I Finally Beat My Dad at Tecmo Bowl

The Signal

I went to Dallas last weekend to see my dad. He's sixty-three. He still has the same NES he bought in 1989, the same沙发, the same small television in the same corner of the living room. The NES is plugged into a power strip he turns on and off with a switch. He'd rather not leave it on standby, he says. I don't know if that matters. He believes it does.

We played Tecmo Bowl. We've been playing Tecmo Bowl since I was eight. The Cowboys versus the Chiefs, always. I was the Cowboys. He was the Chiefs. For twenty-seven years, he won.

Last Saturday I won. 17-14, last drive, I ran it in from the 3-yard line with Bo Jackson. My hands were shaking. My dad sat back and said "there it is" and laughed in a way that made me realize he was relieved more than disappointed. He'd been waiting for this, I think. Not just for me to finally win, but for the game to still matter.

Tecmo Bowl is 2KB of RAM. No patches, no updates, no seasons that reset your progress. The playbooks are the playbooks. The teams are the teams. Bo Jackson is overpowered in exactly the way everyone knows and nobody can do anything about. This is not a limitation the developers negotiated around. It is the game.

What I've been thinking about is how often "limitation" gets treated as a problem to solve, and how often the resolution of the limitation is the thing that makes something good. The groove of a record can't hold infinite music. Tecmo Bowl can't be patched to fix Bo Jackson. The NES can't render a face that looks like a face. These are constraints. They produced something.

I drove back to Bentonville on Sunday with the windows down because the heat in Dallas was already too much for April. I had a Tecmo Bowl cartridge in the passenger seat — a complete-in-box original I found on Greenville Avenue the morning of the game — and I kept looking at it at red lights. An object. A complete thing. A 1989 NES game in a box that was designed in 1989 and printed in 1989 and sealed in 1989 and opened by me in 2026.

I'm not going to beat my dad again for a while. I know that. But I know I can.

What's Spinning

Dire Straits — Brothers in Arms (1985 original pressing, bought at Half Price Books in Dallas). The first CD-era album mastered for vinyl. It sounds different than I expected — which is to say, it sounds right.

The Find

An original NES cartridge of Tecmo Bowl, complete in box, found at a game shop on Greenville Avenue in Dallas for $22.

From the Workbench

Dreamcast laser arrived. Starting the swap this weekend. Filming everything.

One Link

The Stop Killing Games petition. It's the same fight physical media collectors are already having with streaming. Worth signing.