Plumber Power-Up Anthem

Lyrics

Living room carpet, October 1985.
The static-and-ozone smell of a new television.
This little gray rectangle in my hands.
Two red buttons.
A simple black cross for my thumb.

But before this, a summer in Kyoto.
Humid air sticking to sheets of graph paper.
Shigeru Miyamoto, thirty-two years old, drawing castles in pencil squares.
Takashi Tezuka, twenty-five, making the physics feel like flight.
Three in the morning, the air conditioner rattles.
They just need the jump to feel right.

And all of it, all of it comes down to this.
Thumb presses right on the D-pad.
A to the sky.
Hold it for the height, tap it for the hop.
A perfect, clean arc from the first brick to the flagpole.
Don't think, just run.

Koji Kondo wrote the anthem for a kingdom on a tiny keyboard.
A song for moving forward, forever.
They couldn't animate the enemy they wanted,
so a chestnut learned to walk, angry and simple.
The magic wasn't in the power.
The magic was in the limits.

And all of it, all of it comes down to this.
Thumb presses right on the D-pad.
A to the sky.
Hold it for the height, tap it for the hop.
A perfect, clean arc from the first brick to the flagpole.
Don't think, just run.

September 13th, 1985.
A Famicom cartridge slides into its slot.
A signal travels from a chip, through a wire, to a screen.
A feeling sent out from that one small, hot room.
A new way to move.
A new way to fly.

And now, it's just you and me.
This plastic cross.
These two red buttons.
The start of World 1-1.
Again.
And again.