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John Cena on his love for the NES and its games, being floored by Switch, Zelda: BotW exceeding expectations
Coming from a Sports Illustrated interview with John Cena...
“I am a certainly a child of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, as the gamer Hall of Famers attribute it. That eight-bit graphical interface has truly stood the test of time, and now you see so many vintage designs and content available in eight-bit. I grew up with the start of the original eight games licensed from Nintendo—Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., which was before Super Mario Bros., then Super Mario Bros., Ice Climber, Urban Champion, Gyromite with the robot. You name it, I had it. I grew up through all that.
I love Super Tecmo Bowl, that was definitely my favorite game. loved Baseball Stars, which is a title by a now obsolete company called SNK. That was my wheelhouse. The thing that attracted me most was you could go as far into the games as you wanted. You could sit down and read the instructions, and this is how geeky I get, you could subscribe to Nintendo Power, which was before the internet cheat sheet. Famous games, like Punch Out, even without the code, Contra, the Metal Gears of the world, even Kung Fu, one of the original eight-bit titles, you’d get to a certain level but you couldn’t get past it without buckling down and putting some hours into the game. That’s what I find has been recreated with the Switch.
I’m floored by the technology of the Switch, and the versatility of the console is second to none. It really is a home console that you can take anywhere. I’ve seen situations where home consoles can be transported, and it’s like a big over-the-shoulder carry-on bag, but the versatility of this thing is groundbreaking. When you undock the Switch from its home console and go into handheld, the controller feels the same, it is the same, and it reacts the same. The screen on the undocked handheld system is big enough to be its own world, but small enough to carry anywhere.
I was in this confined living room space where you got lost in the game ‘cause I’m playing on this 60-inch TV, and then you undock and continue to play the game. They had this molecular glass, which dropped and revealed I was in the middle of the desert. I never once knew the change in environment. It’s truly, truly tremendous. In typical Nintendo fashion, I was playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now I haven’t played Legend of Zelda since the gold cartridge eight-bit versions, so I just needed to pick up and start going, and I did. The go-anywhere aspect of the game is incredible, and I know for fans of the Zelda franchise, they’re going to flip. I know for fans of Nintendo, they’re going to go crazy. Everyone is speculating about how good the game actually is—it’s going to exceed expectations and, for a dude like me, a 40-year-old [in April] who hasn’t played Zelda since the gold cartridge, I sat down and was hooked. In a matter of 30-minutes, I didn’t want to put it down.”