Entries from January 2009 ↓

Indy, why does the red background move?

Continuing with the theme of video games from yesterday, the very first eBay purchase I ever made was a used Atari 2600. The year was 1999 and I was twenty-one. And yes, I realize in my previous blog I made it pretty clear just how much of a colossal loser you had to be to play video games post-drivers age. But you don’t understand. I had to buy that Atari. I had to. For one very important reason. I had never beaten Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Before I continue you should realize, if you don’t already know, that video games in the mid-80’s weren’t like the video games of today… or even the video games of the early 90’s for that matter. Most of those games couldn’t actually be beaten. You just kept moving up levels of increasing difficulty until you returned to the first board and began the process all over again. In the world of Atari and Coleco, you pretty much just played until you died… or until the console got sick of you and overheated. It was a lot like life in that respect. So the idea that you could finish Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat positive way inspired you to keep at it. But between me, several of my friends and every one of their older brothers, we were never EVER successful.

That haunted me.

The Nazis' vertical line is too long... they're digging in the wrong dots.

Over the next thirteen years my mind often drifted back to that two-dimensional world of pixilated snakes and dot matrix whips. I had clearly missed something. Something to do with the Map Room screen. I knew that you had to bring a key and a medallion into that screen, just like in the movie, to reveal where the ark lay in a vast mesa field. Selecting the medallion supposedly revealed the ark’s location, but selecting the key was the only way to reveal the map itself. How could you possibly select both items at the same time? Especially when one false step without the proper item could and would make you fall off a cliff and die… and by “die” I mean your “body” would disappear pixel by giant pixel, starting with your rectangular “feet” and ending with your upside-down-T “fedora”. But the more and more I went back, the closer I came to five or six plausible strategies. Unfortunately, I’d gotten rid of my Atari in fifth grade, so I had no way of testing those theories.

God bless the age of the internet. I went onto eBay for the first time in the fall of 1999 and placed a bid on an Atari 2600 with a largish handful of games—including, of course, the much anticipated, and much antagonistic, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I checked back frequently, almost schizophrenically, in the auction’s final moments, then waited two long weeks for my check to clear and my destiny to arrive. The day it did, I could barely focus on work. I ate cereal for dinner, hooked up the Atari, jammed the Raiders cartridge into its slot and said a mini prayer of thanks when it fired up on the first try.

Cue the John Williams in 4-bit sound.

I’m here to tell you right now, folks; the American Dream is a reality. I beat the game in less than thirty minutes. The “victory screen” was minimal—a five-second animation of Indy rising on a spring toward the ark—but few moments, before or since, have ever been so satisfying. I sighed contentedly as I thought, “Okay, now what?”

That was nine years ago and I’ve yet to come up with an adequate answer.

See how it’s done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uKI7J0pdr4

At what point did video games suddenly become cool? When I was a kid you played video games until (and ONLY until) you or one of your friends got a drivers license, at which point you said, “Screw Mario Brothers, I’ve got better things to do.” Personally I always looked forward to the day when I would be deemed officially too old for video games. I never knew which turtle shell to stomp on to get to the secret level, or which bricks you could smash to get ten bazillion lives. I don’t even know how anyone managed to figure that stuff out in those days before the internet. Actually yes I do know how they figured it out. They were geeks! And they had no life! So I was very much looking forward to sixteen, and turning in my paddles for the chance at maybe touching a girl’s boob. Of course that particular dream wouldn’t become a reality until the age of 25 or so, but at least nobody was calling me a “Gamorian” every time I got killed.

But then the language changed. Suddenly anyone who spent twenty bleary-eyed hours a day pushing buttons in their parents’ basement weren’t complete video game nerds. They were… “gamers.” I’m sorry, gamers? Slap an enigmatic title on it and suddenly it’s cool to be lame? Why couldn’t they have done that for the geeky things I was into? Rather than assembling plastic X-wing models in the secrecy of my own room, I could have been… a cementer. Nah, too easy to draw out the “C” and make it sound gay. A gluer? A builder? Exactoist! Crap, some geekery just doesn’t lend itself to badass verbage.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like playing the occasional bout of Mario Kart on my sister-in-law’s Wii as much as the next guy (and I’m sorry, but the fact that the end of this sentence doesn’t make anyone’s eyebrows go up is just plain wrong). But you used to be able to get that kind of fix with five dollars worth of quarters at the local video arcade. And since it was kind of a social situation, indulging that latent geekery provided at least some small probability that you might meet a girl who might let you touch her boob. But unless something goes horribly wrong, there’s no way that is going to happen on my sister-in-law’s Wii (seriously how does that not bug the crap out of everybody???).

Am I wrong? I can’t imagine I’m the only thirty-year-old in America who thinks the ubiquitousness of video games is a bad thing… the only thirty-year-old who looked forward to buying a car for no other reason than he could finally stop memorizing some stupid UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT combination.

I was watching the Dane Cook “Rough Around the Edges” special on Comedy Central the other night (I assure you, there was absolutely nothing else on) and the first thing I want to say is: Dane, buddy, I know you’ve been at this standup thing for a few years, so you should know better by now—when your comedy special airs on basic cable, it might be a good idea to make sure they don’t have to bleep every other word out of your mouth. Kinda makes it hard to appreciate the gentle comedy.

But here’s the good thing about the show: Dane’s opening bit was about a place in New Hampshire called “Benson’s Animal Farm.” Now, for any of you who didn’t grow up in New England, I’m sure that reference is lost completely on you. In fact it might even be lost on some of you who did grow up in the area. Benson’s was my very first amusement park experience. Well, I think “amusement park” is a tad too grandiose a description for the place, which was really little more than a glorified fairgrounds with cheesy midway rides and a sad little zoo thrown in for good measure. But what did I know about quality entertainment when I was all of three years old?

I don’t remember much about that day at Benson’s Animal Farm save for two things. First, I remember thinking (seriously, no joke) that it must have been Robert Guillaume’s day off. But the more important memory—Benson’s was also my very first experience on a roller coaster.

Though again, “roller coaster” is perhaps a wee bit too generous. I mean sure, it was an open-air train on a track that went up an incline and coasted down at an increased rate of speed, except the total distance traveled was little more than three hundred feet at best. The fact that they let me ride it at three-years-old gives you some idea of the G-forces it was pulling. It was intended to be just a bit of low level amusement for kids and their parents, much like the rest of the park. But that didn’t stop me from screaming my head off the entire time.

It wasn’t the speed that got me. I knew perfectly well what I was getting myself into in that arena. And I remember being really excited when I got onto the roller coaster with my mom. We sat right up front so I could see and experience everything. The ride started and we climbed the ramp, crested over the top and started down. And so I started screaming. A happy little scream at first, simply because I knew that’s what you were supposed to do on a roller coaster. But that all changed as we approached the bottom at maximum speed. You see, the builders must have realized just how lame their ride was, and so as an added gag they stuck a mini section of track onto the bottom of the hill which shot out a few feet and abruptly ended. Ha ha funny, it looks like we’re going to fly off the track!

Yeah, I didn’t get the joke. As our car rushed toward the “end” of the line, and the potential end of my life, my innocent little scream turned into pure, unadulterated terror. Holy god, we’re going to die! The train, of course, veered to the side at the last second and we hurtled in a small circle over a couple bumps and around a few curves before coming to rest at the bottom of the incline. I managed to calm down almost immediately, even as the train started back up the hill (the circuit was so stinking short they had to send us around several times just to make it worth the effort of a line). The train crested the hill again and started down. Once again I saw that small chunk of track terminating into thin air and I howled, tears streaming from my eyes, certain I was about to plummet to my death. But at the last second the train swerved and we were safe. By the third, fourth and fifth time around, you’d think I would have picked up on the pattern, if not the humor in it. But at the age of three, I was not what one might call a “logical positivist.” Just because the sun had risen every day since the beginning of time did not mean that I would not die a horrible painful death as hard jagged metal sheered through the soft tissue of my body. So I screamed and cried and screamed some more until the thoroughly evil man finally stopped the ride and let us off. I’m pretty sure I got ice cream out of the ordeal so it wasn’t all bad.

Benson’s closed it’s gates in the mid-80’s and has become something of a mini-ghost town. After watching Dane Cook’s oft-bleeped routine, I’m suddenly rather curious to take a stop back at the old ‘Farm and see if the memories of my first palpable fear of death come shrieking back to me. Jeez, do any of you really wonder that I’m such a neurotic mess?