Tofer A is without a doubt one of the most wholesome people in the retro gaming world. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he’s a pop-culture expert and retro gaming lover who is a master of short form media, creating engaging videos that you will have no doubt spent hours watching on YouTube, Instagram, and through live events on Twitch. He has a strong love for retro gaming that matches our own, reliving incredible gaming moments with his family and sharing all of the knowledge he’s picked up from a life time of collecting and gaming with players around the world.
I sat down with Tofer to talk about all things retro on the Retro Dodo Podcast, discovering how he got into the world of content creation and working with some of the top gaming companies around the globe. The following article is made up of snippets from our interview, and if you enjoy what you read then definitely check out the full episode to discover more about Tofer’s mystery neighbour, how he juggles his channel and a full-time career, and much more! For now though, let’s get to know Tofer A!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know Tofer A
Retro Dodo: Thanks for joining us Tofer! Let’s kick things off by you giving us a little introduction into you and what you do!
Tofer: I’m Topher A. Kris. Kris Topher. I would say I make video game-related content, which most of it is, but if you’ve been following me long enough, know that there’s… it’s more than that. My channel actually started as a gardening channel.
Retro Dodo: Okay, early doors and we’ve come across something that I didn’t know.
Tofer: Yeah, and I’ve collected video games my whole life. Grew up in the 80s, and I’m in my mid-40s now, so that was like the prime time for me. And I was one of those kids that, I guess my mom taught me at an early age to never get rid of anything. She taught me to be a hoarder, but in a good way. My mom treated me to collecting like Dexter’s dad did to serial killing, where it was like, ‘If you’re gonna have this bad problem, we’re gonna teach you how to do it right.’ So, here we are.
Retro Dodo: So you started as a gardening channel and you’ve moved into gaming. How does a person make that move? Were you wandering around Hyrule, just sort of chopping grass for rupees one day and suddenly thought ‘You know what? I reckon I could combine these together.’
Tofer: So yeah, that’s basically it! No, actually it was a game called Stardew Valley. So my roots with gaming and retro gaming in general just go back to being a kid. My Grandad bought a Miss PAC-MAN arcade machine, the one you can see behind me in my videos. He bought it new… I don’t know what year that was. He bought it from Midway probably early 80s. And so, you know, we go visit my grandparents and my Grandpa… I just have the earliest memories of my grandfather standing there with a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream playing Miss PAC-MAN Every night and so I think that’s where my love came.
Tofer: My grandparents had a NES in their bedroom with a little nine inch CRT on top of it. But the TV was like really far away. So I don’t know how they managed to play it, but they would sit there together as, you know, a couple and play Super Mario Brothers. And so that was probably my earliest memory of that. And when I was younger I always knew I was gonna have kids so it was always this thing of like I want my kids to play this stuff when I get older so I’m keeping everything I collected, so I kept everything even boxes. And when my wife and I had our first child we moved into this house and I started a garden in the backyard. It was just a little garden… can’t say that gardening has been a passion my whole life like games have, but I started a little garden in the backyard and some friends of mine suggested Stardew Valley.
Tofer: It was right after the game had launched early, and so I picked it up and fell in love with that game. I got my wife hooked on it, she fell in love with it and we must have played Stardew Valley for like six months straight, just every night, laying in bed playing Stardew Valley. And so the next spring, when I started my garden, it went from like this little plot to like the whole backyard. I was like, I’m gonna do Stardew Valley in real life. I love making videos. I shot a couple of videos and started an Instagram and started uploading. It was just me in the garden playing, the Stardew Valley music was playing in the background.
Tofer: I have a neighbor, an older gentleman in his 80s, across the street who knew I was a gardener or I was gardening and one day he shows up at my door with this plant, and his glass of wine. He said ‘I brought you this plant, I’m not gonna tell you what it is… it’s a surprise, but I want you to grow it.’ It all felt very Stardew Valley, and I was like, ‘Okay, challenge accepted’. So I took it into my backyard where my garden is and I set it on the gardening area back there and I forgot about it, and it almost died. One day I was looking for something to make a video about and thought ‘I could talk about Doug’s plant,’ so I shot this video explaining this story. And that was my first viral video.
A Link To Tofer’s Gaming Past
Retro Dodo: So let’s go back and talk more about the games that you remember from being a kid then. You’ve mentioned getting your granddad’s arcade machine – what else were you playing as a kid growing up? What were your defining memories of gaming?
Tofer: So I’m 100 % send me on a solo adventure so I can explore’ kind of guy. And I feel like that’s how I, gosh… I feel like that’s how I approach life too. Just let me explore. Let me discover things. So really, Zelda, that was it for me. I played a lot of Mario early on because that was the first thing I discovered. My grandparents had it.
Tofer: The following year… It had to have been the following year after the NES launched, my grandparents on the other side of the family actually got my brother and I a NES. And the box and everything is still sitting up on my shelf behind me. They got us the Mario Duck Hunt combo that came with the light gun. And then we fought over it so badly, my brother and I, that the following year for Christmas, they got my brother his own NES. And at that point, we got the one with the trackpad.
Tofer: There was no good way, maybe sans Nintendo power, to source like what was a good game. And your parents who knew nothing about games certainly weren’t gonna research it, or at least mine weren’t. So for birthdays and stuff, we would get a game and sometimes it was good… and sometimes it was terrible. And even the terrible games were like, you know, I like this game. I have reverence for games that people consider really bad. I love Friday the 13th for the NES. I love Monster Party for the NES. Those aren’t great games by any stretch… pretty bad games actually, but I love them because that’s what we were bought and you get bought one game and you’re like, ‘Well, I’m gonna figure out how to play this game.’
Tofer: We really fought over the games. And so my dad bought me a wood-burning tool for Christmas one year, which is basically a soldering iron. It’s a hot poker. You plug into a wall that gets burning hot and then you just, you can carve your name into wood and stuff with it, right? So my brother and I claimed our stake to our video game cartridges with it.
Tofer: And so my cartridge still has my name carved into it from a wood-burning tool. And that’s why I had it. I’m not huge into like the whole like grading games and getting packaged games. It doesn’t really matter to me. If that’s your thing though, it’s totally cool. So I thought it would be fun to send the one in that I carved my name into and have them grade it.
Experiencing Retro Gaming With A New Generation
Retro Dodo: We’ve seen videos now where 90s kids who have grown up and have children themselves are teaching them how to blow into NES carts and SNES carts to make them work. It’s amazing how we are, even now we’re passing on this kind of knowledge of retro gaming to newer generations. And I’m sure you’re doing it with your kids as well. You’re passing on the things we used to have to do that are no longer problems in the modern world, like turning a SNES on 18 times to make it work or putting on a ZX spectrum and going out and playing for half an hour until it’s ready to go.
Tofer: My 11-year-old son and I are currently playing through Ocarina of Time together on the 3DS at the same time. So I have my 3DS, he has his 3DS. We’re trying to keep level with each other; I don’t want him to get too far ahead of me and I’m not gonna get too far ahead of him.
Retro Dodo: So you experience it together, that’s nice!
Tofer: Yeah, and we were playing last night, and I’m shooting little video segments, and I had this moment with him last week where he had finished the first three temples You know, he did the Deku Tree, and then we did Death Mountain and Zora’s Domain. And then you go back to the castle, and that’s when you grow up. That’s when the time change happens.
Retro Dodo: One of the most iconic cut-scenes in gaming history right there!
Tofer: Exactly! And then it’s seven years later and you’re Adult Link. I was watching him, I took a video of him doing it, watching him walk up to the shrine… and he’s already played all the new Zeldas. He’s played Breath of the Wild, he’s played Tears of the Kingdom. He’s played both of those games multiple times. And so when he walked into the Temple of Time and saw the sword, stuck in the Triforce there, he looks at me and he’s like, ‘It’s the Master Sword, Dad!’ And I’m like, ‘I know, go pull it!’
Tofer: And he walks out there and he goes through the whole sequence and then it flashes around and you go up… and then you come back down, and all of a sudden you’re Adult Link. And I’m watching him go through this in this game, this transition in this game, and I’m realizing that this is what he’s going through right now in real life, because he’s 11, and he’s an early bloomer, and he’s going through his own changes and everything. His voice is getting darker, and he’s getting taller, and all of a sudden he’s got some hair on his lip, it was this pivotal moment of the art, the media is just like meshing with my real life in that moment where it’s like, I’m watching him grow up in a game that I loved growing up while he’s growing up. And I’m like, I can’t process this!
Retro Dodo: One of the things I love about your social channels is that you game with the whole family, it’s a real family affair and you can see the love for games that you all share and the impact they have on your life. It’s very wholesome, and it’s nice to see how much of a big part they play in bringing you all together.
Tofer: My wife… she’s very jumpy person, and so for the for the Halloween season I had her play through the Resident Evil 4 remake on twitch all the way through. She’s never played a Resident Evil game, those are all logged. I think somewhere on my YouTube channel…there’s a lot of interactions that happen in the Twitch, on the Twitch channel. So we have all the viewer points set up and you could purchase things and people can trigger certain events just on their end. And so one of those things is the Ric Flair woo has become really popular on the Twitch channel, know, the ‘woo’. And so while she’s playing, people will trigger the Ric Flair woo and it pops through the headphones and it… she got pretty jumpy. By the end of that playthrough, she was done!
Handheld Gaming & The ModRetro Chromatic
Retro Dodo: Now Let’s talk about the ModRetro Chromatic because I know that like us you’re a huge fan of the handheld and the games that are being released for it. The nostalgia it evokes is amazing! We actually had Palmer on the podcast and talked about how Modretro were bringing the Chromatic to the world. He told us he’s losing money on it but he wants to make the ultimate Game Boy, the only one you will the only one you’ll ever need to buy ever again. He went in-depth into every little detail of the screen, taking us through everything.
Tofer: Uh-huh. Well, that was the thing too; when they sent it to me, they were like, ‘Hey, the CEO wants to have like a one-on-one with you, like a chat, you know, would you be interested?’ I’m like, ‘Sure, I got questions, you know?’ So I ended up sitting down and doing a Zoom meeting and yeah, I got to pick his brain on everything about it.
Tofer: I said ‘Why this? Why did you do this?’ There’s an answer for everything. Everything was thought about. This isn’t anything against Anbernic or anybody like that, but this isn’t some cheap device that you pick up for 80 bucks on Amazon that plays some of the emulators okay. This is a Game Boy Color. Not only that, but it’s the most like a Heirloom Game Boy Color, like a future-proof Game Boy Color. You’re not gonna scratch the screen, you’re not gonna crush the shell, you’re not gonna have your battery explode because it takes AA batteries. It’s super retro, and for somebody like my kids, they pick it up and they’re like ‘Cool, a Game Boy’. But for someone like me, or us who grew up playing those things, it hits it in a spot that you just can’t explain unless you get your hands on one.
Retro Dodo: Talk to me about your handheld collection because we all know you’ve had quite an addiction over the years, as have we all. Are there any that stand out to you as being extra special or meaningful?
Tofer: I’ve always bought into like, every time a company, I mean, I’m looking over at my collection right now and I’ve got like some really weird stuff. My N-Gage is sitting up there. And I remember Nokia releasing the N-Gage. I was actually working at GameStop at the time when they released the N-Gage and I thinking like, ‘My god, we’re finally gonna be able to have a cell phone and a gaming console in the same thing. It’s gonna be fantastic.’ And you know, obviously it was a total flop and failure. There have been so many things since then that have done that. And for me, I’ve never been more excited about an era than I am about the era that we are like entering into.
Tofer: I was thinking about, for my 11 year old son, I was thinking about getting him a PC for Christmas. He’s a Switch kid and he’s been playing the Switch forever. And he’s getting to be that age. He wants to start messing with mods and that sort of stuff. So I actually thought about buying him an ally and a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse because he doesn’t need anything crazy.
Tofer: He’ll be able to pick it up and take it on trips with us. He’ll be able to play it in the living room with us. He’s not gonna be holed up in his bedroom, you know, like in front of a monitor all day long. He can be by the fireplace in the living room and watching movies, all of us playing on our devices together. We wouldn’t have been able to do that before. That’s not something that was possible. And the Switch really did that. In a video recently where I was messing around with the Wii U, we were talking about the Wii U and how this was like, this was the prelude to what we saw with the Switch. And people didn’t understand that at the time, and I think like now in retrospect… you look back at the Wii U, the Wii U looked like like the Virtual Boy, you know, it was like, ‘What a misstep for Nintendo.’ But now that you see where we’re at – the Switch is the Wii U untethered.
Thanks to Tofer A for joining us on the Retro Dodo Podcast and to you for checking out this interview! This article is just a small slice of our 75 minute interview, so make sure to listen back to all the laughs and retro gaming goodness using the player below while on a walk with the dog, on the train to work, or kicking back with your favourite game!
