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Lucky Wander Boy
It's the mid-90s and Adam Pennyman's got no particular place to go, so he finds himself in a Los Angeles apartment with a cranky soon-to-be-ex girlfriend and a copy of MAME, everyone's favorite game emulator. His collection grows until he feels compelled to document it, or his life as realized through his gaming, in an unpublishable text called the Catalogue of Obscure Entertainments.
Unimpressed, his girlfriend starts edging out of his life just as a chance meeting with a former friend lands Adam a copywriting gig at Portal Entertainment, a dot-com ostensibly in the process of turning various videogame properties into movies. (The real business, of course, involves turning smoke and mirrors into venture cap; alumni of, oh, D*N or El*ctr*m*dia are encouraged to up the dosage of whatever they're taking to quell the flashbacks during the passages describing Portal's office culture.)
But Portal puts Adam within reach of the gamer's Grail: Lucky Wander Boy, a rare and bizarre game created by the reclusive Araki Itachi. Lucky Wander Boy was years ahead of its time, and so intricately coded that no one, no one, ever reached third level. Or have they? Adam nearly did once, long ago, and has been haunted ever since by a memory of gameplay that just couldn't have truly happened... could it? Adam will go far to find out. Very far indeed.
I love me some metaphysical conceits in my fiction, so strictly for the description of the Lucky Wander Boy game I'd rate this book highly. (It doesn't exist. It couldn't exist. I want it to exist. Dammit.) The author's done a fine job capturing a certain kind of thinking that occurs when smart people start reading deeper meaning into their obsessions.
Adam's ruminations on many of the classics (Pac-Man, Microsurgeon, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., et al.) ring player-true -- which is why it's so glorious and scary when he goes off the rails with you right beside him. If you played in the days when primitive graphics and freshly-minuted archetypes made gameplay somehow even more addictive, this book will cause howls of recognition. Best of all, it's well-written and for the most part affectionate to the subculture; be glad this quasi-historical novel was written by the promising Weiss and not by that maiden aunt of yours who wouldn't let you have any more quarters.
You can purchase Lucky Wander Boy from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
We'll correct the oversight of games not being recognized as a part of pop culture by writing a book about them?
I spent a whole day when I was 12 with a single ten pence piece, playing Wonderboy in monsterland, my score at the end of it was 867,000 odd and I was quite proud.
Previoud high score just scraped in at the 80k mark.
I didn't win the weekly high score prize because my dad owned the said arcade.
Shame. Was a fiver. Could get chips, a litre of cider, and a spccy game in them days. With change. Didn't drink mind you.
"So why haven't the arcade games so formative to geek youth (okay, geek 30somethings, young in the glory days of arcade play) gotten their due from the rest of popular culture?"
Let's see...there have been pop songs about arcade games, movies based on arcade games, movies about people playing arcade games, movies about people arcade video games, television cartoons based on arcade games, and almost every household you see on tv in US of A has at least one video game system.
Yes, there is no Hollywood 'walk of fame' star for gaming, but what kind of 'due' do you expect?
I think the important question is, why does every video game on tv sound like Pac Man for the 2600?
Arcades were /always/ full of freaks, they're just no longer /your/ freaks.
Dramatic Interlude
It seems that video games occupy a certain space of popular culture and that it is only slowly expanding beyond that. The geek influences are still in place even though they're mass market items. When I am interested in a new video game or a new system, I don't check the mainstream news outlets, I go to a video game website or read a video game magazine. Comparing this to when I want to read a review of a new movie - just open the newspaper or just watch the trailer on TV and judge it from that. Video games have clearly broken out of the niche of being a toy for kids BUT the marketing of them seems to be stuck in a limited circle. Of course, maybe this is a good thing - perhaps it's the fact that people are interested enough in video games to seek out information about them, without huge marketing budgets pushing them down our throats, that shows just why the video game industry pulls in so much more money.
Oh also, the Mario Brothers movie was crap. I think that stunning pile of dog feces shows that a lot of people outside of the video game industry just don't get it - they don't have the ability to translate because their heads are stuck in Hollywood mode. All they did for that wretched mistake was take the basic characters from the game (two Italians, one wearing red, the other wearing green) and throw them into a run of the mill crap movie. There was no real use of the dynamics of the games. Video games are different. :D
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Yep, I grew up playing pinball, skee-ball, etc... in old-fashioned arcades and bowling alleys. Did anyone else ever draw a correllation between the makers (Bally, Midway, etc...) of these games and makers of the video games that followed (Same ones, etc...). Aren't these names (Bally, Midway, etc...) tied-in to the casino industry? Does anyone know if video game companies received venture capital (or other funding, investment) from the gambling industry (aka - The Mafia). It seems it would be more profitable and draw less attention from the law to make money from video games (which only provide the illusion of winning something tangible) than operating brick-and-mortar gambling establishments. One may think this is an offtopic rant, but does a plan exist to have the youth of the world addicted (and I use the term very loosely) to gaming/gambling from an early age? Haven't we already seen evidence of this through video_game_themed Slot/Video_Poker machines in casinos for some time now?
Even the coolest video games only cost a quarter! Now anything more advanced then a 1994 version of Street Fighter costs at least 50 cents, and I've seen some that take a doller to two dollers just so you can lose after one try.
That's the reason I was turned off from arcades, dagnabbit.
OT: I think the best baseball game ever made was SNK "Baseball Stars" for the NES. I've yet to seen one be as fun as that.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
God. I have a wife. I have a copy fo MAME. I'm a hard core nerd, my day job is coding z80 ASM for ATM's, my hobby at night is making video games. Yet, I've dated a lot, had a lot of girlfriends, and don't understand this geek steroetype BECAUSE NO ONE I HAVE MET HAS EVER BEEN ONE. And I know alot of nerds.
God. You know what's unbeleivable? Somebody so stupid they actually would place their suspension of disbleif in something so bad as a stereotype. 1. It's fiction. So suspend away NONE OF IT IS REAL. 2. That would be like saying "God, this cop-buddy comedy with a black man in it isn't racist enough in it's portrayal of a subculture.".
click me
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/fun.games/03/12/game. sales.reut/index.html
Well take a looksee at this. Videogame sales have apparently tripled, then, since 2001. And we all know that piracy is "killing" the music business, so its share will have gone down. DVDs are more popular then ever, so its chunk may have risen. So either the video game industry has Andersen for bookkeeping, or Bidness 2.0 and CNN have some wonky numbers.
Ok, *now* I understand.
Yes. I agree. Pop culture has long since taken video games to heart, but the powers that be in Hollywood and the other centers of Big Media still don't get it.
Now, personally, I think that it's a generational thing. Oddly enough, given their core customers, media companies famously are run by guys (pretty much all guys) who are positively decrepit. And like Wall Street, the culture is so strong and pervasive that even if somebody isn't from that world, they ape its morés and behaviors to fit in.
Unitl the people running the studios and managing the papers/televison stations are of the generation that grew up with video games, and even for five or six years after that during the transitions in priorities and procedures, this will keep happening. If you look at magazine publishing, from GQ to TimeOut, they review video games just as they do movies, and have for years. So do pretty much all men's magazines (especially the "lad"-oriented ones), most of the hipper style magazines (Vice, not Vogue), as well as most nightlife guides.
Of course the weakness in this argument is that there is no reason that iD can't just write a check to ABC and have ads all over the screen by Monday morning. Why don't they? Dunno.
Me? I don't have a TV, stopped playing video games in the late eighties, and only keep an eye on this stuff as a media guy tracking buying and production.
When it comers to editorial policies, well, if you don't like the coverage, start your own news company.;-) But as for ads, bitch at iD or Blizzard, or Bungie, ILM, or these days the ever-newly-evil Micro$oft. They choose the ad pages. Until *they* decide to shift their media buys ain't nothin' doin.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.