Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.

It has been two decades since Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door originally came out on July 22nd, 2004. I was approaching my thirteenth birthday back then, just about a month out from it. I was also a month into the worst period of my life. I was not aware that this game was coming out, despite my love for the original Paper Mario. There wasn’t much in the way of video game news accessible to me other than what little I could glean from the posters at the video game store attached to the place my family rented our videos, but that only worked as a “news source” if I could go into the store and ask people about what I was seeing. I rarely chose to do that, though, since I didn’t have money for video games and was busy helping my mother take care of my baby sibling anyway. Starting the year prior, in 2003, pretty much all of my spare time was occupied with that–making sure my youngest sibling was cared for when my mother was busy with my other siblings–or with surviving my brother’s teenage years. I was still homeschooled back then, so it wasn’t like I had anywhere else I could go to learn about new games via socializing with kids my age (all my friends had moved away years prior) or to get enough safe leisure time to turn my mind towards potential gaming news of any kind (that I might have been able to dig up on our early internet connection), either.

It is clear to me that I was not in a place–physical, mental, or emotional–to spend much time playing video games, but my memories of that period of my life, from the start of 2004 until the summer of 2006, are so scattered that I might actually have played plenty and just forgotten them in the fog of that horrible timespan. I know for certain that, at some point in those years, I played Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. I don’t remember when or how. I might have rented it, played it through while visiting my first high school friend, or even gotten it as a present. All I know is that I eventually lost access to it and, during my high school years following the lifting of the fog (sometime in the early fall of 2006), I experienced it again, but only in little chunks through the lens of my little group of theater friends playing video games together.

Trying to remember anything of my initial experience of the game is difficult. I have all these loose fragments floating around in my mind, mixed into periods of inscrutable fog and sometimes overlapped by solid (but small) chunks of my second playthrough, years later, that are further scattered amidst memories of Super Smash Brothers Melee and Kirby Air Ride, the multiplayer games of choice for my little group of high school friends. I don’t remember when I first beat it. I don’t remember when I first played it. All I know is that I have clear memories of fragments of it and a general sense of the rest of it. Glimpses of a train. The knowledge that the X-Nauts have a base on the moon. Somehow knowing that Vivian was the first trans character I ever encountered in a video game (the moment and method of learning this information is another victim of this fragmentation and fog). The difficulty involved in getting a Yoshi ally with the right coloration and hair. Fighting my way through the Glitz Pit the first time and the comfortable life you get to live as the champion the second time you fight through it (though I apparently forgot you had to fight through it a second time). Goombella being my favorite companion. Buying the Super Luigi books from the local shop and never having enough money. Turning sideways and folding up into a boat or airplane, but not that you get the ability to roll up into a tube. Scattered moments that encompass almost the entire game but leave out many important parts and all the interstitial segments. I have no idea what the final boss looks like, but I can perfectly picture exactly what waits at the bottom of The Pit Of 100 Trials. I know I loved playing the game, but I didn’t remember why I loved it, outside of a few snippets here or there.

Following its release on the Nintendo Switch, I’ve been playing through The Thousand-Year Door again and, until recently, was having a difficult time sitting down to play it for very long. Any time I did, I’d get anxious. I’d start to feel even more fidgety and antsy than usual, which is saying a lot given my inability to sit still for very long, no matter what I’m doing. The only time I could comfortably play it for more than an hour or two at a time was when I was playing it during my vacation with two of my younger siblings nearby. It occurred to me last night, as I opened the game, wandered around a little, and then closed it because I was just too stressed from a reoccurrence of my eye issues (first time since 2022) to handle how I felt when I played this game, why that might be the case.

You see, during those years of fog, I endured the worst abuse I’d ever experienced from my brother as the mostly verbal and sometimes physical violence escalated into physical and verbal abuse beyond even my prior-to-then wildest nightmares (most of which I’ve forgotten as a mixture of self-defense and healing from said trauma). He was a teen, then, and getting his first taste of freedom. He could come and go as he pleased, mostly, and sharing a room with him meant that I was disturbed every time he came home, even when he was in a good mood, which ruined my ability to sleep, an already precarious thing since I was sharing a room with my abuser. When he wasn’t in a good mood, I walked on eggshells because I was his favorite target. I listened for him constantly, since I could read his temperament by the sound of his steps, and I always kept track of where my siblings were in case he went near them when he was upset and I’d need to intervene to protect them. I had to watch out for my baby sibling for all those reasons and then all the baby reasons too, since our mother was often busy with homeschooling lessons for my younger siblings, dealing with my brother, or dealing with her own emotions. I didn’t do much those years that wasn’t interrupted by some kind of abuse, need to act, or labor demand placed on me by my parents. Everything I did do, I either did before my brother woke up, between the time he left for school and my other siblings woke up, or in tiny fits and starts. Every part of my life, not just my memories of this Paper Mario game, from those years is fragmented and foggy as a result of living in this constant start of anxiety, fear, and readiness to act.

Between that initial chopped up and interrupted experience of the game and the way I played it in fragments with my high school friends, I have two very different strong emotional connections with playing this game in tiny pieces. Nowadays, when I’m no longer repressing those memories of my childhood and traumatic teen years, I feel myself caught between these negative and positive associations. It’s no wonder that I can’t make myself play it for very long, considering the way my emotions are constantly flipping from one extreme to another as I encounter parts of the game that are more firmly tied to one experience of it than the other. How can I focus on the game and my current experience of it when my heart is hammering because a thump against the wall separating me from my neighbors came right as I was hitting a point in the game that is strongly tied to memories of keeping one ear open for the sound of my brother thumping angrily down the stairs? Or when I feel myself relax and sit back in the way I used to, as one of the largest of my group of high school friends, when I hit a period that reminds me of how we used to sit together on beds, chairs, couches, or patches of rug to crowd around each other while taking turns with a game? There’s so much wildly varying emotion tied to this game that I can barely play it unless I’ve got enough of my own emotional resilience built up in the present to shrug off these invasive associations from the past.

I would love to be able to play through this game and untangle this knot of memories and feelings. Unfortunately, the demands of my life at present mean that I can still only play it in bits and pieces. Sure, it’s not in the half-hour chunks I played most games during my early teen years or in the pass-it-around-without-a-timer chunks of my later teen years since now I can actually invest one or two hours at a time, reliably, but the interruptions still feel the same. Sure, now I’m watching the clock to make sure I go to bed on time and keeping an eye open for when the timer turns my stair lights off (which is the sign that it is time for bed if I haven’t already gone), but that’s not enough to break me from my first associations with the game because I’m still playing it with part of my mind focused on the world around me. It’s enough to break the positive associations, unfortunately, especially considering that I only talk to one of those high school friends still (and even then only very occasionally), which means I find myself increasingly unwilling to play the game. Especially considering how often I feel emotionally drained and burned out by life already. Half the reason I’m ever able to push through all that is because I really want to free myself from the stranglehold of these awful associations and find a way to just enjoy this game again. Or, barring that, at least continue to confront said associations since this little foray into the mixed parts of my teen years has been a gold mine for things I still need to work through with my therapist.

All of this is a lot to put on a silly little video game. It feels so strange to write that Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door has evoked such a strong reaction in me, but I can’t deny it. This game, somehow, holds so much associated trauma that I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to play it and experience it as a game on its own. It might always be tied to that horrible period of my life, a casualty of time and chance. All of which was all apparently something I could only learn by tripping over it because, as I’ve said, I did my best to forgot a lot of that period of my life. In retrospect, though, it kind of explains why I’ve never taken the time to replay it despite owning the GameCube version of the game for well over a decade. Clearly my subconscious knew better than to subject me to this difficult experience when I wasn’t ready for it. I’m not sure I’m entirely ready for it now, even though I’m about 5/7ths of the way through the game, since I’ve got plenty enough going on with work and life in general. At least, this time around, I’ve got the tools to deal with this stuff as it comes up. I’d prefer to not need to deal with any of it, of course. I’d much rather not be dealing with childhood trauma showing up around a bittersweetly beloved video game since I’d much rather not have been traumatized at all… But that ship has sailed and all I can do now is deal with it as it comes up.

Maybe that alone–being able to make choices this time around rather than following the sole path of survival–will be enough to break me free of these old associations. For now, though, I know that I’ve gotten five Crystal Stars and I’m having a difficult time making myself start to quest line required to get on the train for reasons I am unable to make clear to myself. I mean, I know it’s a negative association thing, but I can’t figure out what this one might be and there’s a persistent part of me suggesting that maybe I should just leave the door hiding these things shut. Not all memories need to be recovered. Forgetting can be a blessing. Still, I well know that those sorts of things have a way of working themselves free eventually. Maybe being the one to open the door and giving myself even a modicum of control will make a difference. Better to open a door than to have it kicked open, after all. You can always close a door you’ve opened and that’s not always true if it has been knocked off its hinges.