti …” And there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES games in Tahiti.”

It was a bit, mostly, but as Nintendo celebrates the 33rd birthday of its historic console—and as Contri approaches 38—it was also a sign of the conflict within him. Like a lot of people who were born in the years just before and after the launch of the NES, he is no longer young and not nearly old, neither new nor vintage, and it seems like he has started to feel a bit lost in the in-between. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years old talking about retro videogames,” he told me. “I don’t want that to be the only thing I talk about forever. I think sometimes, ‘Is this where my talent begins and ends?’ ” He says he doesn’t play NES videogames anymore—except when he’s in character—and that it’s different now: It’s work. He admits this in resignation, like it’s sacrilege, the man for whom Nintendo became a career.

“There’s something a little self-deprecating about the Punk character, and about my character too,” says James Rolfe, a 37-year-old godfather of YouTube gamers who plays a character named the Angry Video Game Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All these YouTube characters have some kind of element of sadness to them. Thinking back to childhood, were we wasting our time with games? Were we really entertaining ourselves? Were we really happy?”

Contri is a 37-year-old man who has been playing videogames his entire life. His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his parents bought him an NES console, and preadolescent Pat started spending hours in his family’s rec room in front of a small Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school, he played Super Nintendo and then PC games, and rediscovered the NES while he was in college. After he graduated, in 2002, he eventually settled into a job in market research, working 50-plus hours a week in Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby North Brunswick. He hated it.

One day in 2006, he came across the Angry Video Game Nerd’s irascible game reviews, and the sight of a character drinking beer and railing about the game Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I saw the AVGN doing well, but I saw a lot of bad videos out there too,” Contri says. “I’d watch them and think, ‘Not only does this person not know how to play the game, he didn’t include any history of it.’ At the very least, I thought I could do better.”

Contri made his first video, six and a half minutes of him as the Punk playing a couple of NES baseball games before landing on the best, Baseball Stars. He chose the nickname because he thought it had a ring to it, had an attitude, and, well, women he’d dated told him he acted like a punk. It also captured the overpowering feeling he got when he played the games; the NES made him happy, and the character was a weird, happy extension of who Contri really was.
He made his second video a month later, about The Three Stooges, and then another one after that. He started pumping out videos, each loaded with enough humor, personality, and insider knowledge to set it apart from everything else online. In 2012, a few years after leaving New Jersey for San Diego, he quit his market research job and started making videos full time.

Today Contri gets flown across the country up to a dozen times a year to attend videogame conventions, where he often arrives sleep-deprived and stressed, carving a smile in front of his fans. He schleps suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and DVDs across banquet hallways and sits at a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a guy with that perpetual five-o’clock shadow and the foppish hair, selling his merchandise and signing his name a hundred times on NES consoles and controllers and game cartridges. He earns six figures a year, his revenue coming from merchandise and book royalties; from YouTube ads and the sponsors of his two podcasts, Not So Common, which he hosts by himself, and the Completely Unnecessary Podcast, a show he cohosts with a friend named Ian Ferguson; from the Patreon supporters whose monthly donations help pay for his content.

As of earlier this year, the NES Punk videos were the least lucrative and most time-consuming of all Contri’s ventures. One of his most recent videos, about a game called Stadium Events, took him more than 50 hours to create—much of that time spent researching the mysterious rarity of the game—and it attracted just over 70,000 views at last count, earning him a little less than $400. A low return, by any measure, and he’s started to think more and more about retiring the character and maybe doing something else with his time.

“For the last year and a half, I’ve never really known what he does for fun,” says Ferguson, who met Contri in 2008. “I can’t think of one specific hobby aside from exercise that he does that’s completely disconnected from work. His work was once his hobby, and now he’s married to that work.” Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other interests: “I like movies. I love the zoo. I like watching sports on TV. I hate the Patriots, but who doesn’t?” He’s never been married, has no kids, and lives alone, unless you count the Punk. “The Punk is just a character,” he says. “Sometimes people think it’s really me. But at some point this will end.”

In the game room where he films the videos, Contri lingered over the wall of NES cartridge games he no longer plays for fun. “I don’t know if they give me a feeling anymore,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’m still looking for that feeling. Most of us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe he meant the generation of adults who’d loved the NES as kids, or the obsessed people like him who’d collected the whole North American library (he keeps three games in a bank vault), or the really insane people who would want an ancient, mint-condition NES holographic cereal box, which he proudly showed me.

Contri doesn’t know what to do—walk the Punk into the sunset, or kill the character off. Nintendo is as popular as ever, which isn’t making the decision any easier. The Switch—a Nintendo console designed for middle-aged people as much as it is for anyone—has sold more than 14 million units since it was released last year. Stores spent a year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic. And in the summer of 2016, Contri released a 437-page, $60 hardback coffee-table-sized bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985–1995, which took him nearly three years to finish ¹. It includes reviews of every mainstream NES game released in the US along with information and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote 450 of the 800-plus reviews, then compiled it all before publishing it himself.

It suffocated him but turned into a surprise hit—with two print runs totaling 10,000 copies—thanks in part to his meticulous research and the surge in interest in retro NES games. It was a big reason why he was able to buy his house in San Diego, where Nintendo is on the walls and in the bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves, in the beady plastic eyes of the stuffed animals and on his personalized wristbands and the five-o’clock shadow that his YouTube character can never seem to get rid of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him the strange bounty of internet fame, not to mention a ton of crazy stuff he has collected for no other reason than that it probably made him feel like a kid.

He has already planned a sequel to the book, a guide for the Super Nintendo library that he hopes to publish next year. “I am happy, I think—I’ll definitely be happy, once I finish the next book,” he says. Contri’s hair is going a little gray, and he mentions that maybe the Punk might survive to have totally white hair—that maybe he could still be talking about games 30 years from now, like old men talking about toy train sets in the corners of convention ballrooms. He has enough games to make it all last forever. The Punk, an old guy, hunched over, still collecting, still playing the ancient games, still living in a house full of Nintendo.