Guest Article: 8-Bit Soundtrack To My Life

Sometimes we hear a song on the radio and it elicits a poignant memory from the past. Whether it’s because the melody happened to be playing at the time or the lyrics are simply reminiscent of the event or emotions involved, music has the magical power to recall meaningful past experiences. Marissa’s Dad (of Marissa’s Bunny) finds that occurrence happening frequently, only with video games instead of music. Enjoy his sentimental stroll down memory lane, and perhaps it will spark one of your own.

The general consensus seems to be that people remember songs from key events in their lives.  Whenever they hear a particular song, it’s like a mental time warp has opened, and the events that surrounded the song are fresh and new.  I do have a love for music, but this time-space vortex doesn’t seem to apply to music for me, maybe because in the past I had to be mercenary about it and I was paid to spin the tunes.  Rather, my life seems to be bookmarked and dog-eared by video games.

Puberty was denoted by an atonal Star Wars game that I played with paddles and a text-based Star Trek version for the Apple II.  My first love had to compete for time with Wizardry.  I played The Bard’s Tale in the wake of the Challenger explosion.  My high school post-graduation event had a Technos Super Dodgeball portion of the proceedings.

Various events in my military career spanned two installments of both Civilization and Fallout, with a sparse helping of MechWarrior and console games of a Nintendo persuasion.  September 11th by NFL 2k1 for the Dreamcast.  Halo 3 for Marissa’s birth and seizure commencement.  The primary demographic for Marissa’s Bunny: An Infantile Spasms Awareness Blog, the gaming community, has been very good to Marissa and supportive of my family.  Well, the primary demographic for the blog other than grandparents and family- both of which have been known to play a game or two in their time.

Like rock musicians, Dungeons and Dragons gamers, and ages ago television viewers themselves, the chatter about video gamers being evil by nature is fading.  Over my life, comments about my gaming have ranged from “Video games, what’s that?” to “Oh god, what a nerd, you play video games.” proceeding through “Huh, video games.” and as gaming became more mainstream “Hey, cool- you can play video games on a laptop.” and more recently “How old are you, and you play video games? Neat!” The trend in attitude from society as a whole has been pretty apparent.

Events and people have weaved in and out of my life.  Consoles and games have fallen in and out of vogue.  I’ve had some amazing events in my life and I’ve suffered, and am suffering through, some incredible lows.  Mario doesn’t judge me, and Bungie’s Master Chief doesn’t waggle his finger at me, lecturing me on a decision made in haste or in error (but I have been lectured by more than one real-life Master Chief).  While I beat Wizardry more than 20 years ago, Werdna still needs vanquishing from time to time and the wasteland still needs scourging of the mutant menace.  Caesar of the Romans will still threaten me with nuclear annihilation in Civilization like he did all those years ago while I was serving my country, and aliens in their crashed UFOs still need to be hunted down by my virtual elite forces all over the world.

I’m surrounded by the detritus of consoles and systems past and present, like some sort of post-modern Dickens play.  There’s a plastic bin in the basement of N64 games that I couldn’t bear to get rid of, even though I have no functional units.  A pair of shoe boxes holds my 8-bit Nintendo games, with a ripped white box holding debris from some original Atari systems.  In current rotation next to this desk are two Ikea DVD towers with shelves spaced just so to hold Xbox, Xbox 360, PC and Mac games.  These are all more recent life events that I recall when the disk hits the tray – Rainbow Six 2 for Marissa’s first failed ACTH therapy, BioShock during the time we figured out that her seizures were medicine-resistant.  I played The Bigs while Fairfax was at PAX ’08.  To alleviate some of the post-hospitalization stress from this last summer, I knocked the crap out of things with my hammer in Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Eighties teenage angst came and went, I was a gamer.  The military took me places few have ever gone before, and I gamed when I could.  For whatever her reasons, the Wife married me, and I admit I stopped for a little while while, um, otherwise occupied, but I still gamed afterwards.  I am a gamer.  Marissa will be who Marissa is going to be- the new baby when he or she arrives will be whoever they are, and they’ll both need me, but I will still be a gamer, if more sporadic than now.  When they wheel me to the hospital when it’s soon to be my time to pass, I’ll go portable console in hand, playing until my arthritic hands won’t allow me to play any longer.  I belong to the first video gaming generation, but I don’t pretend it’s the only generation, or the last one.  There’s no “Damn kids, get off my lawn!” equivalent, I don’t think, nor should there be.  It’s not all of what I am, but it is a part, and I feel richer for it.

Gaming industry, you have your moments, but thank you.  Thank you, Roberta Williams, Sid Meier, Gabe Newell.  Thank you Alex Seropian, Trip Hawkins, and Alexey Pajitnov.  Thanks Töru Iwatani, Jordan Weisman, and Will Wright.  Obviously, this list could go on for pages, and often does.  You’re not responsible for who I am, but you are for where I’ve been, how I file and recall it in the bitbucket between my ears, and how I deal with the stresses of it.  You’ve made worlds that I can distract myself for a little while, if even just to eat some phosphorescent dots, or chainsaw the Locust.

Here I am, still fighting on two feet, in large part thanks to game designers I’ll likely never meet, and the 200 or so of you that read daily.

-by Marissa’s Dad

8 Bit Soundtrack To My Life originally appeared on Marissa’s Bunny and was carried here in full with permission.