When it was my turn to be exposed to chicken pox, I was taken over to my childhood best friend’s house and made to hang out so I could catch the obnoxious disease.

This was in 1986.

I’d only heard of Nintendo, but that day I got to see it and actually play Super Mario Bros. for the first time. While playing Nintendo hardly makes up for an itchy pox and oatmeal baths, that inaugural gaming experience left an as yet indelible impression.

Many years later, while I was in high school, some technically proficient people came up with video game emulators for the PC and suddenly, I was playing CastleVania III: Dracula’s Curse on my computer.

I hadn’t touched the game since whenever in the ’80s it had been released. I’d never beaten it, and hadn’t broken out my NES for ages, but thanks to Nesticle, I promptly dispatched the Prince of Darkness and got some video game closure. It probably goes without saying, but emulators are pretty sweet for making one’s computer an all-in-one gaming console. Granted, it depends on how hardcore you are, but I never minded having to use the keyboard to play … I was just happy to boot up a ROM and kill zombies, werewolves and vampires without having to mess with wires.

Now, and this will prove how far out of touch I am with what technologies exist, I think it’d be great to have classic video games, be they Atari, Nintendo or whatever else available for play on cell phones. Diablo would port well onto a phone, too … and while I know Blizzard is working on mobile games, it doesn’t seem that War/StarCraft or Diablo are available for cellphones.

VirtualNES provided a Java applet through which you could play a ton of games (but its web-based games have been shut down over legal wrangling) … and most phones have built in Java support and could port those games. I get pretty tired of playing Cubis every day on my commute, particularly since I’m on level 300-something and there’s barely enough time on the game clock to wrangle one win per level every 20 tries. So, I’d dig the chance to play CastleVania on my phone.

If there’s a way to port Java applets of classic video games onto a phone, feel free to let me know where to find it or how to do it. I need a new excuse to avoid looking at people on the subway.