Learning to Believe, with PaRappa the Rapper

The 90s were such a tumultuous time. Well, we were ten so maybe the world was just a scary place in general. Life was a giant pot of confusion. We didn’t know what was going on; the Internet was just becoming a thing, we were going online but dialup took ages and a lot of us gave up. Confusing times. Perhaps we began to struggle with identity and confidence, wondering where we belong and how we’re ever going to accomplish anything. We go about our days seeing people at their jobs at grocery stores and doctor’s offices, wondering how they got there. We wonder what we will do when we are their age, and how we’ll get there, and are we even smart enough to do it in the first place? Heavy thoughts for a ten-year-old, but we’re special. Everyone says so.

Our parents had to work and make dinner for us when they got home, so we didn’t want to bother them. If it was a rainy or cold evening, we sought refuge in video games (after homework of course). If we’d been good that year maybe we would have had a new video game that we owned. Otherwise we had a five-day rental from the Blockbuster or Giant Eagle (real ones remember Iggle Video).

 It’s in this video store that we see him: our first guru.  He appears on the cover of a cartoonish-looking game for the original Playstation. He is a cartoon dog wearing a large orange beanie. Below him is his name, written in colorful squiggly letters: PaRappa the Rapper.

Level One: Chop Chop Master Onion

An export from Japan (one day we’ll learn so many of our favorite things to watch are exports from Japan), the game follows a young pup of ambiguous age, Parappa, who feels like a giant loser. He’s in love with his friend Sunny, an anthropomorphic flower, and wants to impress her with acts of “manliness”. He is constantly upstaged by Joe Chin, a larger, muscled dog who has looks and money and seems to do everything right. The odds seem stacked against PaRappa, and as a little guy in a big world we can relate to him.

The gameplay was the first of its kind for us. It’s a rhythm game, the precursor to what would eventually become Guitar Hero (don’t argue about this). Buttons flash across the screen and you have to hit them in time to score points. If you mixed up the beat in a way that sounded good you scored more points. But if you mixed up the beats in a bad way you lost points. It was impossible to know which was good and which was bad. We just pressed buttons and hoped for the best.

Parappa’s  motto is very simple. When faced with opposition or a seemingly impossible task, he declares: “I know! I gotta believe!” He repeats this at the start of each level. He says it before taking a karate class with a talking onion (the legendary Chop Chop Master Onion). He says it before passing his driver’s test (how old is this dog?). He says it before selling items at a flea market (this doesn’t make sense, but it’s a cool song). He says it before baking a cake from scratch. And, finally, he says it while pushing in front of others in line for a gas station bathroom so he won’t shit himself on his date. It’s a work of art, this game. The original songs were catchier than they had any right to be. The screen was bright and colorful and the gameplay oddly challenging. And you couldn’t disappoint your favorite rapping pup. He’s gotta believe, and so do you.

Near the end of the game PaRappa puts on a giant show, gets the girl, blah blah blah. We feel accomplished because we helped him achieve this goal. And, again, we’re like 10 years old, so what else have we done lately? But in playing this game and watching PaRappa pursue his goals, he’s planted the seeds in our brains. Having trouble understanding your math homework? You gotta believe! Want to survive longer in the dodgeball game at gym class? Believe! 

But it gets harder to hold onto PaRappa’s simple motto as we age. A two or three-minute song is fun and catchy, but doesn’t capture the amount of work required to learn how to properly bake a cake or drive a car. The spinoff/sequel games get more extreme: the power of belief has characters with no qualifications literally putting out fires, flying airplanes, cutting hair, and so on. Now, of course, if those are jobs you want to have, you’re capable of learning how to do them, but you'll need more than just the power of believing to walk off the street and pilot an airplane. But we like your enthusiasm.

Did PaRappa become a bit more jaded as he aged? Who can say? After all, he’s fictitious and doesn’t have to age. But we’d like to think if PaRappa the Rapper 3 ever came out he’d be an adult stuck in some sort of stupid job and wondering how his friends are doing, as he doesn’t see them much anymore. Through various rap-themed stages he’d have to find himself again, rapping catchy songs about cleaning out his own car or scheduling to have coffee with a friend.

This little pick-me-up (pick me PUP, right?) can still be dredged up from nostalgia when things feel hard. We can’t accomplish our goals if we don’t believe in ourselves first. That’s step one; that’s why the game is rated E. For Everyone.

Thank you for reading. Part 2 of “what I learned from video games” coming soon.

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