Saw King of Kong, Fist Full of Quarters a while ago in a cinema where the seats are well better than they used to be. Pretty much flipped-out for the KILL SCREEN concept where the game is too big for the machine and Mario dies and never gets the girl and everyone at the vintage gamers festival go the fuck home. So deliciously bleak. It's like spinning the wheel of fortune and falling over its decorative mounting in front of a live studio audience. I thought of a dowsed-in-beers conversation with a friend. I only have my half of it ("Yeah" and "Totally...") and just a little bit of his (the rest).
"Fucking, right. How bleak are old computer games?"
"Yeah."
"You drive forver to get nowhere."
"Totally. If you're lucky the mountains, like, change colour."
There is good art about it, but I couldn't help love it more when I asked my friend's 13 year-old son why he likes the games he plays in comparison to the games we play on the rare occasion we fetch the NES out from under the bed. "I suppose I just enjoy the freedom of them. You get to go anywhere." He's right. There's only one way through a game of Golden Axe. I want to eavesdrop on conversations between those identical giants with that fucking massive door, maybe perv on them calling their mother back home, but instead I have to waste the shit out of them every time. Furthermore:
"When you are raised on computer games
You grow accustomed to saying ‘I’m dead,’
Several times a day. Which is not to say
We are the first generation to feel
So comfortable with our mortality."
From And I Saw by Luke Kennard.
Speaking of Luke and since doing Paul Jones' book jacket, I was wondering if there were any more people that write books who like Guided By Voices? I looked on his blog for the poem that mentioned them but it's all gone. He left the world with an ancient cartoon instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment