forget the tarp

okay, well it's my turn to chime in, regarding the recent entertainment news.

So if you have happened to glance at the television news station or a website, you've probably heard all the usual clamor lately "new video game systems! Next generation! HD TV COmpatible! Buy this crap now, because youuuu NEEEEEED ITT!TTTT!!!T!!" Yes exactly, you do need it, and should buy it. Or maybe you need a hole in the head instead.

Where do I begin? Many years ago, chillun, I was a kid. I saw a pamphlet at Lechmere, or wherever, for something called the NES with R.O.B. the Robot and the Zapper. I saw the ocmmercial with R.O.B. hatching out of this huge glowing egg, and this cool thing that looked sort of like a VCR with amazing graphics being shown on a TV and these weird little boxy controllers with black crosses and red action buttons to press. Immediately I knew "I must have this - I WILL HAVE IT.." It looked so much better than my semi-dinky Atari 400 with the "membrane keyboard" (ah, but you have to love the early eighties). Not to diss, that thing was fun too. this stuff just looked so much more.. serious.

That Hanukkah, my parents caved into my onslaught of nagging (I need, I need!) and I got my NES Deluxe Set. The games it came with weren't the hottest things ever, but it was still fun and I was hooked. Some months passed and eventually I bought Super Mario Brothers, just randomly. That was the beginning of my end.

About 4 years later, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Nintendo freak.. my room was overlfowing with Nintendo Power Magazines. Friends? Who needs them! My only friends were The NES Max (which kind of sucked admittedly) and the NES Advantage (which did NOT suck). Then I started seeing commercials for this strange new device, the Sega Genesis. Whoa. Suddenly the videogame characters were not one inch high, with 3 colors to make up their body's color palette. No, these dues were like 4 inches, with 12 colors! Say what you will, but instead of goofy cartoony trees and simple dull spaceships, we had gnarled haunted trees with twisted evil faces and leaves and branches that fell when vultures swooped by to attack you, and huge battleships and biomechanical space monsters which launched several arrays of lazers and missiles at your unyielding fighter ship, while cheesy glitzy techno-rock soundtracks played. I needed THIS shit now, worse than before. If NES was a glimpse of the arcade, Sega Genesis was living in the penthouse of technology. That thanksgiving, we had our holiday break from school, I vaulted to the toy store (after a whole late-summer of staring at the thing behind glass), forked over the necessary $189.99 and it was mine.. Ghouls and Ghosts as well (well, what else!) That holiday was marvelous.

Another couple of years passed.. I was still getting some play out of my NES, and of course the Sega.. and now, it was 1991, and "the new Nintendo system" was finally upon us. And yeah, I was starting to get older, in fact I was 16. I still dug the gaming, but such things were still considered the passion of the immature, in the same realm as comic books and action figures (well, I guess that doesn't help much does it, considering how folks are these days). Anyway , Super Nintendo launched laet that summer, if memory serves, and again.. I HAD to have it, again the graphics still trumped all others before it. Everything looked and sounded more perfectly than one could expect, making the old NES look like a caveman's toy and the Sega was looking sort of limp by now. My enthusiasm for this new toy wasn't quite what it had been for the past videogame systems, I mean - how many games can you play, before you've had "enough already!" Anyway the system came out, and had been for a little while, with a scant 3 titles to buy. So, I was still the first kid on my block to get the thing, but still - I didn't NEED it quite so badly. And it looked great, we hooked it up to my parents' big-screen TV and stereo. It was definitely better than anything before, but the novelty was wearing thin by now. Over the enxt couple of years I supplanted it with some pretty good games, but I was getting older now. Still reading all the mags, and keeping an eye out for "that next great game," but nothing that got me unbelievably wrapped up in it as I had been when I was younger.

Okay, so a couple more years passed. 1993 and I have just graduated from high school. Suddenly, everthing in my life changes, I move out of my parent's house and take up residency in a dormitory at school. My SNES comes with me but the rest remain behind. A couple of years pass and again, we have new video game systems to buy. A new Sega Saturn and this thing called the Sony Playstation (what, Sony never made a system before! What do they think they are doing.. amateurs..) Anyway, at this point, lots of things in my life are different. Games are fun but so far down my list of priorities, as I have an actual thriving social environment around me now (well, relatively.. no girlfriend yet, haha). Rather than lock up in my place for an evening in front of the TV, my friends and I will regularly head to some party on or off campus, spend the night by the keg and stare at girls we will never talk to. Or strap down inthe lounge of the dorm with all my art supplies for my "demanding major.." (ah, the embattled life of the art student). Anyway, the point is, the new systems launched and at this point, I didn't care! None of my friends did either. No one I knew at school gave a shit about any of this stuff, and that says something about the types of people I was associating with at this point in my life. Non-gamers, and I became that way as well.

Also, around this time, I started to get into 3D graphics within my major. That's a story in itself, but let';s just say it's one of those things you never plan for, but somehow fall into. Around this time (and the enxt couple of years), videogames embraced this style as well, but whereas I was working with high resolution technology, games had to take the low road, for reasons of cost - boxy and ugly. U G L Y. These things did not add up to being any kid of appeal to me, and so by now I had essentially dropped out.

I graduated from college, the part fo my brain that had loved videogames as a boy was now obsessed with making 3D graphics and video, manipulating the software, etc... instead of just "getting to the end of the game." Around this time, ironically, games were "growing up." Though I never realized it at the time, many people my age went through the exact same childhood I did.. hypnotized by the 8-Bit NES around 12 years of age, woo'd by Sega Genesis' fancy graphics at 14 yrs, stepping up to SNES' even better experience a couple of years later. An entire generation of nerdy kids reared on videogames, and now (unlike me) many of them were still hooked and moving to the next level, and thewer more "adult" style of gaming was pandering to them. For me it was a different outlet (getting involved in 3D), for everyone else it was the CD-ROM system. So yeah, there's where the split happened. Everyone moved from Metal Gear to Metal Gear Solid, Zelda to Final Fantasy.

Anyway, to wrap this up.. the irony is, right out of college I got a job in videogames. PC games mind you, but regardless. (I was too inexperienced for the well-built-up animation and FX industries, and games were still slummin'). I was excited to be working in games, but still the excitement for me now was the 3D creation, as opposed to the legacy that I was becoming part of. And more years passed, and new systems came out. Sega Dreamcast, then PS2. I went to E3 after moving out to Los Angeles, and saw for the first time how much grandeur and spectacle games were becoming. I waited in line overnight to buy a PS2 at launch October 2000 "just to do it" (I sold it at the tiniest of profit margins on eBay). Still working in games (on and off, but mostly), and then the successors came, Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube. I yawned... and at this point, had reinvigorated my love of the games I enjoyed as a child thru the magic of computer emulation (downlad the game programs from all those old systems, and ARCADE machines, over the internet, fiddle with some settings, and run them on hacked-together programs on the PC see all those old weird japanese games you never got to enjoy as a kid!) Communities, likewise, popped up on the web to "share that scene," it was (and still is) a fun hobby.

But now.. now, all these years later, all these E3's later, all these game companies later. I look in the news, and daily there's reports of the outlandish prices this shit is costing people, peopel waiting in line for several days all over the world for "the new Playstation, the new Nintendo Wii," etc. I look at the games they have for these things and they're uh.. well.. it's the same shit that didn't interest me 10 years ago. It is strange how we've both grown up..

I look in my "entertainment unit" and see my old SNES, my mom sent it to me in the mail some 6 months ago or so (it was packed up in the basement). I actually spent a couple dollars on eBay and at the used game store to fill out the collection a little, it's still fun to mess around with. There's a PS2 there also, I bought it a couple of years ago during a console job (I needed to research sports-action titles) but mostly I use it to watch movies. I have an Xbox and a Sega Saturn now (donations, both) waiting to be investigated, -- the Saturn has a weird bevy of Japanese software that I will unearth someday, and I can mod the Xbox to play lots of old videogames (like the PC).

So I guess these days, I am content to keep making graphics, and going outside and doing things other than bolting down in front of the TV with the controller. Ah. the bitterness of adulthood. Anyway, 15 years ago I was pretty ecstatic around this time of the year... these days, I get my entertainment from more external things, I guess.