Game On

While reading over my previous post, I found it kind of comical that I pretty much used the Bon Jovi “I've seen a million faces and I've rocked them all” analogy when describing my love of books. So, kudos to myself for that one.

I had to explain the concept of Manga to the new lady at work today, and soon after that I had to explain what an RPG novel is. I name checked Warcraft as an example of a role playing game. I loved the blank face of disinterest I received in return. That's the stuff of dreams when you are trying to find out if a new hire is going to shit on your entire work world or whether they are going to actually help you get things done. Soon after the Warcraft reference I got in a few copies of the Warcraft video game guide and it's the sort of near synchronous event that happens fairly often at work for some reason. I love that stuff.

I can't tell you how many times I have thought of some obscure book or author only to pull that very book out of the next box. I swear I must be like some sort of totally useless book clairvoyant or some such shit. Uncanny.

As I am wont to do at my intellectually unstimulating job, my mind was wandering about over the topic of video gaming and I realized at that moment just how much of a dork I have been over the years.

So in the spirit of full disclosure I am now going to give a brief, tortuous, and purely pointless rundown of my history with video games over the years.

It won't quite be chronological because, well, my memory isn't even vaguely linear. So bear with me. Here we go.

1979(ish): Coming back to the states from a five-year stint in gay Paris, my parents take a month long sabbatical to Tokyo to visit friends leaving my brother and I to fend for ourselves with my Aunt in the insanely American town of Louisville, Ohio.

(As a side note – In Marilyn Manson's autobiography he describes an incident during which he apparently has sex with some local Louisville girl who by his account is way out of his league, which is forcing me to admit that I at least read part of that book.)

My Aunt has this crazy box that you plug into the TV. This box is called Pong. I am a duck to water. A duck who plays Pong by himself for many hours, and a duck who literally takes to water during swim lessons at the Y (yes, for those who actually read my shit, the same Y at which I am mistaken for a girl.)

1980(ish): My dad gets a bug up his ass in his new bachelor pad and decides on an apparent whim to buy a Radio Shack TRS80 home computer. The damn thing uses a tape deck for memory. We discover Pyramid, a text-based game, and waste countless hours dying in a verbal wonderland.

My dad shakily enters the world of cooking with his now infamous concoction: the mac-n-chee-pinto-bean-tuna-fish casserole. His well-deserved ridicule has begun. It takes many years for him to exonerate himself by becoming a virtual genius when it comes to cooking on a grill (seriously, the guy is a real talent).

1981(ish): Atari is the shit in console form. There are two camps in middle school: those with Atari and those without. Care to guess our side of the fence?

1982(ish): In an anticlimactic but no less welcomed turn of events, the Cramer family acquires it's first Atari 2600 console. With the console is the ridiculous game Combat, which while advertising as having 27 different games in it, is really just 27 versions of the same monocolored shitty game. No matter, in our house there is a new king and his name is Atari.

In the next couple of years the spirit of aggressive hostility that is borne between my brother and me is honed to a razor sharpness. This will later culminate in his putting a box of thumbtacks under my bedside rug as a good morning gift which I return in kind with a face punch.

We acquire more stunners like Frogger, Soccer, Missile Command (which I fall asleep playing and wake up two hours later having scored a million-plus points), Space Invaders, Defender, Centipede, and one of the world's greatest all-time games – Asteroids. Woo-baby. The hours I've burned on that game alone. Terrifying.

Game rooms pop up everywhere. It's hard to imagine how many quarters are stolen from the world as kids lose their mind to go to the arcade and rock out on Defender and Donkey Kong and the like. The arcade by my house was called Ice Cream and Games, and the dude that ran the place was a Polish immigrant who looked almost exactly like Klause Meine from the Scorpions. It is at this arcade that the dickhead bully down the street taunts me for awkwardly bending my wrist while we play air hockey. I respond decades later by outing him as a friend of Ted Nugent and a closet homosexual (which he is, and which he is).

1982-3(ish): We visit my friend Daniel in San Antonio. Dan has a freestanding system called Vectrex. Vectrex is like porn for teens. The system is comprised entirely of vector graphics based games, which basically means games like Asteroids, or Battlezone, or Tempest. Vector graphics games are all comprised of points connected by lines on a black background. The different games come with overlays that mimic the look of their arcade counterparts. That so much was created with so little is a testament to the creativity of gaming designers of this era.

Around this time, while languishing in a bowling alley known for a murder, I also discover a game called Pick-Up. Pick-Up was a Vector game and it was the shit. Dan's Vectrex has Pick-Up.

For the record, Dan had the entire Micronauts comics series and I read the whole damn thing. I love Dan forever for this alone. I also hate his sister forever for playing the Genesis album Abacab on replay the entire stay. Demon bitch.

She also tried to walk in on me while I was shitting, something that couldn't possibly be pleasurable to anyone.

Still, Dan also has assloads of X-Men comics, so all is forgiven. Besides, she was adopted so I can't blame Dan.

Back home, this guy down the street keeps a real cougar in his backyard. I am not making this up. The cougar is called Ripides and the guy lets the thing walk around in the living room. While this is pretty cool, it's the row of pinball games that he has in the loft that keeps us coming over. Despite the obvious creep factor involved, the guy never tries to ass fuck any of us.

Intellivision is now making kids want to stab each other over which console is the king.

My friend John has the Intellivision, and he and my other friend, Matt, are moths to a flame with the damn thing. Me, I feel disloyal to my 2600 and rebel. It's all those damn buttons. If I want to push that many buttons I'll go back to my dad's TRS80. Fuck that noise. Okay, I'll admit that Pitfall ruled. I'll give John that one. Bastard. But he will never be able to explain his love of Night Ranger and Yngwie Malmsteen. Never.

Still in the early to mid 80s here: My friend _____'s dad is a doctor, and as such feels the need to let everyone know how little of a burden it is for him to throw money at his kids. Thankfully his misguided generosity puts a full-sized arcade version of the game Battlezone in their TV room.

That's what I'm talking about.

Not so thankfully, his mom decides to share with me that she wishes she were "only ten years younger."

I immediately stop going over to the dragon lady's house. 

Even Battlezone isn't that cool.

The late 80s/early 90s find me turning my back on video games. Too busy getting loaded, I suppose. Too busy playing in bands. Too busy being broke.

1996(ish): The guy at my new job rants and raves about the Playstation he put on his plastic just so he could play the new game called Tomb Raider. I act interested while secretly thinking the guy has taken leave of his senses for wasting money he doesn't have on a fucking video game.

About three weeks later I do the exact same thing.

Without exaggerating, over the next couple of weeks, and whenever I am free (which I make sure is every night), I play Tomb Raider until I have literally finished the entire game. I am now lost in a pixellated world of narcotic joy. All hope is lost.

For brevity's sake I will give you a brief summary of the next few years as it relates to video games: I play them with a renewed vigor. I am at this point a total gaming dork and I am even proud of it.

There come times during which I have played Grand Theft Auto so much that when I go driving afterwards it takes several minutes to not look at the environment as a place to exploit as I am running from the cops and trying to collect money from my whores.

For the record, I pride myself on not gaining any police attention whenever I am collecting from my ladies.

And then...

Burnout.

Other than the Silent Hill series and the occasional Tomb Raider reissue and the rare adventure with my kid, it is over.

Now, video gaming for me means Spider Solitaire, or this new one on my home page called Flood-it!.

Pretty high-tech stuff.

I got totally burned out on the same four or five ideas played out in higher and higher levels of graphic resolution and lower and lower levels of creative intelligence.

That is, until my brother scored The Wii.

Shit.