videogame manuals: a ritual

or, the past comes flooding

When we traced Donkey Kong at our dining room table in Minneapolis in the mid-90s, I believed I’d someday be an artist. Not only one recreating someone else’s images on tracing paper, but an artist inventing my own worlds, my own images that would someday be traced by some other little boy so in love with the inviting Dream of videogame worlds.

I love videogame boxes. I love videogame manuals.

One of the greatest tragedies of the digital era of videogames (and all media, really) is the loss of physicality. There are few memories I have as powerful as reading videogame manuals in the 90s. Tracing Yoshi and Funky Kong and Samus and so many more.

I learned to draw by tracing their images. I learned to dream through sleepless nights in the glow of their screens. I used to spend my Sundays at church dreaming them into existence before my eyes.

Even just this week I was dreaming about Zelda, dreaming in cartoon, the way I always used to.

25 years of the N64: Bomberman 64

Your interest in Marc Normandin’s Retro XP newsletter will vary, depending on how you feel about very old games. So, I mean, I’m interested. Maybe you will be too.

But when this specific essay came in last year, it was like a light turning on. See, I played Bomberman 64 but had completely forgotten that this game even existed.

You know, it really wasn’t like a light turning on. It was like being slapped in the face by a cold fish.

I think it’s easy to forget the economics of games in the 90s and early 2000s. There was no digital store. Games didn’t become wildly discounted after a few months or even years. When your mom bought you a $60 game for your birthday or Christmas, that was the game you were going to play until Christmas or your birthday, whichever came first (unless, in my case, your mom told you that the game was your birthday and Christmas present).

Masks and Ocarinas

And so the games I played were the ones I had. Even if that game sucked ass, it was still the only new game I had to play and so play it I did!

When I opened my Christmas present to reveal Bomberman 64 it didn’t matter if it was what I wanted or even if it was any good (it was not). A relationship began between me and that cartridge, that box, the pages in that manual that would one day be worn from use, the staples barely holding it together. I loved that game. A lot. It had a terrible story that I spent days inside. Imagining and creating and redeveloping that world and its narratives.

I held its manual full of terrible artwork like some talisman, like it could transport me to that other imagined world.

Which it could. Did.

I grew up Catholic and so I was habituated to holding a book between my hands and mumbling the words to manifest worlds of belief. And so there I was, believing in Bomberman and his cast of mercurial allies and enemies. Every traced figure, a prayer. Every hour spent meditating on these characters and their stories brought me closer to them. I basked in their glow and felt the warmth of their regard.

And I remember kneeling in the middle of the night at a church my parents dragged me to during all night adoration, and I remember lying down with my portable CD player, my headphones on, volume turned all the way up, while I held the liner notes in my hands and subvocally whispered words blasting into my skull, and I remember Mario jumping like a sacrament held between my fingers, and I remember god summoned down by a man draped in shining vestments holding a chalice of blood in the air, and I remember so many moments in empty cavernous churches where I daydreamt of fighting Ganon or catching Pikachu and all those middle of the night existential nightmares with Thom Yorke howling in my little lonely boy skull, and the 40s we drank on swingsets at midnight in parks meant for children while I loosed whatever hold religion had ever had on me and all the gods I killed with the power of friendship in games made in Japan that taught me too much about love and life.

When I think of videogames from my childhood, I think of midnight masses and the hours I spent kneeling at an altar to a god I guess I never was able to believe was real, and not even real in the sense that Zelda and Mario have always been real to me. When I think of who I am and how I came to be, I don’t think of sermons from a pulpit but of pixelated monologues about worlds that only existed in that prayer of a dream bursting in the skulls of little boys and girls all over the world.

I think of fraying pages, the colors bled away beneath the oil of my fingers, and all the hundreds of recreations I traced into existence to train my own hand to someday make my own worlds, tell my own stories, to be someone whose story might someday matter to some other someone.

Have you bought my book yet? Want to read the first twelve chapters for free?