"I just had the strongest memory -- coming home from school and going to the fridge... ice cold bottle of milk... big piece of chocolate cake. Just the simplicity of it... I can't think of anything that'll make me feel that happy again."
-Charles Van Doren, as portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Quiz Show
erhaps I am overly sentimental. If history is of any relevance I am without a doubt so. However, something broader than that needs to be said on the subject at hand -- the subject of webmastery; the subject of classic videogaming; ultimately the subject of nostalgia. So I'll drop back a bit from where my narration presently stands. Oh boy, a chance to ramble.
| I do not pretend to love the American 1980s. An entire era of pop-culture fixated upon high school bears little resemblance to my proverbial cup of tea (although I must give due notation to Perfect Strangers, The Cosby Show, and the beginning of They Might Be Giants.) It is probably befitting, then, that the greatest love I extracted from that period was, in point of fact, an import -- and an amplification of the situation's irony that it has probably had a greater influence upon me than any other single thing.
Okay, so that's dramatic. It is not unfounded, however. My staunch belief in the universal human potential for heroism comes not from religious doctrines (Christian pontifications of an entirely separate, paternalistic god make no sense to me anyway) but the experiences of toppling evil on countless fronts that the Nintendo Entertainment System accorded my youth. Moreover, the system supplied an outlet of common interest to a remarkable number of people, such that I cultivated an inordinate number of friendships, and by way of which NES aficionados became as unified an interest group as any short of the Star Trek fandom. |  |
 | The lost-then-found nature of the experience is, I admit, a cliché -- akin to by and large every experience of "rebirth" that has ever been of any significance to anybody. However, as the SNES era dawned, the majority of what I call "NES Preservationists" were far too young to weigh the conflicting standards at hand. Moreover, videogaming did not disintegrate in one fell swoop. The SNES featured numerous quality titles, and for that reason the gaming public was happy to accept it. Players did not know their ideals were soon to be abandoned -- they had no choice but to get lost.
A few years went by, after which, in my own life, a remarkable thing took place. I looked around the gaming realm and realized that, while I was running around the modern scene with my head up a certain private orifice, the majestic castle |
| It is difficult to describe the experience in universal terms -- mainly because each such sensation is relative to the individual. That suits me perfectly, for I don't want to define it. I don't want to apply weeks of intense cognition only to understand something less than I understand it now. This I know, and this I choose to believe: the "NES Renaissance" is very much the experience Fiennes/Van Doren was describing -- the sudden epiphany -- the "just ha[ving] the strongest memory." Really, that is what this entire preservationist retinue is championing -- even when we dissect games mercilessly in review form, we are, in effect, declaiming upon their multifaceted natures, their inherent uniqueness, their worthiness to be reviewed. How many original things are left to say after one has talked about three N64 games? Not many, I would imagine.
Well, we're championing their aesthetic quality and the somewhat unearned right |  |