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Michelle and Helmut Teubner live in one of those leafy Connecticut suburbs that you see in cynical movies about the '80s like The Ice Storm and Ordinary People. Crew-neck sweaters and late-model Volvos, high-end antique stores and a coveted public-school system. And behind the doors of their Philip Johnson-inspired modern homes, all the marriages are allegedly falling apart.
At least that's what Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore would have you believe. They should spend some time with Michelle and Helmut, who have built more than three decades of marital bliss on mutual give-and-take, romantic drives through the countryside, shared housework and a daily round of bomb-throwing and trash-talking over Dr. Mario. Dr. Mario, which they play on their miraculously still-functioning Nintendo Entertainment System, has been a part of their marriage since 1991; they never play any other game. In a way, the steadiness of the ritual (forty-five minutes each morning, four days a week) and their commitment to the game reflect the kind of quiet perseverance that keeps a marriage together for nearly a lifetime.
— Will Doig
How long have you been married?
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Helmut: Thirty-two years.
What do you do together when you're not gaming? Michelle: We take drives. Normal everyday boring household stuff. Helmut: Today I'm doing some plumbing and replacing some doorknobs.
When did you start playing Dr. Mario together? Helmut: We bought the game, kind of for my daughter and kind of for ourselves, about a year after it came out. We used to play Tetris. That was the big thing before.
Dr. Mario is kind of like Tetris, isn't it? Helmut: Kind of sort of.
My parents sometimes watch TV in separate rooms. I think playing video games together is quite interactive. Helmut: We do the same thing with the TV. Our interests are totally different, so we have two TV sets. I stay in the basement and Michelle stays in the spare bedroom. She watches her stuff, I watch mine. Michelle: That's just in the evenings when I get home from work, though. In the mornings, when we're home together, it's always Dr. Mario. Helmut: We've gotta play. Michelle: We have to play! Helmut: We start the morning off with maybe forty-five minutes of Dr. Mario. We play until the coffee and tea run out.
You get up extra early before work just to play? Michelle: On my workdays we don't play in the morning. I work three days a week. We play in the morning on weekends, and Mondays and Tuesdays are my days off, so we play every Monday and Tuesday morning.
I find my hand-eye coordination is at its worst in the morning, don't you? Michelle: Oh, no. We'll be lying in bed, and we'll look at each other and say, "Do you want to play? Yeah! Let's go!" The console is in our family room. He gets his coffee, I get my tea, and we get down here and just start. Helmut: It's how we get up.
Why Dr. Mario? Helmut: It's the only game we've found so far that we can play simultaneously. I'm not interested in any of the new games. This is something we can play either against the machine or against each other.
Do you ever play against the machine? Michelle: No.
Is it competitive? Both: Absolutely. Helmut: It's brutal sometimes.
Does the competition ever lead to hurt feelings? Michelle: No. Helmut: It's all done in fun. There's bragging rights at stake. If you win three in a row or something like that. You've swept. And there's some trash-talk.
Give me an example. Michelle: Like, in Dr. Mario, you can bomb each other. Whenever you bomb, the other guy can't play when the bombs drop. So Helmut will be like, "I can't believe you're bombing me!" Helmut: There's some swearing too. Michelle: Not when our daughter Joslyn's around.
Is the game ever used to settle an argument? Is it a tension reliever? Michelle: When we're doing stuff around the house and we need to take a break, the break is playing some Dr. Mario. Helmut: We'll stop what we're doing and play for about twenty minutes. Michelle: Twenty minutes of Dr. Mario. Joslyn will come home from New York. She'll be like, "You could at least put down the paddles and say hello!"
Do you always play as the same characters? Helmut: There are no characters. What it is, you've got these different colored squares called viruses, and then you've got things falling down called pills, and you have to drop the pills onto the viruses of the same color. That's basically what it is.
It sounds like a puzzle. My parents are into puzzles. My mom does crosswords and my dad does Sudoku. Michelle: Well, it's lining up stuff and counting. We have the original Nintendo, and then they made Dr. Mario for Nintendo 64, but it was a whole different display. We didn't like it at all.
You have the original Nintendo Entertainment System? Helmut: Yeah. We've already gone through a couple of paddles.
Because you get angry and throw them? Helmut: No.
Michelle, who wins more often? Michelle: Helmut wins more often. But I can bomb better.
Are video games healthy for a marriage? Helmut: It's not unhealthy. Michelle: It's bonding time. We talk, we listen to music when we're doing it. It's a good time for us to be together.
Is a little competition between spouses healthy? Helmut: Yeah. Michelle: I mean, we golf together, but we're not competitive there. Helmut: And it's not as much fun.
Do you have your own individual strategies for winning? Michelle: I'm more of a bomber, wouldn't you say, Helmut? Helmut: Yeah.
Do you ever turn it on when you're entertaining? Michelle: Sometimes we'll have friends over and they'll watch us play and Helmut will say, "I can't believe you're making that move! How could you win? You're terrible!" And then I watch him play and I'm like, "I can't believe you're doing this to me!"
Do your friends play against you? Michelle: My brother and his family would come from California to visit. They love watching us play. Sometimes they'll play against us. If we play somebody else, we let them play at a different level, an easier level. And there was another couple we played with for a while. Helmut: Years ago. Michelle: I don't know if they play as much now. Helmut: They think we're weird.
Do lots of people tell you you're weird? Helmut: Some of our friends. We just say no.
Do you consider yourselves a romantic couple? Helmut: I'm not, I don't think. Michelle: No. Helmut: But we do things together. We enjoy taking rides together. We get in the car and just drive. Michelle: We'll drive for a couple of hours and get some lunch and then get in the car and drive home. We love looking at the scenery.
What's the secret to longevity in marriage? Helmut: Give and take. You've got to give, and early on that was the hardest thing. You start out doing whatever you want to, nobody tells you what to do. Then all of the sudden it's like, "Well, I'll give in this time if you give in the next time." I finally realized I have to give in sometimes if I want to get my way the next time.
If Nintendo were to disappear tomorrow, how would it change your marriage? Helmut: I think I would look around. I haven't looked at a new system in fifteen years. We could try to find another one on eBay.
No, I mean theoretically, how would the absence of video games change your relationship? Helmut: It wouldn't. It's not a big deal. Michelle: It would be sad. Helmut: Yeah. But it's just a game.n°
