Evan Ratliff

to just lose yourself in with the action figures.

That was a game that came along with a Famicom in 1985.

Because now you didn't even need to use your imagination.

You could just be like, oh, I saw this on the G.I.

And it was the most advanced looking game and playing game that any kid had ever seen.

Joe cartoon today, so let's act that out.

Right, and none of this would have ever happened had it not been for Ronald Reagan.

It was, as Dave points out, it was the first game that you could play and have fun playing forever.

That's right.

And that sounds weird, but here's the story.

So in the late 70s, there was a lot of concern about kids and advertising, about advertising to children.

Like, you could go on and on, finding the hidden worlds, finding the Easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections and other levels that you never even knew existed, banging away hidden bricks.

So the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, got a task force together, and they said, should we ban or regulate this marketing to children?

Like, there were so many discoveries and places to go in Super Mario Bros.

They put together 6,000 pages of testimony from 60...

They created...

sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey, how would you like to be little Josh Clark?

Oh, the oral testimony, 60,000 pages of expert testimony from all these experts on child psychology and health and nutrition, because it had to do with food and sugary candies and stuff like that too.

Put your cigarette down.

How would you like to play a video game, the same one for the next seven hours?