A blast of nostalgia with a N64 game controller cable guide.

Do you remember your first gaming console, and the first game you played? For this writer it was the Sega Mega Drive and the attack helicopter game Jungle Strike. The next console to stand out in my memory was the Nintendo 64 and hours of playing Goldeneye with friends.

Multiplayer, however, required multiple controllers, so often I’d need to take my controller to school in my rucksack to play after school. While I stuffed mine in with scant thought for the cable going everywhere, Japanese Twitter user @EF8CR16 shows the different ways the cable could be tidied, and prompted a blast of gaming nostalgia in doing so.

▼ “Way back when, this is what I’d do before putting the controller in
my bike’s basket and cycling over to a friend’s house.”

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1027908821404999680

Other Twitter users declared which style of cable tidying they had gone for back in the day, perhaps saying something about the type of person they are. Certainly the asymmetry of the second photo where the cable is tied around the left-hand side of the controller offends my aesthetic sensibilities!

The tweet spread like wildfire, with more than 150,000 people having voted in a poll for which group they belonged to. At the time of writing, photo #1 (the cross-tie type) was the most popular, with 38 percent of the votes. 28 percent were the one-side heretics of photo #2, 21 percent favoured the diagonal tie of photo #4, and only 13 percent the double-vertical tie of photo #3.

The number of ways to tie around the oddly-shaped controller (a design now left by the wayside), which also prompted a variety of hold styles, wouldn’t have sparked so much interest if the N64 hadn’t been such a seminal device, giving birth to such classics as Ocarina of Time and Super Smash Bros.

▼ Of course, as another Twitter user pointed out,
by the time of Nintendo’s GameCube, cord-wrapping was all academic.

A simple photo brings back so many gaming memories, of cherished hours with friends before our lives of work reared its ugly head. What is your lasting gaming memory? I, for one, am off now to try and find a copy of Jungle Strike to once more take down the drug lord Ortega for old times’ sake.

Source: Twitter/@EF8CR16 via Hachima Kiko
Featured image: Twitter/@EF8CR16