The Wizard is a good movie. I know it doesn’t have the best reputation, and there’s no shortage of folks out there who have never seen it but write it off as just a Nintendo commercial, but I believe there’s a genuinely good movie in there, and I will die on this hill. 

And to that point, it’s not just a Nintendo commercial. It’s a Universal Studios commercial too! 

But back to the main point, The Wizard isn’t some strange, incoherent mess slapped on top of a shallow attempt at promoting Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s a reasonably well acted story about a kid struggling with loss, and gosh darn it, it does its job well! 

But the thing that I never realized when I was a kid was just how far from reality that movie takes place, particularly in terms of video games. The Wizard was very clearly a movie written by someone who fundamentally misunderstood the difference between video games in the 70s and video games in the 90s. 

The Wizard is all about late 80s/early 90s video game culture viewed through a super bizarre lens. The physical objects people play games on are things that existed at the time as far as I know, but the prevalence and culture surrounding them is straight out of bizarro world. 

Take Jimmy’s first game “competition” with Haley. The whole thing stemmed from Coey not believing his eyes when he saw Jimmy’s score of 50,000. It is, at best EXTREMELY unlikely that in the amount of time he was playing the game he would have been able to rack up that kind of score. There’s a glitch in level 2 that would allow you to get there, but even that is somewhat time-consuming, and he’s playing on a PlayChoice cabinet, where time costs quarters. But even barring that, it’s the entire concept of being impressed by a score that’s off here. Getting high scores in video games was the thing to do back in the 70s, but by the time the NES came along, video game scores kind of stopped being a thing. Games continued to keep scores, but games stopped being about getting them as high as possible, and more about completing the adventure, so to speak. 

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Then we have how many PlayChoice cabinets seem to be out in the world. They weren’t exactly rare, but they weren’t the most common cabinets either. Not by a longshot. But here in The Wizard, they're everywhere. Would you occasionally see a PlayChoice cabinet in an arcade? Absolutely. Would you see them littering gas stations and diners across the country? Absolutely not. 

And what about who is playing these things? Bask in the 70s, arcades and video games were aimed at everybody, because everybody played video games. But after the crash of 83 in North America, games started being advertised squarely at kids, specifically boys. So while in the golden age of arcades it was commonplace to see a businessman standing next to a little girl, standing next to an athlete playing games like Space Invaders and Centipede. But when this movie happens, the world was a pretty different place. So the entire subplot about them swindling old people out of their money by betting on their video game skills is completely absurd. 

And we can’t forget about the giant casino/arcade where 12 year old girls dressed in skimpy clothing walk around selling candy cigarettes to kids.

Lucas is another fascinating creature. At this period in time, gaming was commonly still looked down on as some kind of nerdy thing. So a kid like Lucas, who has a case full of games (at last three or four of happen to be Super Mario Bros.) and also has a group of lackeys who treat him like some sort of God thanks to his mad video game skills, comes off as some sort of weird anachronistic relic. He’s portrayed like the bullies in old movies the way his group crowds around him doing his bidding. I can’t say for certain that this kind of situation has never existed in the history of the world, but it sure as heck was never a thing with kids playing video games around me. 

The world of The Wizard never really existed, but as a kid watching it in the early 90s, I always wished that it did. But it’s good enough to have this movie to look back on. It’s a nostalgic trip that’s more than a little flawed, but darn if it isn’t a good time.