What and why, eh? This clearly calls for more than a simple list.
The year: 1989. The place: Rec room in a suburban Boston home. After the family next door got an NES in 1987, the neighborhood began to fill with them. Anyone who's ever lived in Boston knows that rainy days are commonplace enough that a house full of neighborhood kids has to be kept quiet, so one parent after another succumbed to the siren song Nintendo was offering for child control.
There was a strange quirk in the water supply in my neighborhood. Some by-product clearly sought out and selectively destroyed X-bearing sperm cells, so the block had 14 boys on it all clustered in age. One-upping each other at gaming accomplishments was a pretty good way to get bragging rights in the neighborhood. We'd all beaten Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!, we'd mastered RBI Baseball and Blades of Steel, but nobody in the neighborhood could beat Contra without pushing the limits of the Konami Code. My brother and I were struck with an inspiration and after school we would practice our co-op play when together and solo play when alone.
Finally, my brother and I accomplished what was believed to be impossible. Not only did we beat Contra without using the Konami Code, we beat it without losing a life. Practicing a couple of more times to confirm that we were, in fact, that good at communicating with each other, we invited the neighborhood kids over and told them to brace themselves - what they were about to witness was what 20 years later has come to be known as "epic win".
"Holy shit," said my friend Steve. "Whoa!" said Rick and Jared. "You cheated," said Andy, unable to believe his eyes, before we beat the hell out of him (not that we needed an excuse---every neighborhood has a Butt Monkey.) Whenever an argument came up about who was the best at Nintendo, there was never any question. "Super Doucette Bros.", indeed.
