Nightmare Mode: A Boss Fight Books Anthology 9781940535531

Citation preview

Final Fantasy VI

Nightmare Mode A Boss Fight Books Anthology

Boss Fight Books Los Angeles, CA bossfightbooks.com Copyright © 2021 Boss Fight Books All rights reserved. ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-53-1 Series Editor: Gabe Durham Associate Editor: Michael P. Williams Cover Illustration by Kyle Fewell Book Design by Cory Schmitz Page Design by Christopher Moyer

CONTENTS v

Liner Notes

1

Speedy Shovelry: Shovel Knight Speedrunners

15

Darkness, Rage, and the Power of Waking: Self and Survival in Kingdom Hearts III

33

How Princess Peach’s Story Draws On 2000 Years Of Women In Peril

42

Meet Tom Keegan, the Mo-Cap Director for Battlefront II and Wolfenstein

49

The Fans Who Won’t Let Mega Man Die

66

The Book of the Dead: S.D. Perry and the Novelization of Resident Evil

80

The Great Zelda Timeline Debate

87

On Not Playing Super Mario Odyssey

97

An Evening With Uematsu, Final Fantasy’s Music Man

108

Party Like It’s 1999: Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger

119 Notes

LINER NOTES Readers! As a teenager, I grew addicted to the compilation CDs that were always available to impulse buy at the register of my local music store: Punk-O-Rama. Give ’Em the Boot. Mailorder is Fun! Fat Music for Fat People. You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again. Plea for Peace. Hey Brother... Can You Spare Some Ska? These compilations were a win-win. Independent music labels got to show off the talents of their artists, including the smaller bands that hadn’t taken off yet. Fans were treated to new b-sides by beloved bands, or new versions of old hits, and the compilations always sold for much cheaper than albums. Now that I run an indie music label for books (technically called a publishing company), I’ve been scheming up a way to highlight our own b-sides and rarities. Boss Fight’s authors have done so much great writing about (and around) the topics of their books that never v

made it into the books themselves. Wouldn’t it be cool to do our own late 90s punk compilation? Here you’ll find essays that were cut from the original books alongside standalone essays in which Boss Fight authors return to the game or franchise they wrote about. If you’ve read their book, here’s a little more quality writing on that topic. If you haven’t and you like what they’re up to, a whole book awaits. Speedy Shovelry: Shovel Knight Speedrunners David L. Craddock, author of Shovel Knight David’s book, based on interviews with the lead developers at Yacht Club Games, was not hurting for interesting details from Shovel Knight’s development. (A benefit of working on a book about a more recent game is that the creators still remember a lot.) One of the pieces we could not fit in the book was this chapter on speedrunning: a window into how game developers now consider speedrunners—and even collaborate with them—in the making and patching of a game.

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Darkness, Rage, and the Power of Waking: Self and Survival in Kingdom Hearts III Alexa Ray Corriea, author of Kingdom Hearts II Alexa Ray wrote her book on Kingdom Hearts II knowing that the much-delayed third main series game was coming, but could only guess what it would contain. When KH3 was finally released, her readers hounded her for an update: What did she think of the latest release? And how did KH3 affect her feelings on the rest of the sprawling franchise? This essay is her answer, presented here for the first time. How Princess Peach’s Story Draws on 2000 Years of Women in Peril Alyse Knorr, author of Super Mario Bros. 3 When Alyse turned in her “kitchen sink” first draft of her SMB3 book, it was around 80k words: more than twice as long as the final version. While Mike and I helped pare away at some of what was in that original draft, Alyse did most of the heavy lifting v ii

for us by taking out a lot of material that was important to the Mario series but less specific to SMB3. She later turned one of those sections into this meditation on the history of the damsel trope in both gaming and our wider culture. Meet Tom Keegan, the Mo-Cap Director for Battlefront II and Wolfenstein Alex Kane, author of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Alex Kane’s KotOR book offers an appreciation of process that includes story, art design, VO, and more. For this interview, we get to fast forward closer to the present day and see a more contemporary Star Wars game employ motion capture technology that the KotOR team, working in the early 00s, could only dream about. The Fans Who Won’t Let Mega Man Die Salvatore Pane, author of Mega Man 3 Sal’s book focuses on Mega Man 3 but touches on the entirety of the Mega Man series, so this nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

article makes for a terrific natural extension of the project: Watching fans pick up the slack when Capcom dropped the ball on continuing the series. Even now after the so-so release of MM11, it’s great to see a roguelite fan game like 20XX keep the formula fresh. The Book of the Dead: S.D. Perry and the Novelization of Resident Evil Philip J Reed, author of Resident Evil Philip’s essay is lifted straight from his book. All other chapters in the book address Resident Evil so directly that a chapter about its novelizations felt like too much of an outlier. In its own right, the essay is an absorbing peek behind the curtain at the world of novelizations, and a look back on the book that kickstarted a novelist’s impressive career. The Great Zelda Timeline Debate Gabe Durham, author of Majora’s Mask This piece was written directly for my Majora’s Mask book and omitted late in the game. ix

Every writer has to decide just how far they’re willing to stray from a book’s stated subject to pursue a fascinating tangent. When several early readers got to this part of my book and politely asked, “What does all this Zelda timeline stuff have to do with Majora?,” I knew I’d pushed too far. Instead, we present it to you now: the short essay that my deleted scene was probably always meant to be. On Not Playing Super Mario Odyssey Jon Irwin, author of Super Mario Bros. 2 Jon is as excited about the idea of Mario as he is with the hero himself. He originally wrote this piece for a gaming website upon Odyssey’s release, but it was never published. If a Mario game exists “to hide secrets,” as Jon suggests in his book, then there’s nothing sweeter to a lifelong Mario fan than reveling in the anticipation of a new Mario game waiting impatiently on your shelf to be played.

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An Evening with Uematsu, Final Fantasy’s Music Man Chris Kohler, author of Final Fantasy V When Chris interviewed Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu in 2009, live video game music was still an experiment. Since then, it’s become an industry. This interview serves as a perfect introduction to a subject our author Sebastian Deken would eventually devote an entire book to: the enduring legacy of Uematsu’s brilliant soundtracks. Party Like It’s 1999: Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger Michael P. Williams, author of Chrono Trigger Immediately after writing his Chrono Trigger book, Mike poured many of his unused ideas into this essay about how the game fits into the Japanese tradition of imagining a bright, utopian future driven by friendly technology—and our nostalgia for those colorful visions from a “future” that has not come to pass.

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To be honest, I don’t think this book will be as difficult a read as our Doom-inspired title Nightmare Mode suggests: “Nightmare Mode” is famously the 1993 game’s highest difficulty setting. A more literal editor would have probably selected Doom’s medium difficulty for its title, though “Hurt Me Plenty” just doesn’t sound like the title of a book of video game essays. Although... you know what? “Hurt Me Plenty” is a great name for a 90s punk music compilation. Fat Mike, if you’re reading this, the idea is yours if you want it. Yours, Gabe Durham Editor, Boss Fight Books

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SPEEDY SHOVELRY: SHOVEL KNIGHT SPEEDRUNNERS David L. Craddock

For every Mega Man 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3, droves of NES sequels failed to capture the spirit of what had made their predecessors fun. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, for instance, had a suitably creepy atmosphere and haunting soundtrack. In retrospect, its gameplay involved tedious item gathering, and its progression is considered esoteric and capricious at best. The third game, however, is considered a classic for improving on the original’s central conceits of action and platforming. Konami and other developers can be forgiven for missing the mark on one sequel only to stick the landing on the next. They had no way to measure what fans liked and what they condemned in an original title until reviews were published weeks or months after release, by which time studios had already committed significant 1

time and resources to a plan for the follow-up. Today, the universality of direct and near-instantaneous methods of interaction such as social media and Twitch let developers keep a finger on the pulse of their communities, and plan development of sequels accordingly. Inviting Kickstarter backers to watch as David D’Angelo programmed Tinker Knight was only one example of how Yacht Club bridged the narrowing gulf between creator and consumer. Their frequent communication with pro players such as Smaugy and MunchaKoopas—two of the fastest Shovel Knight speedrunners around—is another, one that continues to send a ripple effect throughout the design of the game’s add-on packs. “I think I got under an hour on the original Shovel Knight when it launched, or maybe right around an hour. They’re running at like forty minutes,” D’Angelo said of speedrunners. “They’re god tier compared to me. There’s no question about it.” Tailoring Shovel Knight to speedrunners as well as to casual players was a priority for Yacht Club, for personal and professional reasons. “We try to engage with that speedrunner community because those are the people we are,” director Sean Velasco said. “I grew up speedrunning Mega Man 2 and Super Metroid, so [speedrunning is] near and dear to me.” “Even if you’re not speedrunning it per se, people do try to go through the game quickly,” explained nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

D’Angelo. “Say you’re replaying it. You say, ‘I’m just going to run through this room at full speed because I know this room.’ If it isn’t fun to run through that room at full speed, it’s going to be crappy for someone. I think an average player runs into that a lot, actually. I’m going at full clip in Mega Man, and the [enemy] spawns and hits me if I’m going full clip. That ruins the experience. I’m playing the game a lot from that point of view for sure.” Markus “Smaugy” Sundqvist, his online handle adapted from the avaricious dragon Smaug in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, is one of the Shovel Knight community’s most well-known speedrunners. He had a background playing competitive esports games such as Counter-Strike 1.6 and Quake Live before looking for another type of game on which to leave his mark. “I wanted to get back into something that is both fun and competitive,” Smaugy explained. “I had already been watching speedruns from time to time and I loved the amount of time you had to put into it, how much practice, passion, and dedication you needed to become good. I saw it as a challenge and figured I would try it out and see how good I could become.” Fortuitously, Smaugy developed an interest in speedrunning a few days out from the start of 2015 Summer Games Done Quick. Known as SGDQ, the event is a week-long gathering where the best speedrunners in the 3

world blaze through games new and old to raise money for charity. Watching over Twitch, Smaugy happened to catch a speedrunner known as MunchaKoopas playing a retro-style platformer called Shovel Knight. MunchaKoopas was playing in the Low% category, a type of race where the player skips optional content in favor of the fastest possible route to the end. Smaugy’s eyes widened as he watched MunchaKoopas sprint through the Order of No Quarter and defeat the Enchantress in just shy of 50 minutes. “Shovel Knight reminded me of older games such as Castlevania, DuckTales, Mega Man, Super Mario, and Zelda,” Smaugy said. “So I picked it up, started learning, and I was hooked.” MunchaKoopas followed a similar path to speedrunning, tuning into SGDQs and AGDQs (Awesome Games Done Quick, a winter event) and staring in amazement as donations poured in. “I was amazed that this was a hobby in the first place, and that people were using it to do some good in the world,” he said. MunchaKoopas remained a spectator until 2014, when Shovel Knight’s launch on PC and Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS systems coincided with the start of SGDQ. “I had the week off work and played while I watched the stream, and I decided it would be my first speed game. I fell in love with the way the game played and all the clever uses the items had. Even the basic shovel can be used to great effect.” nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

MunchaKoopas and Smaugy take different approaches to perfecting their techniques. For MunchaKoopas, practice makes perfect. “People ask me often, ‘How long does it take to learn Shovel Knight?’ I never have an answer because for me it’s been an ongoing process of almost three years now,” he said. Smaugy has never played Shovel Knight the way casual players do—exploring, returning to the Village to talk to the NPCs, watching the Troupple King and his fishy brigade perform their dance routine. “I wanted to play as much as possible so I could get used to the game, the mechanics of items, physics of jumping, the shovel attacks and the behavior of the enemies,” he said. “So I picked up a few new tricks every day and after every personal best I pretty much looked at two to three of my biggest problems at the time and fixed those problems, and then I repeated that cycle.” Speedrunners tend to focus on honing their techniques for certain categories, such as shovel-only runs or 100% competition—meaning no relics left behind, no levels skipped, no bosses unchallenged. Even after three years and countless speedruns, MunchaKoopas is still amazed at just how much can be done with the game’s default weapon. “I started running Low%, or shovel only, as my first category,” he said. “I worked hard with friends to find techniques to beat the game with only the shovel in under forty-eight minutes. It will forever be my 5

favorite category. The way the shovel interacts with the world around Shovel Knight is beautifully crafted.” Smaugy and MunchaKoopas usually stream the game while they play, providing a running commentary that gives viewers insight into their strategies and practice sessions. Before long, both runners noticed one viewer who stood out from the rest. “One of the members of Yacht Club Games started watching me on a daily basis when I streamed my Shovel Knight speed runs, and still [watches],” said Smaugy. “We developed a friendship, and that’s how I realized YCG appreciates us speedrunners, as we are the ones who know a huge amount of the game and how things work.” “Shane [Calimlim] from YCG has been hanging around Shovel Knight speedrun channels since late 2014,” added MunchaKoopas. “He has been an amazing friend to me, and I am eternally thankful for everything he has done not only for me but for the community. He has been our voice to the rest of the development team.” Yacht Club’s developers appreciated both runners’ enthusiasm for the game and extended offers to let them play early builds of patches and expansion packs, such as 2015’s Plague of Shadows and 2017’s Specter of Torment, in exchange for providing feedback—on bugs they find, on glitches they exploit, and on the techniques they employ. “When I play an early build, I try to simply enjoy the experience of playing that character nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

or mode for the first time,” explained MunchaKoopas. “If I am doing actual testing, I am looking for bugs and small changes. It’s mostly to make sure that speedruns still function the same way.” “I’m making sure mechanics are working as usual,” said Smaugy. “Items doing what they’re supposed to do, looking at if there is any changed behavior in enemies, bosses, or physics. I’ve been mostly confirming that things are working as intended, what feels good when playing.” Smaugy and MunchaKoopas report bugs or glitches they find while testing. Yacht Club’s developers evaluate each one. Some they consider too detrimental to the game’s structure and squelch. Others are deemed fun enough to stick around, or so esoteric that casual players have little chance of stumbling over them and botching their progress. Smaugy is credited with discovering a technique that he and the community have coined “Bubble Wrap.” It can be performed in the Plains of Passage, and saves three to four seconds of time if executed correctly. “The trick is to do a specific setup to make two bubbles from a dragon shoot up into the sky, and you pogo up on them at a specific moment,” Smaugy explained, “and you touch the loading screen of the screen above at the same time as you are touching the screen transition to your left. This trick teleports you up to the 7

screen above which enables you to skip going around the long way.” Some of the glitches that speedrunners report surprise Yacht Club Games. Jump-canceling was one such. “You could hit an enemy with the Shovel Drop or with your regular Shovel Blade attack, and then you can go into another attack right after that,” Velasco said. “So when an enemy’s flashing state is over, your shovel could be inside the enemy, and as long as your hit box is valid they will take another hit. They will use that to do a one-two combo, as it were.” Yacht Club felt compelled to correct jump-canceling, foreseeing scenarios where the player could intentionally get wedged between the topmost screen border and a tall enemy. If players cannot fall, Shovel Knight’s sprite interlocks with the enemy’s sprite. Both hit boxes are valid, enabling players to drill the enemy with shovel drops until it dies or the player gets pushed onto the next screen over. Speedrunners urged the team to reconsider. “We tried to make adjustments to hit boxes in some cases,” Velasco added, “but they said, ‘No, leave it in; this is a cool, extra technique.’” Yacht Club knew about damage boosting, but left it in the code because they saw it as a technique that savvy players would want to exploit. “I think we just deal with [glitches] on a case-by-case basis,” Velasco stated. “If one would make the game look extremely broken, nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

we would take it out. If it’s one that only a speed runner would encounter, or has an extremely small chance of being able to happen, we might leave it.” Propeller Knight has a reputation as one of the most difficult bosses for casual players and speedrunners alike. He’s quick, spends much of the fight hovering in the air out of reach, and calls in an airship to fire cannonballs. Even MunchaKoopas feared the winged knight—until he figured out a way to defeat him in 19 seconds flat. For his opening salvo, Propeller Knight lunges back and forth, trying to impale players on his rapier. MunchaKoopas counters by pulling off a series of jump-cancels to score hits on the boss every time he lunges. If employed correctly, Propeller Knight’s health bar will be reduced by half. “To make this work the player has to use jump to cancel their ground attack and then face the other direction to hit propeller again,” he said. It’s a tough trick to learn but it makes the fight incredibly easy.” MunchaKoopas and Smaugy dig into their bag of tricks every time they attempt a speedrun. Early in 2017, the two friends and friendly rivals got a chance to pit their skills against one another in a race at AGDQ. The goal: to be the first to finish the game in the Low%, shovel-only category. 9

Both players took seats before monitors at the front of an auditorium packed with fans and peers. Smaugy and MunchaKoopas were there to have fun and raise money for charity, but Smaugy confessed to feeling pressure. Not only were they in a room full of people, tens of thousands of viewers tune in on Twitch at any given time during the week-long event. “In races you want to be somewhat safe in the route you are taking to ensure if you die, you won’t lose as much time if it does happen,” said Smaugy. Both runners took their time getting settled. MunchaKoopas got a wave of laughter when he removed his headphones to put on a beanie in the shape of Shovel Knight’s helmet, then slipped his headset on over it. One of the commentators initiated a countdown. “Three, two, one, go!” Cheers and applause broke out as two Shovel Knights on two screens broke into a run across the Plains of Passage. While they played, another speedrunner wellversed in the game provided commentary to explain tricks they performed. MunchaKoopas and Smaugy shut out comments and cheers. They leaned forward, eyes glued to their screens. They were in the zone. MunchaKoopas falls into his zone by treating solo runs at home no differently than live events like AGDQ. “I practice full game runs, individual levels, spots I have trouble with.” “The most important thing to do is get into the mindset of ‘I can never stop, no matter what mistakes happen. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

I have to keep going,’” MunchaKoopas said. “I try to approach it like a musical instrument.” By the time they finished the end-of-game boss rush and headed into the first of two battles against the Enchantress, Smaugy held the lead by three seconds. Entering the villainess’s room, both players threw a chaos orb and batted the Enchantress’s projectiles back at her. Both Smaugy and MunchaKoopas took her down within a second of one another. Spectators exploded in applause. Smaugy grinned and wiped sweaty palms on his pants. MunchaKoopas gave a quick nod, not looking away from his screen. “Coming down to final Enchantress, man,” the commentator said, voice shaky. “This is... I’m excited. That’s all I can say.” He gave a giddy laugh. “That’s all I can say.” Smaugy put his game face back on. MunchaKoopas shifted in his chair, sitting up straighter. Shield Knight, Shovel Knight’s comrade held captive by Enchantress, fell from the top of the screen in dramatic slow-mo. Both players leaped up quickly to catch her. In the background, the towering form of the Remnant of Fate, the final boss, faded into view. Her life meter filled. The fight began. As Remnant of Fate unleashed glowing orbs that bounced around the screen, Shield Knight’s AI kicked in. She commenced pacing back and forth, leaping up and down the disjointed ground and looking for 11

an opportunity to hold her shield aloft so that players could shovel-drop against it, pogo into the air and clock Fate’s head. When and how often Shield Knight raises her shield depends on RNG, or random-number generation, speedrunner shorthand for an action or event out of their control. After pogoing against Shield Knight’s shield, the trick to beating Remnant of Fate quickly is to bludgeon her head with a series of jump-cancels and shovel drops. Both players encountered difficulty at first; Shield Knight seemed dead set against being helpful, wandering back and forth when both players desperately needed her to jump. Smaugy got lucky when his computer-controlled partner cooperated sooner. He boosted off her shield and carved down the boss’s life bar. When the Remnant of Fate scooted to the side—a preprogrammed reflex to prevent players from defeating her too easily—Smaugy took flight after her using the Propeller Dagger and continued his onslaught. His screen began to flash. The Remnant of Fate was down. Smaugy was victorious at 46:10. “Mentality comes into play as well,” explained Smaugy. “If you start doubting a trick you’re about to do, you start to think,” Oh, no, I might mess this up, don’t mess this up. So usually the best thing to do [is to play] as you would in your normal speedrun attempts.” nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

Smaugy tried to stand but got tangled in his headset. “Yeah, but, the cord,” he protested. “Don’t worry about it,” MunchaKoopas said. Smaugy heeded his mentor and disentangled himself. The two friends embraced, clapping each other on the back and thanking one another for a nail-biter of a race. The crowd began to break up. MunchaKoopas held up a finger and asked for a few extra moments. He held down buttons to scrub through the game’s ending. On the credits screen, he pointed out his name and the names of other speedrunners listed in the special-thanks section, then initiated another round of applause for Smaugy, whose name was given a special shout out. CURRENT ANY% SPEEDRUN RECORD SHOVEL KNIGHT SMAUGY 00:43:51 Sharing the memory still elicits a grin. “It has been an incredible journey throughout my speedrunning and streaming it live to countless people watching me,” Smaugy said. “I feel like speedrunning is my home; it has given me much practice and development in my mentality and personality. Spending so many hours playing this has given me an insane amount of joy and seeing other people coming to ask me [for] advice about 13

the game is a very good feeling. Shovel Knight is and will be for a long time one of my favorite games to play and speedrun. For Shovelry!” MunchaKoopas has won his fair share of races, and lost others. His record does not matter to him. He’s just along for the ride. “After so much time spent playing Shovel Knight, I can honestly say that it has become part of my identity,” MunchaKoopas said. “My friends outside of speedrunning joke that I lead a double life. I am a shy, reserved person most of the time. At speedrun events I try to be more outgoing and friendly to people. Shovel Knight has given me chances to travel the country, raise money for charity, make amazing friends, and even led me to a lovely lady I am rather fond of! I am not sure I will ever stop playing Shovel Knight. If I could go back in time and tell fifteen-year-old me he would be working with a game developer one day, I am certain he would demand a high five. This game has given me a new lease on life and I cannot imagine life without it.”

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DARKNESS, RAGE, AND THE POWER OF WAKING: SELF AND SURVIVAL IN KINGDOM HEARTS III Alexa Ray Corriea

This one’s for Camille—the real Princess of Heart. I watched the credits roll on Kingdom Hearts III— the game I had been waiting on for over a decade—alone in darkness. I never thought I’d finish Kingdom Hearts III as the person I was now, a person wholly different from the girl who placed Kingdom Hearts II in her PlayStation 2 nearly fifteen years ago, the young woman who stayed up late at night playing Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep on her PlayStation Portable, or even the working adult who played Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance for her first professional game review. The years had

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been both kind and cruel, and after a traumatic brain injury the struggle inside me had become louder, a raging storm of darkness that threatened to swallow me whole. Like Riku, I was battling my inner demons and determined to turn them from weakness to strength, using them to guide my hand in reaching out to others and creating things, stories, that would maybe help someone else find their light. It was an exhausting fight without end. I never thought of myself as like Sora anyway— carefree, seemingly immune to that darkness—but the deeper I felt myself fall under that shroud of darkness, the longer I let it hold me, the stronger I felt that maybe I belonged down there. Down in the darkness with the Heartless. After such a long time waiting, here it was: I had the bittersweet end of Sora’s story. Sora braved the darkest depths of the trippiest hell in the name of love, building friendships and breaking and rebuilding himself along the way. Kingdom Hearts III included perhaps the most ham-fisted metaphor I have ever seen for getting your shit together, and because I am a sucker for grand sweeping metaphors about love and friendship, it moved me profoundly. I began my journey through Kingdom Hearts with family and friends beside me. These same people walked the road with me, no matter the stakes, no matter the nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

cost, as far as they could go. But they can’t go with me right to the end. While support from your loved ones is powerful, it’s not within their power to do the work for you. You can start the journey together, but you can only finish it alone. However, whether or not you finish it in one piece is entirely dependent on you. • Previous Kingdom Hearts games had focused on the power of darkness. The darkness gave you power the light couldn’t. The darkness made you stronger and smarter and taught you the truth of existence. The darkness would cleanse the world and restore the balance that the light had completely ruined. The presence of darkness can be an impetus for good things. Just look at Riku, who over the course of the series used the darkness within him as a powerful motivator to fight for his friends and bolster his belief in himself. Throughout the series, he found his identity through the darkness, and turned his greatest weakness into his greatest strength. In the Kingdom Hearts series, darkness is a force that is mostly spoken of as being bad, but it can be used for good in rare instances. In Kingdom Hearts III, this theme is expressed in an ability called the “power of 17

waking.” According to the sorcerer Yen Sid, the power of waking is “the power to free a heart from its sleep.” This is a power that very few in the Kingdom Hearts universe possess. Yen Sid, as one of the original Keyblade wielders and King Mickey’s teacher, has this power. Naturally, so does King Mickey. And after the events of 2012’s Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Riku can claim mastery of this power as well. Sora, our hero, does not have this power. The key plot point in Dream Drop Distance centers around this power of waking. In the game’s final moments, Sora’s heart is corrupted by darkness in a moment of weakness. Because of this he is prohibited from learning this power, allowing uber-villain Xehanort to prime Sora for his own devious uses. Desperate to save his friend, Riku manifests the power to enter Sora’s heart as it sleeps in a blanket of darkness, and Riku succeeds in defeating the shadows there. Eerily, the shadow waiting to fight Riku and swallow Sora’s heart is a corrupted version of Ventus in his Keyblade Armor. And Ventus, you will remember, is the name of the person whose heart has been sleeping inside Sora’s for over a decade, waiting to be reunited with his body. So Riku learns the power of waking and Sora gets a giant F for not only failing his Mark of Mastery exam, but also for falling into darkness right in the middle of his final test. Though Sora could wield the Keyblade nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

prior to this test, he does not pass, and therefore he is not a true Keyblade Master. And so it is Riku who accompanies King Mickey on his search for the lost Keyblade Master Aqua through the Realm of Darkness. Defeated but not discouraged, Sora packs his bags and goes off to train some more, eager to match his friend. But Sora doesn’t ever seem to understand exactly what the power of waking is, nor is the audience ever really given the bottom line on its abilities. But we are made aware of its limitations, explicitly, and loudly, and repeatedly. The power of waking can be used to traverse the Realm of Darkness and travel between worlds using dark wormholes (called Corridors of Darkness) unscathed, which is a huge and very important detail. It’s why Sora can’t travel between worlds at all without using one of the Gummi Ships, the blocky vessels that help characters traverse between the game’s worlds. Throughout Kingdom Hearts III, Riku and King Mickey travel back and forth from this dark realm on their search for Aqua, sometimes having to retreat from powerful encounters to recharge and strategize. They do it seemingly effortlessly, so it’s no wonder Sora puts up a giant fight every time they tell him he can’t come along. About halfway through the game, as Sora is preparing to set out and find Aqua and the other missing Keyblade Wielders Terra and Ventus, Yen Sid stops him: Does Sora have the power of waking? 19

“Uh… no? Probably not?” is Sora’s response. “Without that power, you are not ready to face the Realm of Darkness,” Yen Sid proclaims. Sora has only been in the Realm of Darkness once before: at the end of Kingdom Hearts II, on its dark beaches with Riku, but for only a few minutes before the pair escaped. Sora literally begs Yen Sid to let him go to the Realm of Darkness anyway, and Riku says they all knew Sora would try to attempt a “half-baked rescue” of the missing fighters. Everyone laughs at Sora. Sora gets uncharacteristically defensive—angry, even. “The power of waking’s important,” Riku reminds him, and says once Sora has that power, he can join his efforts. Sora tells Riku not to be too reckless, and when they don’t think he’s listening, Donald and Goofy gossip. “Sora’s the reckless one,” Donald says. “No, not exactly, he just doesn’t think,” Goofy replies. This right here is the gospel truth. The power of waking in its original Japanese moniker is translated literally as “power to free a sleeping heart.” Sora can’t obtain this power and thus wake anyone else up because he himself is not fully awake. He has not realized his full potential yet because he is completely arrogant. His character growth over the past seventeen years of games has not been one of maturity, but one of regression. His nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

physical power may have grown, but his sense of self, his limitations, and what he is capable of, is far off balance. In many ways, it feels as though the script writers made Sora dumber in Kingdom Hearts III, and he is more saccharine and obnoxiously, cripplingly positive than ever before. It’s like the previous games in the series never happened, and he is meeting all this darkness and destruction for the first time with a shrug and a thumbs up. It makes Sora look willfully ignorant of the gravity of the situation before him. And Sora doesn’t know this, but everyone else does. Hence the repeated warnings to not attempt certain things without the power of waking. And because of his cheery can-do attitude, everyone waves off his recklessness as “determination.” Nothing could possibly go wrong, right? The power of waking isn’t even meant to be used on individual people, but on entire worlds. We see people’s hearts wake up all the time in Kingdom Hearts with a little shouted encouragement and hugs from friends. Waking a heart is easy. Waking the heart of a world is harder. Those sleeping hearts waiting to be awoken are the hearts of the worlds Sora and the gang travel through. And the power of waking is meant to release those worlds from the darkness binding them, worlds that are “sleeping” because the darkness has hidden them from the Realm of Light. 21

There are only a handful of worlds that fit the description of “sleeping.” There are all the worlds in Dream Drop Distance, which are only accessible to Sora and Riku by going to sleep themselves. “Waking them up” or bringing them back to the Realm of Light is the test to see if the boys can handle the power of waking. Then there are the obvious ones: the End of the World from the first Kingdom Hearts; the World That Never Was from Kingdom Hearts II; and of course, the Realm of Darkness. (You could even say the destroyed-and-then-duplicated-as-data Daybreak Town from Kingdom Hearts Union χ is a sleeping world… but that’s a rabbit hole not worth exploring in the confines of this essay.) Riku and King Mickey can access the “sleeping” Realm of Darkness without harm because they have the power to enter it while it is not “awake,” or in other words, not part of the Realm of Light—and therefore not open to receiving those who can’t comprehend that deep darkness. But the power of waking isn’t so much a magical power as it is a kind of knowledge, a piece of maturity. It is this knowledge and acceptance of the darkness that allows Aqua to confidently sacrifice herself to it in Birth by Sleep so Terra may return to the World of Light. Aqua is able to live in the Realm of Darkness unscathed for over a decade before succumbing to it out of doubt and fear. Neither King Mickey nor Riku doubt or fear the darkness: Riku, because that darkness nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

is part of him; King Mickey, because he knows more than anyone that light and darkness together are what make the universe run. But they don’t want Sora to try and force himself into the Realm of Darkness without this knowledge—it would be like forcing a square peg into a round hole. In Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania, a thick strategy guide for the game peppered with new information and interviews with the developers, series creator and director Tetsuya Nomura says the power of waking is meant to “reawaken what is near death.” Worlds that are near death can be accessed or restored with this power of waking. The Realm of Darkness, with its barren beaches and empty sky, absolutely looks near death. The power of waking lets you get there because it is so deeply broken, all hope and light buried. Sora does finally gain the power of waking in Kingdom Hearts III, closer to the end of the story, but he gets it in a really terrible way. He dies (along with all of his friends), puts himself back together, and in doing so creates a singularity that rewinds time and allows him to try again to avoid everyone’s deaths. Sora follows a Heartless called a Lich from world to world, defeating the creature to steal back the hearts of his dead friends and bring them all back to life. As he is jumping from world to world resurrecting the people he loves, a younger incarnation of Xehanort 23

appears with a warning: Sora is egregiously misusing the power of waking. It is for “traversing hearts to reach worlds, not for traversing worlds to reach hearts.” Sora is connecting his power to the wrong conductors, using it to travel through worlds and time and space and twisting up everything in the process just to revive his friends. From this moment onward, Sora begins to use the power of waking with reckless abandon. He uses it to bring his friends back from the dead, to bring himself back from the dead, and to world-hop with lightning speed without needing to use his Gummi Ship. This places an untold strain on Sora, wearing down his physical body and tearing at his very soul as he treats time and space like his personal playground. We see Sora really, hardcore abuse this space-hopping in Re Mind, the Kingdom Hearts III downloadable content released one full year after the main game first launched. In it, we see what Sora does after the end of the main game, which is to travel through time and space again looking for Kairi, revisiting worlds again trying to piece her existence back together. The result of this search is even more devastating, and I’ll get there momentarily. Sora is determined to complete the job, and in many of Kingdom Hearts III’s major boss battles he is fighting alone or with one companion. But even after nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

all this time, Sora doesn’t know himself well enough, or perhaps isn’t smart enough, to finish it in one piece. There is another piece to this “know thyself ” puzzle: something never explicitly explained or properly explored in Kingdom Hearts III, called Rage Form. Throughout the Kingdom Hearts games, Sora has gained the ability to change his form and ability set in combat, usually with a simple color palette swap on his clothing. In Kingdom Hearts II, he could change into forms that increased his magical or physical power well beyond his baselines or allowed him to wield two Keyblades at once with telekinesis. One of these new forms introduced in Kingdom Hearts II was Antiform, where Sora would take on the appearance of a black Heartless, shadows whispering off his limbs. In Antiform, Sora’s attacks are beastlike, like a berserker, and he attacks and crawls with his hands and feet. He will claw through enemies and rapidly deplete his entire reserve of energy in the process, leaving the player with nothing to work with. Donald and Goofy disappear from the battlefield, leaving Sora to fight alone. Antiform cannot be triggered manually by the player, and it is activated randomly as punishment for overusing the Drive System by repeatedly using the ability to change form in battle. You can only exit Antiform when all enemies are killed, or you have no energy left in the health gauge. 25

Kingdom Hearts III introduces Rage Form. Like Antiform Sora, Rage Form Sora looks like a Heartless holding a Keyblade—only this time his eyes are glowing red coals. Rage Form also will only trigger randomly, and only when Sora’s health gauge is critically low. Shortly after Kingdom Hearts III’s release, in an interview with Dengeki PlayStation magazine translated on KHInsider by user goldpanner, Tetsuya Nomura clarified the relationship between Rage Form and Antiform. “Rage does indeed have characteristics that are reminiscent of Anti[form], but it’s basically a separate thing setup wise,” he said. “Anti is based on Sora getting completely stained in darkness, but Rage Form doesn’t go quite that far. It’s based on him going into a rampage state, controlled by feelings of anger.” Rage Form is Sora’s anger made manifest, when his emotions allow the darkness in his heart to completely consume him. The main magic spell Sora can use in this form, called “Riskcharge,” goes a step further and depletes half of Sora’s available health points every time he uses it. Sora is so furious, he could literally kill himself in combat without the proper discipline. Rage Form is triggered by Sora’s desperation every single time—except once. In the final hours of Kingdom Hearts III, in the final fight against big bad Xehanort, Xehanort summons the mysterious and otherworldly power of Kingdom Hearts. He uses it to absorb the nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

light within Sora, which forces Sora into Rage Form. As Xehanort eggs Sora on, encouraging him to embrace that darkness, Sora slowly regains his bearings and is able to rip himself free. Riku, on the other hand, never once turns to his monstrous side, even after having tapped into his inner darkness countless times before. In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, we learn that Riku’s transformation into the dark being Ansem during Kingdom Hearts II was done on purpose, and that he consciously chose to live in his dark form for a while. In this way, Riku overcame that darkness and found himself again. But Sora does not overcome. He plows through his journey with reckless abandon, using whatever power he can, and it comes at the cost of his very existence. So in leaning on his rage to bolster his power, and in not understanding—or willfully ignoring—his limitations, Sora has lost his grip on who Sora is. And he finishes his journey, finishes it alone, but loses his entire self in the process. You have to know who you are before you trifle with powers that can alter you and the people that surround you. You have to know what you’re made of every step of your journey, or you’ll lose yourself along the way. •

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The “ham-fisted metaphor” for pulling yourself together that I mentioned earlier is the final step to Sora learning the power of waking. The scene occurs in the Final World, a landscape made entirely of blue sky and fluffy white clouds, mirrored on the ground by what looks like a sheen of water. There are no rules of gravity, and giant white structures float around, moving and spinning with their own forces. In the middle of this floats Sora. He is transparent, empty—he has quite literally shattered into thousands of pieces. Scattered around the world are Stars, twinkling five-pointed beings that have no faces, no names, no trajectory. We learn through exploring the Final World that these stars are what remains of people—souls, spirits, hearts—and that some of them are waiting to be found. But no one will be coming to find Sora. Because floating behind him in the endless sky are thousands of Soras, walking, swimming through the air, dancing, waving their arms. It is not explicitly stated, but these are all parts of Sora that were separated when he died. It’s unsettling, watching all those copies of Sora hover through this cheery void, completely oblivious to one another or their surroundings. In order for Sora to pull himself back together—and bring himself back to life after being suddenly killed—he must collect enough nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

other Soras to make him whole again. No one is coming for Sora, so he has to find himself. Sora literally collecting himself is his only opportunity for internal retrospection in all of Kingdom Hearts III, and in the entire Kingdom Hearts series itself. It’s his one shot to become a balanced, whole person. He physically gets the job done, and mentally he does too—but not with outright positive results. Sora knows that he is fearless, jumps in headfirst, and will do absolutely anything to help his friends, including playing God a little bit here. But he doesn’t know where his powers begin or end, or who he needs to grow into—or maybe he doesn’t even want to grow at all. He just wants to act now, consequences be damned. As I collected the Soras, I couldn’t stop thinking about this. I was extremely annoyed that this game would throw such a thinly veiled parable at me. After all the hours I spent playing these games, the years I’d spent pining for the final chapter of this story, I was being rewarded with an allegory about knowing your own heart well enough to know what roads to take. But that was exactly the reward I needed. My friends had my back on this journey—through Kingdom Hearts, through my sickness, through my sadness, through life—but ultimately, I alone had to make the final call on what road to take. Did I know who I was? Did I know my weakness? Anxiety and fear had become 29

my security blanket, and like Riku sneaking around with a ribbon over his eyes, avoiding Sora so his friend would not see the person he had become, so too had I hidden myself away from the people who cared about me. I didn’t even know what I was so afraid of: Was it judgment that I was still a work in progress? Or disgust that I let pain steer me? Could I take that darkness that was holding me so gently, that I had grown to lean on, and turn it from a crutch into powers I never dreamed I could have? For me, that answer was yes. My darkness is still here, but it is my greatest weapon. It has helped me find those unseen barriers in my life and break them down. It has helped me learn strength I never thought possible. It has allowed me to reach out and connect with others’ hearts, others struggling with many different kinds of darkness, helping them in battle. It has allowed me to wake those hearts, and for others to wake mine, even when I didn’t recognize I was sleeping. It has given me my own power of waking. My story isn’t over yet, but it’s a happy one now. I’m Riku, still learning more about myself every day and getting through the hard times with a deeper sense of self and a really excellent troupe of companions. But for Sora, the ending is not a happy one, and his tale is a cautionary one for me. Without his self-knowledge he nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

blasts off into the unknown, all in the name of love and friendship, only to be destroyed by it. After dying, bringing everyone back to life, and eventually defeating Xehanort, Sora’s final act in Kingdom Hearts III is to set off to find and revive Kairi, who was killed by Xehanort before the final battle. Donald and Goofy offer to accompany Sora, but the boy insists that this time he “has to go it alone.” All of Sora’s friends protest, with King Mickey nearly in tears. “The power of waking isn’t to go chase hearts around!” he says. “Even if you do locate Kairi, you might never come home to us again!” Sora insists, stating, “We’ll both be back before you know it.” Even in the end, Sora can’t grasp the true power of waking. Which is why, after several dozen hours of playtime pushing the limits on a power he didn’t understand to begin with, it is not surprising to watch Sora’s form fade away into the setting sun in the game’s DLC epilogue. It isn’t explicitly said what happens, but the way he disappears quietly suggests it: Sora is gone. (At least for now. His presence in future games is somewhat up in the air…) The final message of Kingdom Hearts is unexpected: Know yourself, and you can accomplish anything. You can withstand the hardest journey and pierce 31

the deepest darkness. You can take that darkness and use it to your advantage, harnessing it as a catalyst to push farther and love harder. And conversely, if you don’t take the time to know who you are before you take that journey, it could destroy you. Though it was a long road to get there, Kingdom Hearts III delivers us this message with a gut punch. There’s nothing we can’t do, nothing we can’t overcome, if we take the time to learn our own power of waking.

nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

HOW PRINCESS PEACH’S STORY DRAWS ON 2000 YEARS OF WOMEN IN PERIL Alyse Knorr

Nintendo’s Princess Peach is the quintessential damselin distress. She’s more important as a plot device than as an actual character. Whether you know her as Peach or Toadstool, her name doesn’t matter so much as the “Princess” preceding it. Mario’s leading lady is such a damsel cliché that she can also provide valuable insight into the evolution of the damsel trope, from the 4th century BCE all the way to Super Mario Odyssey. The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic and cornerstone of Hinduism that dates back over 2000 years. In this story, Rama, a god incarnate, must go on a magical journey with his brother Lakshman to rescue his wife Sita from the terrifyingly ugly monster Ravana, who has taken her as his bride. The plot of 2017’s Super 33

Mario Odyssey is the same as the Ramayana’s, only in this case the parallel to Lakshman isn’t Luigi but a sentient hat named Cappy. In many ways, the princess provides Mario with a reason for existing. This shares a lot in common with how damsels worked during the medieval period, a golden age for the damsel in distress. In stories, songs, and poems from this period, the damsel was literally the entire raison d’être for knights looking to prove their strength and chivalry. Apparently this was impossible to do without a maiden to rescue. Damsels surged in popularity yet again during the Romantic period, especially in gothic literature and art. Just look at some of the visual art from this time period and you’ll find maiden after maiden tied up in some way that conveniently reveals a bare shoulder or some cleavage—if she’s not already completely naked. The modern industrial era and its emerging technologies provided entirely new media to represent the damsel in distress—film, television, radio—as well as entirely new dangerous threats. Olive Oyl, girlfriend of Popeye the Sailor Man and another of the most famous damsels of all time, constantly found herself in the clutches of Popeye’s mortal enemy Bluto, who tied Olive to railroad tracks, ship’s masts, and whatever else was around—seemingly just to piss Popeye off. And then there’s Ann Darrow, another classic damsel, whose nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

screams were heard across all of New York City as she squirmed within the palm of King Kong, hoisted atop that 1933 symbol of industrial modernity, the Empire State Building. Talk about phallic. Mario’s first game famously involved a very King Kong-like damseling incident, although it was a different damsel. In the 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong, which marked Mario’s first-ever appearance, Donkey Kong carries “The Lady” around like an object he seems to have stolen from Mario (originally “Jumpman”). To really beat us over the head with her lack of agency, ads for Donkey Kong featured images of each of the three characters with a speech bubble. Donkey Kong says “SNORT!”, Jumpman says “FIGHT!”, and The Lady says “HELP!” On cabinets and promo materials for the game, The Lady wears stiletto heels and a torn dress. She is a prize to be won by a man, from a man. Well, from an ape. Donkey Kong designer Shigeru Miyamoto has said that he had Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl firmly in mind when he designed these characters. The screwed-up love triangle between “The Lady,” Jumpman, and Donkey Kong set the pattern for hundreds of video games to come, including, in major ways, the entire Super Mario franchise. The lady was eventually named “Pauline.” This was after the wife of a Nintendo of America employee, but scholar Neil Lerner points out that Donkey Kong’s Pauline also strongly 35

resembles the plucky hero Pauline from the early film serial The Perils of Pauline, produced between 1912 and 1920 in hopes of drawing a female audience out to the movies. The Pauline of this weekly series was an unmarried, world-traveling adventurer—a female hero of early cinema. Scholar Ben Singer interprets her as a bold and independent hero, a “serial queen” representing the “New Woman” arising out of the women’s suffrage movement. But as independent as she was, Pauline was also one of the first damsels in distress on film, since she’s rescued by a man fairly often. In 1985’s Super Mario Bros., Mario rescues a damsel in every single castle before finally reaching the princess at the end of the game. Super Mario Bros. 2, released for the NES in 1988, strayed drastically from the damsel format—in fact, you can actually play as the princess. This was so unusual at the time that when folklorist Sharon R. Sherman interviewed boy and girl players about Super Mario Bros. 2 shortly after it came out, she found that many boys were confused about the ability to play as the princess in the game because “she’s the one you’re trying to save.” Super Mario Bros. 2 was so different because, although it was developed by the Mario team, it was originally released as a non-Mario game called Doki Doki Panic. That game starred a family of adventurers, so Princess nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

Peach was called into duty to replace the mother character. The redesigned game ends with Mario waking up from a long dream, explaining away the princess’s brief stint as an active hero. Over the years since the dream’s end, Bowser’s motivations for kidnapping Peach have fluctuated. In some games, like Super Mario Odyssey, Bowser seems to be kidnapping Peach because he thinks he’s in love with her or wants to marry her. In others, it seems he wants to get at Mario—they have an age-old rivalry and capturing the princess is more about challenging Mario’s masculinity in a kind of guy vs. guy macho conflict. In Super Mario Bros. 3, the motivations behind Bowser’s kidnapping seem more political than personal—Bowser is the general of a massive army seeking total domination over the Mushroom Kingdom, and he doesn’t snatch Peach until he’s about to lose the war. In a Kotaku article tracking Peach’s “victimization record,” Mike Fahey gathered together some of Peach’s weirder kidnappings—the time she was trapped inside a stained-glass window in her castle in Super Mario 64, the time she actually did make it to the altar to marry Bowser in Super Paper Mario, the time Bowser blasted her castle into outer space in Super Mario Galaxy, and the time Bowser Jr. snatched her in Super Mario Sunshine because he thought she might be his mother. 37

More than a few critics have called for a new, more original plot line for future Mario games, arguing that the damsel rescue plot is tired and stale at this point. In a 2009 Time article titled “The Princess Is In Another Freakin’ Castle?”, writer Tracey John asked Miyamoto in an interview why Peach isn’t a playable character in the New Super Mario Bros. Wii game. Miyamoto replied by saying he had considered including Peach as a playable character, but that he chose to use Toad instead because Toad’s physique was more like Mario’s and Luigi’s. In other words, he chose to use a male character because it was more male. He also claimed, laughing, that if one of the four playable characters wore a dress, it would require lots of extra programming work to animate it properly. (“Then give her pants!” a friend exclaimed to me later, in response to this.) John rightfully pointed out that what Miyamoto doesn’t say is that if Peach were a playable character, she wouldn’t be able to be rescued, and the game would have no plot. “Does it bother anyone that the paper-thin plot surrounding Peach is recycled every time a Mario game comes out, no matter what the gameplay elements?” John asks. “Do Mario games get a free pass because it’s Mario?” Peach was absent again from the playable roster in New Super Mario Bros. U, but finally became a playable hero again in Super Mario nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

3D World. That game still featured damsels in distress, but Peach wasn’t one of them. In the end, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having damsels in distress—as long as we also have dudes in distress. Saving a person from harm is not a bad trope in itself—it only becomes problematic (and boring, honestly) when the damsel is always a woman and the hero is always a man. Rescue narratives are innately compelling, but they need to be gender-equitable and exist in as many combinations as possible— men rescuing men, women rescuing women, women rescuing men, and, yes, men rescuing women. And there are, of course, already games doing just this—Mario games, even. Consider that in Donkey Kong Jr., the “damsel” isn’t Pauline but Donkey Kong. In this hilarious re-working of the hero-villain-damsel triangle, Donkey Kong Jr. is cast as the hero, working to rescue his father from the clutches of the “villain” Mario who captured him in the first game. In Yoshi’s Island, the sequel to the SNES classic hit Super Mario World, a tiny baby Mario is the “damsel” you’re protecting, while a tiny baby Luigi is the “damsel” you’re journeying toward to rescue, all while you play as the genderless Yoshis. In one of the most interesting damsel system re-workings in the franchise, Super Princess Peach, Bowser kidnaps Mario, Luigi, and Toad, and Peach must set out to rescue 39

them. The Nintendo DS game is, however, widely criticized for its sexist mechanics, in which Peach uses extreme emotions like rage and gloom to defeat enemies—there’s even an emotion meter that measures her inner state throughout the game. A few rambunctious designers have had a lot of fun with re-gendering damsels, hijacking game code and premise to empower the damsel in various ways. In 2013, for instance, a game developer dad whose daughter loved Donkey Kong re-programmed the game for her as a gift, swapping the characters so that it’s Pauline rescuing Mario at the top of the platforms. The father, Mike Mika, wrote in a guest piece for Wired that he re-coded the game not to make a stataement about gender, but just to make his daughter happy. His daughter loved the new game (and the father received hate mail and death threats towards his daughter from strangers.) Many indie games like Braid, Limbo, and The Walking Dead have also experimented with the damsel trope in fascinating ways, at the same time as popular kids’ movies like Frozen and Moana shatter it altogether. And more and more mainstream game franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect allow characters to play as any gender and save, marry, or slaughter NPCs of any gender, as well. It’s this kind of openness that was missing from the Mario games in my childhood and are still missing nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

today. And while it by no means makes the Mario games any less fun, it does make me hopeful that my future kids will grow up with more options than ever before—starting with Peach’s decision, at the end of Mario Odyssey, to tell both Mario and Bowser to take a hike and embark on a world-spanning journey of her own.

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MEET TOM KEEGAN, THE MO-CAP DIRECTOR FOR BATTLEFRONT II AND WOLFENSTEIN Alex Kane

In June of 2017,performance director Tom Keegan wrapped shooting on the final mo-cap (“motion capture”) session for EA Motive’s Star Wars Battlefront II in Los Angeles. The veteran director calls it the biggest project he’s ever been involved with, as well as one of the most daunting. And he’s been in the industry for almost two decades; anyone who plays games has probably seen his work. In fact, Keegan is just old enough to remember a world without video games. Born and raised in New York, he majored in theater at Adelphi University and worked for several years as an off-Broadway actor and performance artist. In the 90s, he fell into a job as a development assistant at Hanna-Barbera, where he nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

worked on early Cartoon Network shows like Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, and The Powerpuff Girls. From there, he moved on to Universal Cartoon Studios and, eventually, to Knowledge Adventure, developer of the JumpStart series. “I was offered this job in kids’ educational software, and my boss said: ‘Oh, don’t leave television. You’ll never get back in!’” Keegan tells me. He went to a trusted friend and asked her, “Do you think this CD-ROM thing is gonna turn out to be anything?” Feeling stifled by his role working on The New Woody Woodpecker Show at Universal, Keegan took her advice and went for it. “And voilà, here I am,” he says with a laugh. Following a large acquisition of the studio that hired him in 2000, he was named the talent director at Vivendi Universal, where he recorded the voiceovers for one of the most acclaimed titles from the original Xbox era—2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. “There was a lot of politics around the movie,” he says. “A lot of times, people in movies get really cranky when they have to do the game— especially back then. Games didn’t have as much clout. That was like 2003, 2004. That’s so long ago, you know? But it shows you how far games have come, in terms of importance and popularity.” While the memory of working on Escape from Butcher Bay isn’t necessarily a fond one, that project with Starbreeze 43

Studios introduced Keegan to Jens Matthies, now the creative director at Swedish developer MachineGames. Three years later, they reunited to make the cult hit The Darkness, Keegan’s first project to utilize performance-capture technology. “And we’ve been collaborating together for almost fifteen years, now.” Most recently, Keegan worked with Matthies and the rest of his team on Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, which is slated for release later this year. EA DICE, the studio behind the wildly successful Battlefield series—and the multiplayer component of Star Wars Battlefront—has become Keegan’s bread and butter. In 2011, he served as the performance director for Battlefield 3, and has been a mainstay on the series ever since. “DICE has been a great collaborator and supporter of my work,” he says. “I did Mirror’s Edge Catalyst with them, also. It’s nice to have a group of people who I don’t have to start over at the beginning with. I do a lot of training; there’s always new people. But there are so many creative and interesting people in games—storytellers—yet not as many people that have dramatic training. And that’s really where I feel I fit in.” According to Battlefield 1 star Jeff Berg, Keegan has a rare talent for getting honest, truthful performances out of actors. “Tom really understands how to peel back the layers of the actor’s instrument,” he says. “Before our first table read, we all sat on the floor, introduced ourselves, and Tom asked us what our families meant to nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

us and how that would affect our role in the game. This man wasn’t gonna accept anything but the best from his actors. We were gonna have to bring our vulnerability to the table every single day.” Karen David, who played Isabel Kruger in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, had never acted in a video game prior to working with Keegan. “It really felt like we were in a play,” she says. “Our morning warm-up sessions took me back to when I was in drama college and when I was in the West End, in London, doing warm-ups with the cast before we went onstage. If it wasn’t for the suits we had to wear, and the dots all over our faces and the head gear, I would’ve thought we were in a theater—not on a special-effects stage.” When EA first tapped Keegan to direct the actors for Star Wars Battlefront II, he knew it was a big responsibility. “You just wanna be sure that you get it right,” he says. “And I made kind of a stupid remark before. I said something like, ‘Oh, God, I wouldn’t ever wanna work on Star Wars. It would be too difficult.’” Bad experiences in the TV business and working on Chronicles of Riddick, a much smaller property, had made him reluctant to work on that sort of multimedia franchise again. “And then, when I got the opportunity to work on it, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck it. This is gonna be great,’” he laughs. He credits both the actors and the games team at Lucasfilm for making the Battlefront II shoot a rewarding 45

experience. “We ended up with a pretty good script to start with, but also the actors were so great. Janina [Gavankar, who plays Iden Versio], in particular, was amazing. So committed. And when we had some creative meetings beforehand, and we got to the set, Lucasfilm was there, the creative director [Mark Thompson] was there, [writer Mitch Dyer] was there. And so we actually ended up doing a lot of improv on the scenes, and kind of tweaking the script according to what was happening between the actors, and what the actors wanted to contribute.” It felt, he says, like a collaboration—one in which things got thematically richer and more refined as they went along. To his relief, Lucasfilm’s quality-assurance team only intervened in ways that helped the material stay true to Star Wars. “Somebody from Lucasfilm would be there saying, ‘No, they can’t do that. This is what they would do. This is what’s really important in the Empire, this is how the rebels walk,’ all that kind of stuff,” Keegan says. “So we had a lot of support. We didn’t really have to worry. The parts that you need to get right, there were people there to help. And with such a great and committed cast, it was a joy. “When you have a game, of course, you can only deviate so much,” he adds. “Every decision you make is gonna affect stuff that they’ve been working on. So you nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

can’t make dramatic changes from the script, but you can work the scene. You can shift the scene around in a way that it really works.” • Keegan has an interesting connection to George Lucas. As an actor in New York, he spent some time working for avant-garde director and dance choreographer Jean Erdman, who happened to be married to the philosopher Joseph Campbell, Lucas’s biggest influence in writing Star Wars outside of Flash Gordon and filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa. He recalls going out to dinner with Campbell and Erdman after a play had ended and hearing Campbell explain to him the meaning behind the various symbols on the dollar bill. As for Star Wars itself, Keegan says he’s always been drawn to its very lived-in universe. “It’s that scene in the bar, I think, that’s the essence of what I’ve always loved about Star Wars,” he says. “The creatures, people having a life, meeting people—the characters. This kind of universal bar where people are talking about having a good time, and seeing the fights and all the things that happen. I think that’s one of the most wonderful things about the franchise.” In preparation for the performance-capture shoots, he went back and watched all of the movies again with 47

fresh eyes, analyzing rather than merely appreciating them. “One thing I sometimes do is, I’ll watch a movie backwards,” Keegan says. “It helps you to see the structure of the narrative. And it was finding the spirit of it—the canon is so large now that there’s different spirits to it, and especially in some of the new ones. Rogue One, you know, is a bit darker. But the early ones had a feeling of popcorn-y playfulness. I really enjoyed that.” To hear him talk about the films, you’d almost think he was describing the creative process: “You just wanna get immersed in it. It always felt like, to me, that Star Wars was about a group of people who were kind of flying by the seat of their pants. ‘Well, I’m in this situation, and I’m gonna get out of it somehow.’ And that’s what I really love about it.”

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T H E FA N S W H O W O N ’ T LET MEGA MAN DIE Salvatore Pane Fall, 2017 In the 1980s,Mega Man was one of gaming’s critical and commercial darlings. Beloved entries like Mega Man 2 sold in large quantities, and later cult classics released in the subsequent decades like Mega Man Legends and Mega Man Battle Network incorporated newer and more modern approaches. By 2010, the Blue Bomber’s future still looked bright. Capcom had just announced Mega Man Legends 3, a game called Mega Man Universe that would allow players to create their own levels, and a first-person shooter starring Mega Man himself called Maverick Hunter. But when longtime series shepherd Keiji Inafune abruptly left Capcom, the company canceled each of these highly anticipated projects. For the next seven years, the diminutive star of more than 50 games on everything from the Super Nintendo to the WonderSwan was pushed out of the limelight, 49

reduced to a handful of cameos or mobile ports. But what Capcom didn’t anticipate was the stubbornness of their own fans. In the words of Brian Austrin, the self-proclaimed “unofficial Mega Man brand ambassador” and owner of the website Rockman Corner, “The fans have made the franchise their own. They won’t let it die.” In 2016, I published a book about Mega Man 3. I detailed the development of the first three NES games in addition to forays into the larger retro game collecting scene. I interviewed the Angry Video Game Nerd and gaming fans who, like me, had amassed hundreds and hundreds of NES cartridges gathering dust on their shelves. I had never even considered speaking with the Mega Man fan community because I didn’t know the Mega Man fan community even existed. That changed the moment the book was published. When I mixed up the names of obscure Mega Man characters, I heard about it. When I wrote that the plots of Mega Man X and Mega Man Legends were lame, I heard about it. When I claimed that Rush, Mega Man’s red robot dog, looked pink, I heard about it. This endeared them to me. I’d spent my teen years writing Final Fantasy fanfiction and playing an online Dungeons & Dragons campaign starring Dragon Ball Z characters. I have a soft span for fans and wanted to learn more about these hardcore Mega Man devotees nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

and why they still clung to a character whose best games came out in the 1980s. I interviewed and interviewed and interviewed, but the question I always asked them was the same: Why do people still care about Mega Man? • In 2017, a teen in the Netherlands started work on a project that would soon make headlines across the world. Known only by the online handle WreckingPrograms, the seventeen-year-old released the Mega Engine, an open-source plugin for GameMaker that allows aspiring designers to assemble their own Mega Man games using assets ripped straight from the classic NES titles. Would-be dev teams used the engine to develop elaborate fan games, but soon that alone wasn’t enough for WreckingPrograms. He wanted to deliver a Mega Man creation suite to the masses, and even something as simple as GameMaker still requires a basic understanding of coding. Enter Mega Maker, a creation suite that allows anyone to build and share their own Mega Man levels. Picture Super Mario Maker, but released by fans on the internet for free. “The Mega Man fan gaming community is still actively working on creating new games, Mega Maker being one of them, to give the community some new content despite Capcom not doing much 51

with the franchise anymore,” WreckingPrograms told me in 2017. When WreckingPrograms first uploaded his Mega Maker trailer to YouTube, the video went viral and was quickly covered by sites like Polygon and GameSpot. With so much anticipation, it’s easy to think that WreckingPrograms would have been better off replacing Mega Man with a character who only looks like Mega Man so that he could actually sell his game. But WreckingPrograms told me, “We really like the Mega Man franchise, which includes its characters, weapons, bosses and more. Changing these assets would take away an important element of the game. Plus, we’re not in it for the money, and we’re completely fine with not making a profit from our fan game.” Interestingly, WreckingPrograms said he had no plans to go into the game industry after college. “I plan to become a software engineer, but not for video games. I’d prefer to keep that as a hobby.” Some hobby. As a thirty-something who cut his teeth on Mega Man in the 1980s and 90s, I was astonished that a teenager from the Netherlands would care about the series when Capcom hadn’t released a new game in years. “I simply prefer it over other classic 2D platformer franchises,” WreckingPrograms said, noting that the series “offers a lot of replayability due to nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

its non-linear stage select, on top of self-imposed challenges such as perfect runs.” Another reason for Mega Man’s enduring popularity routinely mentioned on forums is that the series offers so many points of entry. Want a candy-colored platformer? Try the NES games. Want a moodier, anime-inspired story? Go with Mega Man X or any of the Zero spinoffs. How about a 3D adventure somewhere between Ocarina of Time and Armored Core? That’s Mega Man Legends. An action RPG with a sprinkle of Pokémon? There are literally six Mega Man Battle Network games to choose from. Like Mickey Mouse or Mario, Mega Man can be reinvented for new generations. And if Capcom refuses to craft a new Mega Man for Gen Z, the fans will do it themselves. • WreckingPrograms wasn’t the only one keeping Mega Man on life support. Chris King’s 20XX also took obvious cues from the Blue Bomber while utilizing completely new assets and characters. This meant that unlike Mega Maker, King could actually sell his game to the public. Following an opening sequence that lovingly references Mega Man 2, 20XX marries classic Mega Man gameplay with the random procedurally-generated 53

roguelike structure of Spelunky. Memorization won’t help you this time. “I’ve played through all the [Mega Man] games several times each,” King told me in 2017. “Yes, even the not-so-great X5 through X8. I’ve always just wanted more Mega Man, and [an] endlessly replayable Mega Man X sounded like a pretty solid hook to me, so I went for it as soon as I could afford to. I built a garbage-art prototype, hired [Zach Urtes] to do our not-garbage art, and got chugging.” King began working on 20XX in 2013 when he was still employed as a telecom services programmer in Northern Virginia. Nearing 30, King bailed on the corporate world to follow his dream of developing a commercial video game. A year later, he unveiled 20XX on Kickstarter, and fans paid $20,000 to make it a reality. “20XX is another one of those ‘million dollar ideas’ that a fan just so happened to make,” Rockman Corner’s Brian Austrin said. “It feels like a natural extension to the Mega Man formula. I’m happy it’s seen such success not only within our community, but gamers as a whole.” Applying roguelike mechanics to something notoriously difficult like Mega Man sounds like a game only the hardcore could love, but 20XX wisely adapts to the player’s skill level. Before each run, you can change the difficulty or opt into a mode where rewards like extra nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

health or stronger attacks carry over after death, allowing casual players a sense of progress. Unlike Keiji Inafune’s much-hyped but ultimately disappointing Mighty No. 9, which feels like a weaker Mega Man X, 20XX takes the feeling and mood of the Mega Man X games and meshes that with modern game design. Both 20XX and Mega Maker scratch a gaming itch Capcom seems to have given up on. Like Brian Austrin told me, “Where Capcom slacks, fans are more than happy to pick up the pace.” • In 1992, Dr. Henry Jenkins published a book that redefined the burgeoning field of fan studies, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Instead of merely studying fan communities like in previous academic texts, Jenkins examined the objects these communities produced, claiming, “Fans do not simply consume preproduced stories; they manufacture their own.” This “manufacturing” results in remixed media that serves the fanbase even if it resists the original creator’s intent. Jenkins proved this by studying everything from fanfiction romantically pairing Spock and Kirk to a complete fan rewrite of the final season of the late 1980s TV show Beauty and the Beast. 55

Although fan studies has grown immeasurably since the release of Textual Poachers, video games are still wildly overlooked. But you can easily apply Jenkins’s analysis to gamers. What is Mega Maker if not a remix that stands in stark contrast to the implicit goal of Capcom—i.e, generating money for its shareholders? “Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media,” Jenkins writes. “The fans’ response typically involves not just fascination or adoration, but frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the two responses which motivate their active engagement with the media.” Adoration mixed with frustration? That’s Mega Man fandom to a T. And as these fan projects become more and more financially at odds with Capcom, they may soon directly compete with them. • Although community efforts to expand Mega Man have accelerated thanks to broadband internet, not to mention widely available dev tools like GameMaker, these projects are nothing new. All the way back in August 1999, a hacker named Akujin uploaded a translation patch for Cocoron to the internet. When Brian Austrin first saw pictures of Cocoron online, he was amazed: nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

“Boy, these guys must’ve really liked Mega Man. Little did I know!” Released for the Famicom in 1991, Cocoron was developed by Takeru, an independent company of Japanese all-star programmers who wanted more credit for their games than corporations like Capcom were willing to share. Although Takeru included veterans from Strider, Ghouls ’n Ghosts, and Metal Storm, Cocoron was helmed by Akira Kitamura, the original creator of Mega Man, and Takashi Tateishi, lead composer on Mega Man 2. While Keiji Inafune and Capcom worked on Mega Man 3 and 4, Kitamura and Takeru focused instead on Cocoron, a game they hoped would improve on the established Mega Man formula. Cocoron strips the techno sensibility of Mega Man and replaces it with a storybook feel complete with giant beanstalks and magic castles. You still play levels in any order, and each stage culminates with an engaging boss fight while Tateshi’s familiar-feeling soundtrack kicks in the background. The major deviation comes from Cocoron’s revamped power-up system. In Mega Man, you start off weak and gain abilities as you defeat bosses, taking their abilities as your own. In Cocoron, you’re given access to everything from the start, but you must choose separate properties for your head, torso, and weapon before each level. This bizarre process involves mixing and matching any number of strange 57

parts so that you could end up with a boomerang-wielding tank with a pumpkinhead or a dragon with a robot skull who throws shurikens. At the end of every level, you get the chance to build a new character, but you can’t create any more once you reach Cocoron’s difficult end game. There’s real strategy in assembling the right combination of components for the game’s last stretch. Cocoron isn’t a perfect game, especially compared to Mega Man 3 or 4. But weighed against the entire NES library, it stands out as one of the most inventive titles on the platform, a notch below the system’s best platformers in the tier reserved for games like Batman, Little Samson, or Kid Icarus. But it’s particularly noteworthy for fans of Mega Man. Kitamura’s influence is obvious, and Cocoron feels like a Mega Man side story as much as Keiji Inafune’s own attempt nearly thirty years later with Mighty No. 9 or even Chris King’s 20XX. But what about Akujin, the fan hacker who translated Cocoron for English-speaking audiences eight years after its release? Who is this human being who spent hours and hours in the run-up to Y2K hacking Cocoron, retrieving text, and painstakingly translating every single phrase just to upload it for free over a 56k internet connection? Between 1999 and the mid-2000s, Akujin helped translate over 30 games, mostly for the NES and SNES. Some took a few weeks to translate while others, like the text-heavy Magical Land of Wozz, needed three nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

years of work. Based on when Akujin was active, we can guess he probably started hacking games by manually editing bytes in a hex editor like Translhextion— an incredibly time-intensive and tedious process. We know that he worked with a number of dedicated ROM teams—including Dynamic Designs and TransCorp— that were hugely influential in bringing Japanese games to new audiences in the west. But, like so many super fans, the full story of Akujin is lost to history. This is exactly why the work of fan studies historians like Henry Jenkins is so important. Fan communities are fleeting. And since so many fans online use pseudonyms, much of the history behind some of these fascinating projects will be lost if they’re not immediately documented. I spoke with Taskforce, one of Akujin’s collaborators from Dynamic Designs, and learned that Akujin vanished from the fan community ten or fifteen years ago. Dave “Foxhack” Silva, another influential fan translator who worked alongside Akujin, told me, “Sadly, I know very little about him. If I recall correctly, we only exchanged words via translation message boards, and I never really spoke to him via emails or internet messaging.” No one seems to know what happened to Akujin, and no matter how many hackers I spoke to, the story was always the same: Akujin simply vanished. Whether he outgrew the scene, died, or no longer has 59

time to dedicate countless hours of free labor is anyone’s guess. But even the readme file included with the 2014 Magical Land of Wozz translation patch alludes to Akujin’s disappearance. While thanking him, the hacker Nightcrawler writes, “Akujin, the same translator who did Dual Orb 2 for us, did the script for Wozz. He did an initial rough draft of the main script and then disappeared. He pulls more disappearing acts than the best magicians, but we couldn’t have done it without him.” However, people like Akujin willing to do complex work for free are quite common in the Mega Man community. Like WreckingPrograms, Brian Austrin launched Rockman Corner when he was just seventeen. Thirteen years later, his site has been accessed over five million times. Austrin credits the series’s aesthetic diversity for the large group of Mega Man fans that seems to replenish itself every few years. “The Mega Man brand is so diverse it invites many different kinds of people. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Mega Man fans are some of the most creative artists, musicians, programmers and fan-game designers out there.” He’s not wrong. Search for Mega Man songs online and you’ll find the Protomen, Megas, Minibosses, and dozens of other YouTubers fingerpicking the series’s greatest hits on acoustic guitar. Look up “Mega Man” on Etsy for 1,600 unique results. A search on Fanfiction.net produces 808 Mega Man stories. You nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

can also sample tons of fan games in addition to Mega Maker—Mega Man Ultra, Mega Man 2.5D, Mega Man Rock Force, Mega Man Unlimited, and so many more. Even Rockman Corner has friendly competition in hugely popular sites like the Mega Man Network, Mega Man Homepage, Mega Man Knowledge Database, and Rockman Perfect Memories. Henry Jenkins argues that all of these disparate fan works—everything from Mega Maker to Akujin’s translation of Cocoron to the wealth of Mega Man fansites— accumulate into something larger than the sum of their parts: “Fans possess not simply borrowed remnants snatched from mass culture, but their own culture built from the semiotic raw materials the media provides.” These fan products are not simply funhouse mirror regurgitations of Mega Man. They build atop the foundations laid down by Kitamura and Inafune, pushing them through the cultural lenses and influences of the fans themselves. The hundreds of thousands of words produced by Brian Austrin for Rockman Corner—far longer than any Proust or Dostoevsky novel—are an attempt at remixed meaning, just like the other examples from Akujin, King, WreckingPrograms—even my book Mega Man 3. Taken all together, they are an effort to establish or join a culture: the fan community. These people gathered because of Mega Man and used their shared fascination to create something new. The longer 61

Capcom goes without generating fresh Mega Man content, the more the character and his mythos become defined by the fans. In his book, Jenkins quotes a fanfiction writer from the early 90s: “I liked fans and wanted to join in their activities; the TV viewing itself was more like homework…. How many other fans enjoy the processes of fandom more than, or at least as much as, the supposedly central attraction of the shows and movies themselves?” If that’s true, then Mega Man doesn’t even matter. He’s an empty vessel. Although his stories are increasingly more convoluted compared to Mario or Contra, they still pale in terms of complexity against hundreds of other android-laden tales across a variety of mediums. Mega Man, then, would serve as a creative outlet for people like King, Akujin, and also myself. Our textual poaching and remixes don’t exist because of Mega Man. He is simply the bridge we’ve used to enter a community and express ourselves. In an alternate universe where Mega Man never existed, Austrin would helm Castlevania Corner or Double Dragon Alley, WreckingPrograms would release Ninja Gaiden Maker, Chris King, a rogue reimagining of Bonk’s Adventure, and I’d probably pen a book about DuckTales. Hardcore fans are drawn to texts because they want to be fans and require a lens for their creativity.

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The energy we see in 20XX and Mega Maker and a thousand other Mega Man fan projects will continue, expressed through new forms, characters, and ideas. It was never about Mega Man anyway. Mega Man lives on because of the fans, those people hunched over keyboards with furrowed brows, happily working late into the night, imagining a community of like-minded people.

Coda: New Game + Summer, 2021 It’s been four years since I wrote a version of the above essay, and during that time Capcom has finally released Mega Man 11, not to mention a seemingly endless parade of re-releases across a staggering number of platforms. Some of these compilations are sublime, like the Mega Man Legacy Collection which saw Frank Cifaldi—founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation—and Digital Eclipse take a Criterion-styled approach to the original six Mega Man games. But others have been craven cash-ins like the 2017 re-releases of those exact same games on mobile. These aren’t the Digital Eclipse builds or even the passable versions that came out on the original PlayStation. They’re slightly reworked ports of old flip-phone games, 63

and they control as horribly as they sound. Even Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 feels bare-bones in comparison to the Cifaldi release. Instead of running back the formula that was so successful with the first compilation, Capcom jettisoned Digital Eclipse and repackaged four weaker entries from the series without much in the way of supplemental material. As for Mega Man 11 itself, it’s a joyless retread of the original games in 2.5D. Mega Man is 3D now, but confined to a 2D plane. Otherwise, it’s the exact same game I played 30 years ago as a wide-eyed child. Compared to the creativity of 20XX or the intuitive design suite of Mega Maker, Mega Man 11 feels hollow. It’s nostalgia bait, but l don’t feel any warmth or charm while playing. Instead, I have to force myself to continue playing instead of escaping to the NES entries now available on so many disparate platforms. Rather than imagining the Breath of the Wild equivalent for Mega Man—a game which refreshes 1980s concepts for modern audiences and sensibilities—Mega Man 11 doubles down on the formula that was already turning stale in 1993 when Mega Man 6 dropped. None of this should be surprising. The aforementioned Akira Kitamura, Mega Man’s creator, left Capcom long ago, and so has Keiji Inafune, the man often referred to as Mega Man’s adoptive father in Japan. There is no reason for Mega Man to still exist, save for the fact that the Blue Bomber can still wring a nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

few dollars from gamers approaching 40. Like so much of modern media, Mega Man has been reduced to mere intellectual property. I preferred the decade of wanting, when global fans rushed to plug in the gaps between Mega Man’s rare releases, coding their dreams into missives for their communities. Maybe four years from now, this coda will need another update. Maybe we’ll finally see a new interpretation of Mega Man from Capcom itself, a new version that carries forward the run-and-gun, power-swapping charm of the original minus the baggage of a 30-year-old NES design ethos. I hope to write that update. Until then, the fans will keep Mega Man going. Until then, the fans will keep Mega Man alive.

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THE BOOK OF THE DEAD: S.D. PERRY AND THE NOVELIZATION OF RESIDENT EVIL Philip J Reed

In 2002, the PlayStation video gameResident Evil was very loosely adapted into a film by Paul W.S. Anderson. Turning a five-to-seven-hour game into a lean 100-minute film allowed for a much faster pacing to be brought to the story, but the film shared almost no narrative DNA with the game. In the game, members of STARS’s Alpha Team of special police operatives are dispatched to the spooky Spencer Mansion to track down the Bravo Team, who had vanished while investigating a series of cannibalistic murders. Doing so uncovers an impending zombie nightmare caused by secretive genetic experiments conducted by the nefarious Umbrella Corporation. Players get the chance to play as either meathead Chris Redfield nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

or ingenuous Jill Valentine and uncover the secrets of the mansion—or die trying. In Anderson’s film, none of these characters appear. Instead, viewers experience the story of Alice, herself a genetic experiment engineered by Umbrella, as she and a paramilitary unit struggle to escape the zombie disaster in a laboratory deep beneath the mansion. Even as both game and movie diverged down into their own series of sequels, to date we have yet to see a direct translation of the original Spencer Mansion adventure to the big screen. We did, however, get to see it translated into print as a novelization in 1998 called Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy. Thanks to this book, we experience the story of Resident Evil with pacing that is not dictated by the player. It’s worth both playing the game and reading its novelization to see the differences in perspective artists have employed when approaching the same story through two different forms of media. In the case of The Umbrella Conspiracy, that artist is Danelle Perry, writing as S.D. Perry. Once Resident Evil was released in 1996 and Capcom forged ahead weaving stories for the game’s sequels, the company left it to Perry to flesh out the story of the first game into a readable narrative. 67

Perry lives in Oregon, and today you can find her name attached to a large number of novelizations in major franchises, including Aliens, Star Trek, Wonder Woman, Timecop, and Tomb Raider. When she was tapped to adapt Resident Evil, though, Perry was more of an unknown quantity. She was approached by Marco Palmieri, associate editor at Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. “The books wouldn’t have existed without Marco,” Perry told me. “He pitched the idea to his boss at Pocket, which is how Simon & Schuster ended up leasing the publishing rights. This was way back when, after the first game was out, and the second was on the way. He wanted a writer to novelize both the games, and do two originals.” She was not Palmieri’s first choice, but she did happen to know the front-runner quite well. “He approached my father, initially,” she said. “He was too busy, so he gave Marco my name.” Her father is Steve Perry, a prolific novelist and television writer. In total he’s published more than 50 books, a number of them tie-ins for well-established franchises. These include Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Men in Black, Conan the Barbarian, and many more. Animation fans around my age may have experienced his work without even realizing it, as he wrote—among nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

other things—three episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and seven episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. Perry cowrote two novels with her father: 1993’s Aliens tie-in The Female War and 1994’s Aliens vs. Predator: Prey. “With novelization and tie-in writing, it’s an invitation-only kind of deal,” Perry explained. “My father writes a lot of tie-ins, so I kind of snuck in through the back door writing a couple of books with him and got a ‘rep’ for being good and able to meet deadlines.” She explained that “good” in this sense meant that her writing would be “reasonably clean” and not require much editing. “Once you have a decent reputation,” she continued, “editors will look you up if they’ve got a project they think you’d be good for.” Resident Evil turned out to be a chance for Perry to flex her creative muscles with a series her father had not been involved in. One that would allow her not only to establish her own identity as a writer, but to establish it in a genre she loved. “I’m pretty much a horror nerd,” she told me. “My inspirations are probably about what you would expect: Clive Barker, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James… there are lots more, but that’s a good sampling. One of my favorite books is Hell House by Richard Matheson. I try to 69

read it every Christmas! And I love The Terror by Dan Simmons. The Shining by Stephen King. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I also really enjoy Lovecraft, in spite of his horrendous racism. If he were alive today, I’d probably boycott him.” Perry was 26 when Resident Evil was released, and by the time she was asked to novelize it, she was already a fan of the game. “I was still trying to get through the mansion when the phone rang, so to speak,” she remembered. “I enthusiastically accepted.” Resident Evil had enough plot beats upon which to hang a story, but Perry couldn’t bring herself to rely only on parroting those developments. “Books need filler and backstory,” she explained, “or your characters just run back and forth finding puzzle pieces and shooting monsters, which can be supremely dull if the characters are flat.” To avoid writing a novelized Let’s Play, Perry employed a decidedly subjective view of events, hopping between the game’s characters to reveal how they were reacting internally to the catastrophe. This alone helps the book stand apart from the game, as fans already know what the characters do and say in Resident Evil. Perry instead explores what they feel. She also attempts to round the characters out believably. For example, she reveals that Jill Valentine comes nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

from a family of criminals. This detail not only provides a justification for Jill’s in-game lockpicking skills, but gives the character an arc: She’s the one Valentine attempting to go straight. Perry credits Palmieri for this detail, as well as for coming up with Trent, a character unique to the novels who tips Jill off that there is a traitor within STARS. Perhaps in gratitude for his creative assistance, Perry named the STARS national commander after him. “Other than that, I think I made up pretty much everything else,” she said. She really does mean “everything else.” Perry does a great job of plugging holes in the original story and reframing video-game logic for the benefit of the reader. For example, we learn very late in the game that STARS Captain Albert Wesker is a double agent secretly working for the Umbrella Corporation, tasked with testing the combat abilities of Umbrella’s creations and destroying all evidence of the company’s experiments at any cost. (By feeding STARS through the Spencer Mansion, he hopes to accomplish both.) Wesker has also enlisted the help of fellow teammate Barry Burton, the lovable doofus who aids Jill at multiple points through her quest. Perry reveals Wesker’s turncoat status much earlier than Resident Evil does, which in turn allows her to provide more insight into Barry’s situation. In the game, 71

Barry only works with Wesker because he believes the man is holding his wife and daughters hostage. In The Umbrella Conspiracy, Perry makes clear that this is a complete bluff on Wesker’s part: Barry’s family is safe, and the poor guy doesn’t know it. We also get to see Wesker manipulating him into doing his bidding on the fly, whereas the game leaves it open enough for us to believe that they’ve both been working together for some time. Perry even streamlines the plot effectively. She has Chris and Jill explore the mansion through two distinct routes, finding different keys, rooms, items, and monsters on their own, which means we don’t have to read about two characters figuring out the same puzzles at different times. When it comes to one especially tedious puzzle in the game—involving cranks and batteries and access lifts—Perry skips it altogether, having Jill simply climb down the shaft rather than muck around with the items and backtracking. It’s one of many wise narrative decisions. The differences between the novel and the game made me wonder if she had to fight for any of the changes she made. Surprisingly, she didn’t. “I had a lot of freedom,” she said. “I pretty much only ever worked with my editor on Resident Evil, and he was great. Marco sent the pitch for the first book to Capcom; their only comment was to make sure I nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

mentioned that the mansion was called the Spencer estate. That’s literally the only feedback we ever got from Capcom on all of the books. I’m not even sure if Capcom read the books.” The lack of restrictions from Capcom led Palmieri to implement some of his own guidelines. “My editor only had a couple of rules,” Perry told me. “Try not to curse too much, don’t maim or murder any of the main characters, and turn the games into books that are fun to read. I did my best.” Her best was more than good enough. Pocket was so happy with her work that they expanded her initial contract from four novels to seven. When I asked her about fan response, she told me what I was already able to see from the conversations she has with fans on her Twitter feed: Readers loved her take on the universe. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and continues to be,” she said. “I still get contacted pretty regularly by fans who enjoyed the books. The few criticisms I get seem fair to me, like I didn’t know the difference between a clip and a mag, or that the books are ‘fun but trashy.’ I can live with that.” She did say that the endlessly confounding lore of the Resident Evil series—which was not firmly established when Perry started writing, and which ultimately ran counter to her work—is an obstacle to enjoyment for many readers. Capcom was already working on more 73

games while Perry was writing, and was not communicating with her about where the story would go. “Some fans are quick to point out that my books aren’t canon, which is true,” she told me, “but I didn’t get any direction from the parent company, so I just kind of had to come up with explanations on my own. That became a problem as the series continued; the lack of communication meant that I never knew if what I wrote was going to contradict what Capcom was doing.” Aware that there was not going to be an easy way to rectify her developing backstory with Capcom’s, beginning with the fifth book in her series, the novelization of Resident Evil 3, Perry added a disclaimer so that fans would know that the games and the books were coming from different companies. It wasn’t a step that could win the hearts of lore sticklers, but she felt it important to draw the distinction between the universes herself, as an artist. “The people who focus on canon don’t like the books much,” she said, “but to each their own.” This may be one reason she found it easier to write her two original novels set within the Resident Evil universe—1998’s Caliban Cove and 1999’s Underworld— although she also cites the fact that writing original stories meant she didn’t have to worry about specifics of gameplay.

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“I worked hard to get the details down from the games, which required a lot of time playing,” she said. “With the originals, I just had to come up with cool, spooky Umbrella environments and then cause mayhem.” The two original novels also provide a solid clue as to her favorite character in the series: Rebecca Chambers, the spunky STARS medic who helps Chris Redfield lumber his way through the Spencer Mansion in the original game. Rebecca played a major role in both of Perry’s original tales, as well as The Umbrella Conspiracy and 2004’s Zero Hour, the novelization of Resident Evil Zero. “I had to pick someone from the original game’s cast who was kind of unknown to ‘star’ in the first tie-in,” Perry said. “I was writing Caliban Cove before the second game was even out. Rebecca seemed the obvious choice because she had so little screen time at that point. I got to invent her backstory, which was fun.” As a horror nerd, though, Perry also has a bit of love for the less virtuous. “I gotta say, Wesker was also quite enjoyable,” she told me. “Villains always are.” While Perry enjoyed her time with the franchise, her writing career took her elsewhere and left her with less time to play the games. “I only played the games I was contracted to novelize,” she said. “I always played before I started writing, 75

although I leaned heavily on game guides after the first couple. As for after? Not so much. Other projects came up, and I had to invest in other fandoms.” Like so many of us, though, she has dipped back into the games of her youth to see how they held up, and to take a little trip backward in time to reconnect with the characters she used to know. “I actually tried to play the first game recently, the original version,” she told me. “I died in the first hallway with the dogs because I’m old now, and my reflexes are crap.” I asked her if she remembered any particular challenges she encountered in adapting a story from an interactive medium to a passive one. “I was too young at the time to worry about anything outside of meeting my deadlines,” she assured me, as ever underselling her own achievement. Perry comes across as an appealingly humble figure. One who kept a lot of Resident Evil fans—as well as fans of other massive franchises—entertained with her work, and one who doubtless inspired others to write their own stories, just as so many writers inspired her in the first place. “I think of writing as kind of like playing the violin,” she told me. “Anyone can sit down and make sounds, but to get good at it, you have to practice constantly. You have to care about the process, which often includes nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

mind-numbing edits and rewrites. I was still very much a newbie when I wrote the Resident Evil books, and I think it shows, but I love that people still care about them, and I worked hard to make them entertaining.” She continued with some valuable guidance. “Write because you love it,” she said. “If you’re only writing for fame or money, you’ll likely be disappointed.” With such a successful father and an impressive career of her own, I wondered if her children have the spark of creativity as well. “Both of my boys have a creative flair,” she said. “My thirteen-year-old loves language and world-building. My fifteen-year-old thinks creative writing is a blast. But they both hate editing, so they probably won’t end up going professional.” Of course, the important thing to her isn’t that they keep up the family trade. “I don’t care, as long as they find careers that fulfill them,” she concluded. “Because, you know, I’m their mom.” Even given the same creative ingredients—a spooky house, a team with guns, a shadowy corporation, crafty puzzles, and a heckload of zombies—artists will achieve very different visions. Capcom took these building blocks and built Resident Evil, a video game so iconic that it named the genre we now call “survival horror.” In time, Capcom would refine the gameplay of the series, expand the 77

world and its cast of characters, and eventually bloat it to the point that it needed a soft reboot to welcome new players into its universe. Paul W.S. Anderson and S.D. Perry were each handed Resident Evil and given the freedom to build out from it. Anderson flipped the script and told an insideout version of the story from deep within Umbrella Corporation, eventually spawning a hexalogy of films from 2002-2016 that were smash box-office successes— if not exactly critical darlings. Perry hewed more faithfully to the source material, taking the small-screen polygon melodrama and giving it depth and texture in ways that were bolstered by the strengths of her medium. She widened her world across seven novels from 1998 to 2004, each book deepening the interior life of Resident Evil’s characters and becoming more authentically Perry’s. (In a fun twist, even most of Anderson’s films themselves received novelizations.) A certain type of Resident Evil fan, having encountered these divergent narratives, might dig into their preferred canon and rail against anything that does not fit neatly into it or, worse, dares to contradict it. Another type of fan might do their damnedest to make sure no detail goes unexplained, imagining multiple timelines and parallel universes so that every creative decision by every game designer, book editor, film producer,

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comic-book artist, and action-figure sculptor has a valid (but probably farfetched) in-universe explanation. But perhaps we might look beyond the media, beyond the plots and characters and canon, to appreciate how inspired people can transform the familiar beats of an existing story into something new and visionary.

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THE GREAT ZELDA TIMELINE DEBATE Gabe Durham

It’s a weird time to be a fan—of anything. There is your love of the thing itself, pure and sweet. Then there is the creator of the thing, who in their long time on this earth has likely done things both benevolent and monstrous. And then there is the community of other people who love the thing, though potentially for very different reasons. Star Wars fans brutally harassed an actress off the internet. Ariana Grande fans tried to get Pete Davidson to kill himself after their breakup. Rick and Morty fans flipped out when McDonald’s under-ordered a dipping sauce. People who’d liked the initial idea for No Man’s Sky resolved to destroy its creators when the game was delayed, and again when it’s initial release underdelivered. A games journalist got death threats because he reported on the fact that a nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

game was delayed. An anti-feminist gamer movement has for years compromised the safety of countless women. Zelda’s is generally a cheerful fandom. When I interviewed Joshua Lindquist, Content Director at the huge fansite Zelda Universe, he was earnest and helpful. When I asked him what set Zelda fans apart, he cited the fandom’s enthusiasm: “It’s a core part of who they are.” He spoke of how Zelda fan art has led people to careers as illustrators, and of fans bonding over games like Wind Waker, with its genial surface but mature themes. After years in the Zelda community, he seemed as passionate as ever. It didn’t surprise me at all. While there are occasional dustups, like fans’ initial response to the art style of Wind Waker, or when fans protested the forthcoming Chinese game Genshin Impact for its similarities to Breath of the Wild, the Zelda fan machine runs mostly on positive vibes—a nice respite from the hateful, unmoderated id of social media. To my mind, the other thing that sets Zelda fans apart is their obsession with chronology. Before the year 2011, the favorite pastime of Zelda fans was to argue about the correct chronological order of the events in each of the Zelda games. Here comes a summary, a chronology of the chronology. Deep breath. The ordering of games began simply. You have the first NES game. Then Zelda II comes after. So far, so 81

good. A Link to the Past was pitched as a prequel set a little earlier than the first game, so we took it at its word. And then Link’s Awakening takes place immediately after ALttP but a little before the first game—but it’s also just a dream (or is it?) so maybe it doesn’t happen at all? The real headaches began with the release of Ocarina of Time. Ocarina takes place in the time of the backstory Koizumi wrote for the ALttP player’s manual, but it also clearly diverges on several previously canonical points, and so maybe Ocarina’s Link is a different Link than in the other games. Even so, Ocarina ends with a kid timeline, an adult timeline if you win, and maybe a third timeline if you lose. Around the time of Ocarina’s release, Miyamoto said in an interview that the timeline goes Ocarina, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, then ALttP, and that Link’s Awakening could go anywhere—but this contradicted official Zelda materials, and was later contradicted by another Miyamoto interview with Dengeki Nintendo 64 in which he said ALttP actually came between Ocarina and The Legend of Zelda. This made way more sense, but the whole debacle soured Zelda fans as to whether or not Miyamoto could be trusted as the official historian of his own game series. More games arrived in need of sorting. Luckily, Majora makes clear that it immediately follows the “kid nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

Link won” timeline of Ocarina, so that’s easy. But then came Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, whose orders could be flipped depending on which you played first, and it was hard to tell where to slot them into the larger series. Plus, they were made by Capcom (under Nintendo’s supervision) so were they even canon? Or could we dismiss them like we dismissed the three awful and wonderful CD-i games that I didn’t bother mentioning above? Nintendo of America realized that the question of the series timeline was burning in fans’ minds, so in 2002 the company stepped in to referee. “Good news,” Nintendo said (I’m paraphrasing) on zelda.com. “It’s super simple. It’s all the same Link. It starts with Ocarina and Majora, then ALttP, then Ages and Seasons (in that order), then Zelda I, then Zelda II, then Link’s Awakening. We hope that helps!”1 And the fan community said, “NO THAT DOES NOT HELP. If it’s the same Link, how do you explain all these discrepancies? Did you even consult Aonuma or Miyamoto because

1. Even here, they hedged their bets. “We have studied this timeline very carefully,” reads the preface to the zelda.com timeline, “and believe that it represents one of the most accurate chronological arrangements of Link’s actions. Of course, other scholars have formulated different theories. Since there is no way to prove these theories, they will likely be debated for centuries to come.” 83

it SEEMS LIKE YOU DID NOT.” Uh-oh. We hadn’t realized we were shouting. Instead of responding, Nintendo flooded Hyrule in 2002’s The Wind Waker, which on one hand seemed like a Babylonian flood myth that took place way before the other games, but on the other hand implied in-game that this young hero was the latest in a line of many Links who had come before him, so maybe it directly followed an Ocarina timeline. After that, Nintendo said, “Hey while you’re chewing on that, juggle Four Swords Adventures and also The Minish Cap.” With the release of 2006’s Twilight Princess, Nintendo reached out directly to fans once more. “Guess what,” Nintendo said (again: paraphrasing), “you guys were totally right. There’s more than one Link. You’re all very smart.” And the fan community said, “WE KNOW THAT.” Nintendo said, “Great, now juggle Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.” Luckily, these were direct sequels to Wind Waker, just as Majora was a direct sequel to Ocarina. The Great Timeline Debate is a wide-ranging conversation that takes into account matters of aging, legacy, mythology, geography, geology, time travel, parallel worlds, multiple “Heroes of Time” named Link, multiple princesses named Zelda, multiple incarnations of Ganondorf/Ganon/Gannon, and—as noted in Sean C. Duncan and James Paul Gee’s 2009 essay “The Hero

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of Timelines”—different fans give more weight to some factors than others. As in any beloved fan property, to discuss Zelda is to discuss both the series as it is and also as a Platonic ideal of the series that exists only in your mind. In this ideal, there is complete cohesion. Miyamoto’s original Famicom game blinked an entire universe into existence, and every game since has delivered a new chapter of that world’s history according to the creator’s perfect designs. Or maybe it’s less Platonic, and more like the Deism practiced by America’s founding fathers: Miyamoto set the world into motion and then left Link’s universe to its own devices. In any case, our ideal Zeldaverse is so fully realized by the games—and so fully animated by our enthusiasms—that this Zeldaverse in some way really exists.2 This is why getting the timeline right was so important to the Zelda community. It was an attempt to see Pure Hyrule as clearly as possible. If other people couldn’t get that, fuck ‘em. Their inability to grasp the stakes showed they were not true fans.

2. If it is indeed true that in the multiverse there is a universe for every possibility we can imagine, it follows that there is a universe in which the citizens of Hyrule play a popular Nintendo game starring us. 85

In late 2011, Nintendo released two products concurrently: (1) Skyward Sword, a game that purports to tell the very beginning of the Zelda story, and (2) Hyrule Historia, a handsome hardbound book featuring a detailed chronology that claims to settle, once and for all, the Zelda series timeline. And this time Nintendo made it clear to fans that they had sought the counsel of Aonuma himself. The official timeline validated years of fan efforts by confirming that the most popular fan (and perhaps most convoluted) timeline was correct: The story starts with Skyward Sword and forks into three distinct realities at the end of Ocarina. Instead of dismantling everything we knew, Nintendo squinted at all our evidence, said, “Yeah, seems fine,” and told us we’d been right all along. “You’re all very smart,” Nintendo said quietly. “We know that,” we said. Finally, we had a Zelda timeline that was truly canon. So why did this victory not taste as good as we thought it would? The timeline had for now been settled. It was time to find something new to argue about.

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O N N OT P L AY I N G S U P E R MARIO ODYSSEY Jon Irwin

Fall, 2017 The need to be first is a diseaseof the modern era. For certain professions, the desire makes sense: Minutes spent in ignorance as a doctor or cop can mean the difference between a minor trifle and catastrophe. Athletes who spend their lives training for the Olympics have a reason to push for gold even as silver, also a precious metal, goes with more outfits. But the fever has spread to more leisurely pursuits. Opening weekends are stuffed with ravenous cineastes, impatient to see another alien invasion or group of ragtag high schoolers foil the local bully. When Beyoncé drops that secret album, a million phones buzz with notifications responded to with a haste normally reserved for emergency tracheotomies.

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And so it goes with video games. Publishers, PR people, and enthusiast sites alike feed the hype cycle so that by the time a big game releases, it becomes a salve to our every wound, the drop of water falling from a miracle canteen found at the edge of whatever desert we find ourselves in that week: The 9-to-5 slog, the midterm cram session, the insomnia-fueled fugue, the FOMO anxiety. Last month, when Super Mario Odyssey was released on October 27, 2017, the game was no longer a consumer product with a MSRP of $59.99 but a savior wrapped in cellophane. At least that’s how it felt. Hundreds of games came out that day. But for me, only one resonated with the importance and power of the inevitable. For you, it might have been the new Assassin’s Creed. Or maybe your new life begins with the release of Star Wars: Episode VIII. Or for you oenophiles out there, the long-awaited day is the annual release of the new Beaujolais wine, a drinkable Madden game with more antioxidants. But what happens if we wait? In our age of spoiler-warnings and YouTube longplays and leaked footage and Twitch livestreams, the decision feels anachronous, like choosing to churn your own butter. Or worse, impossible, as if waking up and deciding to stop obeying gravity. In such an era of access, removing yourself from that accessibility takes effort. Perhaps the more difficult journey, then, is worth considering. By now, nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

more than a month after its release, we know what it’s like to play Super Mario Odyssey. So what is it like to not play it? Friday, October 27, 2017 My wife left out a box of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal on the counter this morning. On the cover was Mario and his new mate Cappy from the game Super Mario Odyssey for Nintendo Switch, advertising a sweepstakes with the chosen one winning a copy of each. What she did not know: I already bought the game. My copy arrived a few hours ago. When it did, I took the shrink-wrapped case and stuck it in the open cereal box. When my wife returns home later, I’ll nonchalantly ask to see if we won. Behold: A fresh copy of Mario alongside the sweetened flakes and nut clusters. Here’s what happened instead. “Good cereal choice,” I say, asking her if we won, ha ha. She reminds me we already have a Switch. I say we should check, just in case. Ha. She looks at me, nonplussed, distracted. She goes into the bedroom. When she comes back, she places the box, Mario hidden within, up into the cupboard. We make dinner. Night falls. We fall asleep, Mario stuck in his cardboard prison. Super Mario Odyssey is the first mainline Mario game I haven’t been assigned to review since 2010’s 89

Super Mario Galaxy 2. In a way I was looking forward to playing without the pressure of completion, or that constant mental chatter that digests playtime into compelling paragraphs. But something changes when everyone else rips open their presents. We succumb to a communal mania. It’s no wonder our social media timelines are called “feeds”—each is a conveyor belt of consumption, our gorging near-automatic. By the time we’re full to bursting it’s too late. One day we can’t wait to love something; the next day we’re already sick of it, the celebrated object having taken on the funk of centuries in the span of a single 24-hour cycle. “We are obsessed with freedom,” Ian Bogost writes in his book Play Anything, “but we are also miserable and bored, despite living in an era of enormous surplus.” His answer is to embrace limitations and explore the opportunities found therein. He would see my trapped Mario as not an obstacle to my playing but the chance for a new, invented kind of play. Still: I wished to gorge but I couldn’t. And the only thing hungrier than a famished animal is one with a carcass at its feet. Saturday, October 28 “I’m feeling like eggs this morning,” she says. Oh no. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

“Really?” I say. “I was thinking something simple, like… cereal.” She doesn’t take the bait. We put the skillet on the electric stovetop, turn the dial to M for Medium Heat. All I can think about is that other M, stuck and waiting. When she finally opens the cereal box later that day and sees Super Mario Odyssey tucked inside, she looks at me and I raise my hands in glory. “We won!” I say. “I can’t believe it!” She’s so not impressed. I eventually relent and tell her my sad, squalid tale. Today’s a busy one, but Sunday is a day of rest. We’ll play Mario tomorrow. Sunday, October 29 It is 2:04 PM EST and Super Mario Odyssey still sits unwrapped in its cellophane skin. A strange thing is happening. I’m experiencing not playing the game. I’m exploring the limitations of this new kind of play: The one where I don’t. The result is this focused attention on an absence, like a wood-cutting where you scrape not the picture into the soft wood but everything else. What remains is a kind of negative: You don’t see the image; instead, the image presents itself. I scroll through Twitter with eyes glazed, blinking past others’ attached screenshots and blurring my vision at 140-character reveals I’d rather 91

not see. The art style is a mish-mash, someone complains, evoking a grand journey but lacking the confidence of its predecessor. There’s a level players are obsessed with for some reason unknown to me, says a Yahoo! News headline. The ending is phenomenal, I hear. Wait—people have finished it already? To jump in now would be to join an orgy hours late. Better to avoid the seething, frothing masses and opt for the intimacy of an untimely one-on-one. Tuesday, October 31 I teach at a nearby college. My earliest class is at 8:00 a.m. but my second class doesn’t start until 3:30 PM. Sometimes I’m grading papers or working on drafts, but sometimes I have extra time. What I mean is: I could be playing Super Mario Odyssey right now. But I’m not. The game’s native platform makes this self-imposed abstinence all the harder to obey. So instead of playing Mario, I’m staring at his package. For some reason I brought the still-unopened game to school. I wanted it close. Here I sit in a coffee shop, holding the wrapped case in my hands, feeling the weight of it. Never has an entire world been so light. I gape at the front cover, noticing details I hadn’t previously absorbed: Mario’s hair looks redder than usual—and why is his mustache a darker brown?; a nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

faint rainbow shimmers in the waterfall’s mist; the tiny ™ trademark symbol in the logo retains the slanted perspective of “ODYSSEY.” I turn the case over. The “Play Mode” icons are efficient masterworks, denoting an HDMI cable and the Switch’s kickstand in millimeters of ink. The background graphic is a delicate woodgrain, as if poring over vacation photos strewn about your coffee table. The Player 1 Joy-Con’s blue matches Mario’s eyes; the Player 2 Joy-Con’s red matches Cappy’s red fabric. Class time is almost here; time to put the unopened box away. Another nice thing about not-playing Mario? Automatic save states. Thursday, November 2 Nintendo sent out a press release today celebrating Super Mario Odyssey as the fastest-selling Super Mario game in U.S. history. Even in my avoidance of the game itself, I have contributed. It feels good to have stoked the flames of a corporation’s profits. And with barely any time wasted! I should do this more often. Maybe next I’ll buy a movie ticket and walk out of the theater before the first trailer. Maybe I’ll order an entree at a chain restaurant, pay up front, and leave the food untouched on the plate.

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Let us boil culture down to a giving and receiving of funds. Why read a book when you can pay for the book and never crack it open? Why watch streaming video when instead you can pay Netflix $10 a month to endlessly scroll through the options on offer, never choosing one but choosing to never choose? Were we to decide this payment-only behavior was not only acceptable but, dare I say it, heroic, we would all feel better about that endless swamp of infinite content we wade through every day. Consumption would no longer be the invisible scourge of our modern era. The pressure would be off. That backlog of games you bought but never played? Don’t let them weigh you down. Release yourself from this burden. You are absolved. Friday, November 3 One week has passed since Super Mario Odyssey was released into the wild. I’ve waited patiently. I’ve stumbled across a few too many screenshots I wish I hadn’t, but no matter; running through a sprinkler does not lessen the impact of diving into the ocean. I’m finally ready. I’m going to open the box. Allow seven days to pass and that box and its contents grows in power. Last Friday morning I was excited to play the next big Mario game. This morning I’m treating the unwrapping of the case from its plastic like nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

some sacred rite, the experience of playing the game almost beside the point. My hands search for the seam and for a moment I think there is none, my copy mystically coated in a single perfect sheath with no beginning or end. Then my fingernail finds purchase on an edge and lifts up a flap, careful not to tear but instead unwrap the plastic whole. It seems important to do this. The effort proves impossible; I rip the coating off, the entire thing crinkling and cracking in my fingers. I stick each thumb between that recessed cavity along the box’s edge and gently pull the case apart. Inside, a sea of red: The lyrics to the game’s theme song “Jump Up Super Star!” are printed over a red-washed cityscape and below, ensconced in raised hard plastic, the game card itself, its label blushing a deep crimson, the stark red of pungent roses and gushing blood. I pluck the game card out and almost drop it to the floor. My hands shake imperceptibly. The miniature cartridge feels like nothing at all. Shake it and some tiny part rattles within. Hold the circuitry to the light and see elaborate hieroglyphics etched above the gold columns. Realize you have no idea how any of this works: How, when you place this sliver of matter into the appropriate slot and hit a button, electricity surges and colors swirl into recognizable shapes set to a symphony 95

of sound, and it’s all trapped inside this shard no bigger than a puzzle piece. I close the case. That’s enough for now. I think of that word—enough—and I think of all those who have already completed Super Mario Odyssey: how they blazed through the game, scoured every inch, nabbed every collectible, exhausted its potential. Today these pop culture first-responders are looking elsewhere for their fix. My craving remains, focused and unquenched. Maybe tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, I’ll be humming that song—There’s no power-up like dancing—and I won’t be able to wait any longer. I’ll slip the game card into my Switch and close the latch. I’ll pick up the neon red and blue Joy-Con controllers. I’ll turn the sound up and lower the blinds. And even as I trek joyfully through Nintendo’s latest adventure, a small part of me will miss this moment, before I played Super Mario Odyssey.

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AN EVENING WITH UEMATSU, FINAL FA N TA S Y ’ S M U S I C M A N Chris Kohler

Summer, 2009 Arnie Roth, in every way, looks the part of an orchestral conductor. Waving his baton in front of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, clad in long tails that almost reach the floor, his long ponytail bobbing behind him, he most definitely is one. On a massive projection screen suspended above the concert stage, a pixelized conductor is waving his hands, too, conducting an orchestra of sprites. It’s a familiar scene from the 1994 video game Final Fantasy VI, in which the role-playing game’s characters take a break from adventuring to perform in an opera. The crowd giggles at the juxtaposition. But when soprano Leah Crocetto begins singing the opera’s signature aria, 97

the laughter stops and the crowd sits silent, millions of goosebumps raising in unison. This is no fuzzy 16-bit sound sample. This is a world-class opera singer, pouring her emotional weight into video game music. As the 12-minute “opera scene” comes to its thunderous conclusion, the sold-out crowd rises as one for a standing ovation. The man of the hour, Final Fantasy music composer Nobuo Uematsu, takes the stage and the applause gets even louder. This is Uematsu’s second standing ovation of the night. The first was just for showing up: Right before the music began, he emerged from the wings, walking to his audience seat from the front of the house, under a spotlight, smiling broadly. The crowd went wild in the presence of their hero. • Just a few years ago, it would have been quite rare to see video game music in concert outside of Japan. Today, three different concert promoters are playing dates all over the world, putting on symphonic concerts of game soundtracks: Video Games Live, Play!, and this one, called Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy. That it is the only tour devoted to a single game is no accident; Final Fantasy is nearly synonymous with great game music, and Nobuo Uematsu, 50, is recognized as the foremost composer in the field. He has composed nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

video game music for nearly half his life, effortlessly jumping between genres, using elements of progressive rock, Irish trad, opera and everything in between to heighten the many varying moods of the company’s acclaimed, innovative role-playing games. “The music has always set Final Fantasy apart from everything else,” says Uematsu fan Fiona Jane Orolfo, who traveled from Reno with her boyfriend Daniel Johnson to see the show, which she pronounced “spectacular.” Uematsu’s music has been popular for almost as long as the games themselves. He has released dozens of CDs in Japan, some of which feature music pulled right from the game, but even more of which are “arranged” versions that feature live concerts or studio performances in a variety of different styles. Very few of these CDs were ever released outside Japan, so for quite a long time fans had to scrounge whatever they could, whether they were downloading MP3s or paying too much for bootleg Taiwanese CDs at comic conventions. I count myself among those fans. Around 1998, still in college, I started collecting Final Fantasy music in earnest. One of my favorites, which I paid a mint for at New York’s Kinokuniya bookstore, was Symphonic Suite Final Fantasy, a recording of Uematsu’s first live concert. On it, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra played 99

medleys of the simple tunes from the first two games in the series. Sitting in the lobby of the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown the day before the show, Uematsu remembers back to that first concert, which took place twenty years ago—May 20, 1989. “In Japan, there had already been orchestral concerts of the music from Dragon Quest, and I realized that I could probably do a Final Fantasy one,” he says. “Amazing. It’s amazing how powerful orchestral music is,” Uematsu thought as he left the concert hall that night. His only regret was that he didn’t have more control over the process. “I just told the arranger, ‘I’d like it to be in this style,’” he says. These days, he exchanges MIDI files with the orchestral arrangers, tweaking the scores until he is satisfied. Concerts of game music remained a Japan-only phenomenon for the next decade. Much of the reason for this was geographic: When one-fourth of your population lives in the greater Tokyo area, it’s much easier to mount a one-off live show of just about anything. Game music came to America in 2004, when, following a successful tour of Japan, a Final Fantasy concert was held at the Walt Disney Concert Hall during that year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. Tickets sold out in three days. Months later, a nationwide tour was being planned and Video Games Live was also off the ground. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

• Arnie Roth isn’t just the conductor of the Distant Worlds tour—he’s also the producer, through his company, AWR Music. Roth, gregarious and animated, has the air of someone who’s seen it all in the music biz, probably because he has: He’s won a Grammy as a member of Mannheim Steamroller, directs the Chicagoland Pops and shepherds Square Enix and Uematsu through the jungle of concert production, America-style. “Square Enix could not get booking agencies or anyone to be interested,” he says. “They literally could not get anyone in the U.S. to actually believe... is [game music] really a concert entity? Is that something you can sell tickets to?” “That’s what most of the orchestras needed to answer for themselves. Now, we’re clearly answering for them,” he said. Roth has sold out shows from Stockholm to San Francisco based purely on the power of Uematsu’s work, which he thinks really resonates with fans when they get the chance to hear it in a way that they usually can’t. “They’ve been listening to all of these tracks with the same beats per minute, same recordings, same compression for hundreds of thousands of hours,” he says. “They may be beautiful recordings, but the fact is, it’s the same ones over and over again. And [Uematsu] had major dynamic markings on the scores. Triple forte, 101

triple piano, all kinds of articulations… all that gets squashed, as we say in the industry, with compression. The difference is, they walk into a concert hall and they hear 150 performers playing triple piano pianissimos, a hush where the hair on your arms stands up.” Speaking as a fan, I can say that hearing for the first time 150 musicians play a piece that you’ve fallen in love with is a profound moment. Role-playing games are ultimately a deeply involving solo activity. To be in the same room with so many people who share your love for a certain piece of music can be thrilling, especially to hear it played to perfection by master-class musicians. “You can hear a pin drop during the performances because they want to hear every note,” says Roth. “The fans are not there for the video clips.” I didn’t quite come away from the concert with that impression. There was quite a lot of giggling whenever scenes from the older games were played, which is not quite pin-drop silence. The fans I talked to seemed to like them—Johnson said the videos “brought back a lot of good memories,” and Orolfo wished they’d shown more video during the opera. Personally, I was glad they chose that moment to pull back and put the focus on the singers. I felt the piece that followed, “Terra’s Theme,” was marred by the video portion. It was of 16-bit sprites, so of course there was giggling, but it also featured the credits for the nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

show, so there was lots of loud applause that unfortunately drowned out the music. Otherwise, I loved the show even though I’d heard so much of the music before at many different concerts. Many of the pieces were pulled directly from that first Japanese show in 2002, but Uematsu says he’s working on that: They’ll premiere new pieces, “JENOVA” and “Dancing Mad,” at shows in Vancouver and Chicago later in 2009. The battle music “Clash on the Big Bridge,” a fan favorite, is scheduled for 2010. Uematsu says that by this time next year the show’s lineup may have completely changed. As the credits come to a close, Uematsu takes the stage. The crowd rises to its feet a second time, shouting “Encore! Encore!” in the way that only symphony audiences in movies do. Roth and Uematsu pretend to consider an encore, and the crowd pretends to believe that it wasn’t already planned from the beginning. “One Winged Angel,” says Uematsu in accented English, the only three words he speaks during the show. The still-standing crowd erupts, as if they didn’t already know that the bombastic final theme from Final Fantasy VII was coming. There is no concert tour that doesn’t close with “One Winged Angel.” Play! does. So does Video Games Live, with composer/promoter Tommy Tallarico shredding along on his electric guitar over the orchestra’s staccato violins. 103

Perhaps Uematsu and Roth won’t change the entire lineup. After the concert, a small group of about 100 fans gather in the Crimson Lounge down the street, anxiously pecking at tiny hors d’oeuvres and sipping overpriced cocktails. They’ve paid $100 each for tickets to this after party to get a chance to meet Uematsu and get his autograph, which, at $100 a pop, is what Mark Hamill commands at comic conventions. That should serve as a pretty clear measurement of Uematsu’s place in the pantheon of gaming gods. Finally, Uematsu comes down the stairs into the basement lounge, which quickly fills with more applause. “We love you,” calls out Orolfo; the crowd concurs. Fans want pictures, want to shake hands, want to get near Uematsu. “We just want to party with you guys!” says Roth, but it quickly becomes clear that a casual hang-out will not be possible. The pair sits down at a table with stacks of Sharpies and a line quickly forms. Everyone received a pre-signed CD of the show when they came in the door, but everyone wants a personal minute with the composer. They want the Moment. I already had my Moment at a roundtable interview a few years ago, getting Uematsu to sign the best thing I could think of: my first-run, out-of-print Japanese copy of Final Fantasy IV Celtic Moon. So I hang by the bar, watching the procession of fans. “It’s an honor,” says nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

one. “Thank you, nice to meet you, too,” Uematsu says in English, a phrase he has clearly practiced and used a thousand times. One couple tells Uematsu that they played his music at their wedding. Another fan actually proposes marriage, only half-jokingly. Still others have brought their own treasures to be signed; a copy of Final Fantasy II, a book of sheet music. Uematsu signs for hours, barely touching his beer, never flagging, always beaming. He is living the dream of a million post-war Japanese kids; he is a rock star in America. • “I’d really like to tour America with the Black Mages,” Uematsu says, referring to his rock band that features current and former Square Enix musicians. They’ve toured Japan twice, playing shredding interpretations of Final Fantasy music, and made one American appearance in 2005. At some point over the last few years, Uematsu altered his physical appearance to match his inner rock star, growing his greying hair out to shoulder length. At the Kabuki Hotel, sitting by the koi pond, he has it tied up in a kerchief. “We all grew up listening to American music, were surrounded by American music ever since we were kids. 105

So as adults, to do a concert in America, I think everyone would be really happy. But for the six of us to carve out that much free time in our schedules would be really hard.” Uematsu left Square Enix in 2004, going freelance and establishing his own music production company and record label. He stepped back from Final Fantasy for a while, handing off composing duties to in-house composers while exploring a variety of other freelance game projects. A week ago, at E3 2009, Square Enix announced that Uematsu would return to score Final Fantasy XIV. “With some previous Final Fantasy games, I was so busy that I had to share duties with other composers, but this time, I’m composing it all myself,” he says. “To control the entire soundtrack, that’s easier in some ways.” Uematsu says he’s also composing the soundtracks to two more Square Enix games that will be announced later in 2009. He’s also working on a solo album of music for children. The album will be released in both Japanese and English, as a nod to his worldwide fans. The orchestras that Arnie Roth conducts, he says, can’t believe the reaction of the fans. Although some fans might show up to the symphony in T-shirts and jeans or even in cosplay, Roth says they’re “better than classical audiences.”

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“With classical audiences, you always have some 70- or 80-year old who starts coughing at the end of a very quiet triple piano, and all of a sudden, it’s ruined. A classical audience likes to leave before the concert is over. They want to get their cars out of the lot first.” “Final Fantasy fans don’t want to go home,” he laughs.

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PA R T Y L I K E I T ’ S 1999: J A PA N E S E RETROFUTURISM AND CHRONO TRIGGER Michael P. Williams

Like most of you reading this, my memory is imperfect. I forget names, faces, and especially birthdays. Perhaps this is because much of the limited storage space in my hippocampus has been crowded by bits of pop culture trivia. The largest cohesive body of knowledge within this dubious archive is of the animated program The Simpsons—still on the air since its debut just a few weeks before 1990. In many ways, The Simpsons nurtured my web of associative thinking. I learned as much from the show’s often highbrow references as I did from school curricula. So it was only natural that the show should be my cultural anchor when I started to consider the theme “Futures of the Past.”

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My thoughts turned to the 1996 episode, “A Fish Called Selma,” in which Bart and Lisa’s always-unluckyin-love aunt Selma marries a washed-up 1970s actor, Troy McClure. McClure lives in a hexagonal UFO of a home—actually a repurposed aquarium supported by rickety beams. The house, like McClure’s career, is falling apart, and is one broken support beam away from collapse. But humdrum Selma is starstruck. Upon crossing the threshold of her marital home, she is awed by the cheesy opulence. “It’s so modern,” she remarks. “It’s ultra modern, like living in the not-too-distant future.” I find this same not-too-distant future wherever I see gravity-defying glass architectures, wherever Jetsonian disc-buildings hover precariously on over-tall spires. The not-too-distant future is all around us, but some of it has already become the all-too-recent past. • In 2014, I wrote a book about a video game called Chrono Trigger, first released in Japanese for the Super Famicom game system in March 1995, and later that year in English for the Super Nintendo, the Super Famicom’s blockier North American cousin. Chrono Trigger is a role-playing game about a disparate crew of heroes traveling through time to stop a cataclysm in the year “1999 AD.” In the game’s mythos, this year will 109

mark the apocalyptic reemergence of legendary beast Lavos from the planet’s core. The characters journey through time to save their world from destruction. Chrono Trigger is a product of Japanese imaginations, and we might be tempted to read this apocalyptic event as an analogue to natural disasters that have plagued the island nation. The most recent high-profile calamity was the tag-team manmade/natural disaster of March 11, 2011. On that day, a tremendous earthquake triggered a coastline-devastating tsunami, which in turn surmounted the walls at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing significant damage and a meltdown of half of the plant’s reactors. This disaster was deeply palpable for me, a former resident of Fukushima with friends still living in the prefecture. Before Lavos erupts and dooms the planet to perpetual nuclear winter by 2300 AD, the player gets a brief glimpse of that fateful year 1999 AD. Society has advanced considerably since the time period in which we begin the game—1000 AD, “the present.” But the domed cities dotting the landscape where towns and castles once stood are made less fantastic by evidence of spreading desertification. It is a subtle detail, and one not on screen long enough to permit most players— many of whom might be children and younger teenagers with more interest in gameplay than criticism—a close inspection. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

Similarly, nuance isn’t easy to come by in other 20th century Japanese visual renditions of the not-toodistant future, many of which were aimed at young readers. One striking vision of the future captioned “Tokyo in the Year 2061” features a panoply of classic science fiction tropes: hovercars, towering buildings with top-heavy platforms, smiling monoracial citizens in equally monochrome jumpsuits. There is nothing sinister here—except perhaps an instance of ghoulish pareidolia involving a grinning flying car—and indeed this image was published in a 1961 issue of a magazine called Tanoshii Yonensei, or “The Fun Fourth Grader.” This is far from the oldest Japanese juvenile future I’ve encountered. A 1936 survey of future transportation published in the magazine Shōnen Kurabu (“Boys Club”) features a series of Japanese illustrations interpreting American and German inventions as part of a “World Transportation Invention Competition.” Some machines, like the “amazingly swift flying machine,” still look revolutionary. Others, like the “sphere-wheeled car,” seem like dead ends of vehicular evolution. None of these curvilinear vehicles make an appearance in “Computopia,” published in a 1969 issue of another boys’ magazine, Shōnen Sandē (“Boys Sunday”). Instead the reader is treated to a transhumanist survey of the future of twenty years from then—that is, 1989. Boxy robot proctors patrol teacherless classrooms, bonking the 111

noggins of children who input the incorrect answer on their computerminal desks. Meanwhile at home, a bubblegum machine-like kitchen robot3 enacts mundane tasks, as a technicolor-jumpsuited Mom takes care of home economics on a punchcard calculator. Yes, there are silly bits, but there is also striking prescience—a surgeon performing a delicate heart transplant using a guided computer arm, a self-propelled vacuum scouring the floor for debris, and Dad chatting on a videophone. While none of these futures had come to pass by 1989, they would be implemented within the next two decades. The early 1970s Japanese book series Nazenani Gakushū Zukan (“Whywhat Illustrated Encyclopedia for Learning”) features more fantastical takes on possible futures and alternate presents. The volumes in the series juxtapose the realistic and the fantastic—a UFO whizzing past the Great Sphinx of Giza, or a giant dragonfly used as a rocket-powered airplane. The volume which drew my attention was number 14, Robots and Life in the Future (Robotto to Mirai no Seikatsu), published in 1973. Used copies are prohibitively expensive and difficult to have shipped from

3. Perhaps a spiritual ancestor of wisecracking Tom Servo, a fictional robot known best from Mystery Science Theater 3000, a staple of 1990s TV futurisms. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

Japan, and no library in the United States seems to own this volume. I was, however, able to find a digital preview of its contents. The first section depicts what it calls a “bright future,” where robots labor on moon colonies and humans zip from Tokyo to Osaka in one hour on a massive bullet train. The second, the “dark future,” shows laser-armed robots revolting against their selfish human masters. The final image of the dark future is a two page spread: The first shows a global ice age, with Tokyo Tower (or is it the Eiffel Tower?) drooping defeatedly to the ground; the second depicts a series of transparent domes on a barren landscape, sustaining both the ecosystems and the cityscapes within them under artificial sunlamps. While this book was undoubtedly designed to be read right to left, the decontextualization of these two pages into one image shows a frightening synchronicity. These domed cities could just as easily pass for Chrono Trigger’s 1999 AD, and the wintry desolation for its 2300 AD. Here in the Whywhat? series, these dark futures are one and the same, separated only by the gutter of paginal transition. Most of these original sources are difficult to find, and I do not doubt that many undiscovered gems are still buried within unindexed library-bound journals or the bins of Japanese used bookstores. The most fascinating thing about these images is not what they got right 113

or what was way off, but rather that humans today are so captivated by them. The force that drives up the price of these collectibles—perhaps the very same quality that imbues them with collectibility in the first place—is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a past of which I wasn’t a part. Nostalgia that imagined futures in which nostalgia for the past would become obsolete. • One element conspicuously lacking from mid-century Japanese visions of the future was play. Almost every character in these images is doomed to a sedentary lifestyle, and their activities are either productive of, or passively receptive to, information. There is nothing fun about Computopia. Even Nintendo’s mid-90s game system flops were futurist. The Virtual Boy, a system that aimed to be portable and to create virtual experiences, managed to fail on both accounts. Not only was this ViewMaster lookalike incredibly cumbersome, it was not even wearable— players had to place the device on a flat surface. Even worse, graphics generated by the device were only red and black, and rumors abounded of players developing severe headaches. Even with continuing discounts on its initially hefty price tag of $180 in 1995 dollars—Toys “R” Us eventually started selling the system at $25 after nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

poor Christmas season sales—the Virtual Boy failed to attract an audience and was soon retired from production. Despite inspiring modern successors like the truly portable, stereoscopic Nintendo 3DS, the Virtual Boy was by most accounts a spectacular failure. While 1995 was a disappointing year for Nintendo, it was a great one for Square, the publisher of Chrono Trigger. Debuting at $80 in North America, the memory-heavy game was one of the most expensive Super Nintendo cartridges ever produced. Despite a retail price noticeably higher than other games on the market, Chrono Trigger became a worldwide bestseller. Chrono Trigger’s ultimate origins lie in a project codenamed Maru Island in development for a CD-ROM peripheral that would attach to the Japanese Super Famicom system underneath, alleviating the memory and data storage limits of the system’s game cartridges. Although the CD-ROM add-on never materialized, its co-developer Sony would eventually use it as the basis for their PlayStation system, whose entry into the gaming console market would disrupt the traditional Nintendo versus Sega dichotomy of home gaming. The leftovers of Maru Island would be repackaged as two distinct cartridge games with striking visual similarities: Secret of Mana, released in 1993; and Chrono Trigger, released in 1995.

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Another stackable Super Famicom add-on was the rather successful Satellaview, a satellite modem launched in 1995 that could receive new game data as it was broadcast. Although the cost of the system and the monthly subscription fees were high, the system was successful— it enjoyed a five-year run before it was discontinued in 2000. The Satellaview is notable for demonstrating an early, if ultimately flawed, model of remotely distributing games.4 The Satellaview was never released in North America, and the CD-ROM addition was a future that never came to be either. I can only imagine how ridiculous the angular gray chunk that was my Super Nintendo would look with two big peripheral boxes undergirding the lofty perch of the cartridge slot. The potential existence of this totem of cartridge worship in a world slowly trending toward optical discs strikes me as both foolish and sublimely quaint. It is an image perhaps best illustrated by a Japanese science fiction artist from the 1960s. •

4. It is worth noting one of the Satellaview games was a sort of spinoff of Chrono Trigger. This text-based adventure, Radical Dreamers, would in turn later become the prototype to an official sequel to Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

I had intended this article to be a way to talk about things that didn’t find a place into my eponymous book on Chrono Trigger. In Japanese, this piece might be called a gaiden—a noncanonical side story. But I want to end with another gaiden to the story I’ve been trying to tell here—our collective failure to archive digital pasts. Who will preserve outmoded technologies for posterity? Attempts to create videos of Virtual Boy gameplay are hampered by the inability to display the system’s 3D technology as it existed—while anaglyphic images can be generated, and then viewed with red/ cyan 3D glasses, these would not reflect the games as they were originally experienced. There are also few archives of the Satellaview’s broadcasts, some of which included live narration—whether these exist somewhere in the vaults of Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto is a matter of speculation. Concerned gamers, though, have archived many of the games that players downloaded, but this is far from a complete snapshot of the compelling Satellaview content that kept Japanese players paying those monthly subscription fees. It is in another staple of early 1990s futures of the past that I find an idealized, almost-perfect, archive of human achievement—Star Trek: The Next Generation. The all-knowing computer of the starship Enterprise could access and cross-reference data from all manners 117

of polyglot sources, and could announce the compiled results in an even-tempered, clinical voice. But even this near-omnipotent database couldn’t fill in the blanks left by humans of pre-singularity eras. I have trouble accepting a disappointing truth of human progress—there are things that have been forgotten, and they will never be re-remembered. There is no going back to the mid 20th century to snatch up copies of Japanese kids’ magazines for preservation. There is no backwards journey to the 1990s to capture the ephemeral radio narration of Satellaview broadcasts. Our present is as imperfect as our past, and our future will carry this legacy onward.

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NOTES

Darkness, Rage, and the Power of Waking Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania was published in Japanese by Square Enix in 2019. Tetsuya Nomura’s interview with Dengeki PlayStation magazine was translated by user goldpanner of KHInsider and posted February 27, 2019: https://bit.ly/2Z2vWvW.

How Princess Peach’s Story Draws On 2000 Years Of Women In Peril This work originally appeared on Kotaku on November 14, 2018. Ben Singer’s “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly” was published in Camera Obscura vol. 8, no. 1 in January 1990: https://bit.ly/3tImUPX.

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Sharon R. Sherman interviewed Super Mario Bros. 2 players in “Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games,” published in Western Folklore vol. 56, no. 3/4 (Summer/ Autumn 1997 issue): https://bit.ly/3hDwnmV. Mike Fahey’s “Thank You Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Game, Getting Kidnapped Again” was published on Kotaku on November 13, 2009: https://bit.ly/3ze6rEl. Tracey John’s “The Princess Is In Another Freakin’ Castle?” was published online by Time on November 16, 2009: https:// bit.ly/3CaB6UO. Mike Mika’s “Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter” was published at Wired.com on March 11, 2013: https://bit. ly/397aJCV.

Meet Tom Keegan This piece was first published at RollingStone.com as “Meet the Man Behind the Motion in ‘Star Wars: Battlefront II,’ ‘Wolfenstein’” on July 14, 2017. It has been lightly updated for clarity.

The Fans Who Won’t Let Mega Man Die A condensed version of this work originally appeared on Kotaku on September 27, 2017. The Mega Man community Rockman Corner is located at https://www.rockman-corner.com/. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

WreckingPrograms’s Mega Maker trailer was uploaded to YouTube on July 8, 2017 as “Mega Man Maker - Create your own Mega Man levels! - Official trailer”: https://youtu.be/ BpCarkGGoxI. Polygon’s Owen S. Good covered the game the next day as “Can Mega Maker — a fan game creating Mega Man levels — make it to its July 15 launch” (https:// bit.ly/3z9vnwE), and GameSpot’s Alex Newhouse followed suit on on July 10, 2017 with “This Fan-Made Mega Man Game Is Like Mario Maker, Comes Out This Week” (https:// bit.ly/3lsJzw3). While both articles opined that Capcom would quickly shut it down, the game remains available even in 2021 as of this writing: https://megamanmaker.com/. 20XX was first advertised on Kickstarter as “Echoes of Eridu”: https://bit.ly/3zg6ZJV. Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was published by Routledge in 1992. Some release notes on Akujin’s translation patch for Cocoron are available at Romhacking.net: https://bit.ly/3lqcqRz. Akujin released a patch for the Magical Land of Wozz in 1999; the 2004 patch released by Nightcrawler’s Translation Corporation (and its readme file) are also hosted there: https://bit.ly/3hBxsLO.

The Great Zelda Timeline Debate Gabe’s interview with Joshua Lindquist from Zelda Universe was conducted by email.

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A few different sites have preserved the original zelda.com timeline explanation, for example the “Pre-TWW ‘single Link’ theories” thread at Zelda Universe (https://bit.ly/3lrQkOC) and the 2001-2002 thread “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker” at Nintendo World Report by Jonathan Metts and others (https://bit.ly/3zcWNBN). Sean C. Duncan and James Paul Gee’s essay “The Hero of Timelines” appeared in the anthology, The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am, edited by Luke Cuddy and published by Open Court in 2008.

On Not Playing Super Mario Odyssey Ian Bogost’s Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games was published by Basic Books in 2016. The person who complained about Odyssey’s mish-mash art style was Olly Moss, in an October 27, 2017 tweet: https:// bit.ly/3tGrQVy. Meagan Fredette’s “Why People Love the ‘Super Mario Odyssey’ Level New Donk City” was published on October 28, 2017 to Yahoo! News https://yhoo.it/3nB17IV. And Ross Llewallyn’s October 29, 2017 tweet praised its ending: https://bit.ly/3AeXoEx. Nintendo’s press release, “Super Mario Odyssey Becomes Nintendo’s Fastest-Selling Super Mario Game Ever in U.S.” was released on November 2, 2017: https://bwnews. pr/2YQ0Ib9.

nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

An Evening With Uematsu, Final Fantasy’s Music Man This work originally appeared on WIRED.com in July 2009. They’ve paid $100 each for tickets to this after party to get a chance to meet Uematsu and get his autograph, which, at $100 a pop is what Mark Hamill commands at comic conventions. The value of Mark Hamill’s autograph at comic conventions is documented in the Wired article “WonderCom 2009: 10 Things We Would Have Bought” published on March 5, 2009: https://bit.ly/3AjvSWj. News of the announcement that Uematsu would score Final Fantasy XIV was reported by IGN on June 2, 2009 as “E3 2009: Square Enix Releases New Final Fantasy XIV Online Info”: https://bit.ly/3nC6ebR.

Party Like It’s 1999 This essay originally appeared in The Appendix on August 7, 2014 as part of its “Futures of the Past” issue and has been lightly updated. The Simpsons episode “A Fish Called Selma” first aired as season 7, episode 19 on March 24, 1996. At the time of publishing, Mike alluded to human civilization’s failure to archive our digital pasts, and indeed many of the online sources references in that 2014 article have since gone down without any backup. Tanan Ito’s “Tokyo in the 123

Year 2016” can now be viewed at the Appendix, in the original run of this piece: https://bit.ly/3z93mW0. The original web page hosted by the Yayoi Museum & Takehisa Yumeji Museum is gone. Its recaptioned “2011” version is preserved at datasea’s “Yume Nikki” blog” https://bit.ly/3nDpEgC. Pink Tentacle rounded up images from Shōnen Kurabu’s 1936 survey of future transportation in a June 30, 2010 feature: https://bit.ly/3luU41D. They similarly compiled images from the 1969 Shōnen Sunday feature “Computopia” on October 22, 2009: https://bit.ly/3kcj9yV. Images from the early 1970s Japanese book series Nazenani Gakushū Zukan (“Whywhat Illustrated Encyclopedia for Learning”) can be viewed at the Japanese website Tsuchinokodō through the Internet Archive: https://bit. ly/3luTYXP. A digital preview of volume 14, Robots and Life in the Future (Robotto to Mirai no Seikatsu), published in 1973, can be seen at the original Appendix run of this piece. Jon Irwin’s “Seeing Red: The Tragic Prescience of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy” was published in Kill Screen vol. 1, no. 4 in Summer 2011, and available online at Versions: https://bit.ly/3Ci4zw2. More on the Chrono Trigger/Secret of Mana connections can be found in the liner notes of the album Seiken Densetsu Ongaku Daizenshū (“Seiken Densetsu Music Complete Book”), translated by Gerardo Iuliani and formerly available at Game Music Online: https://bit.ly/3EpcdXg. The album itself, a 19 disc boxed set, is documented at VGMdb: https:// vgmdb.net/album/26348. nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

SPECIAL THANKS For making our fifth season of books possible, Boss Fight Books would like to thank John Romero, Ian Chung, Fenric Cayne, Trey Adams, Jennifer Durham-Fowler, Cathy Durham & Ed Locke, Ken Durham & Nancy Magnusson Durham, Nate Mitchell, Lawliet Tamaki Aivazis, Cassandra Newman, seanz0r, Zach Davis, Andrew “Xestrix” Carlson, Ant’ny Fataski, David Goodenough, Adam Hejmowski, Joshua Mallory, and Sean ‘Ariamaki’ Riedinger. Adam Rosenfield, Sileem Farghaly, Samuel Rauhala, mceaton, Nathan Tolf, brazzell dazzell, Todd Hansberger, Michael O’Leary, Connor Wack, Wes Locher, Yoan Sebdoun-Manny, Scott Mendenko, Jeff H, John Simms, Matthew LeHew, Aaron Murray, Jason ‘XenoPhage’ Frisvold, Kevin Foss, Mickey Possingham, Chris Suellentrop, Tim Suter, Yannick Rochat, Salvatore Pane, Anonymous, Josh Scherping, Joseph De Maria, J. Kyle Pittman, Bear Belcastro, Stephen Trinh, Shane Culp, Marc Beavan, Nik Zeltzer, Graham Guletz, Jonathan Charles Bruce, Samuel Kossow, Chris Furniss, Morgie73, David Altman, Dave Kapell, Justin “Vextalon” Brissette, 125

Greg Trawinski, David M. P. Goncalves, Nick DiNuzzo, Alex Rhys, Christopher Vermilya, Jim Fingal, Gavin Craig, Andrew S. Rosenfeld, Ryan Markel, John Hague, William Linn, Greg Cashman, Eric Pidkameny, Alasker, Meghan and Ethan Kaye, Allen Murray, Empty Clip Studios, Mark Freeman, Emerson Emser, James Terry, Kathryn Hemmann, Russell Wiley, Josh Lee, Gavin Graf, douglas riggs, utcv, Corey Losey, Kenny J. Murray, Wesley James Kevin Starr, Philip J Reed, Patrick Tenney, Caleb J. Ross, Victor Romero, Graham Faught, Victor Hunter, Rob Watkins, Stephen Milligan, Eric Tran, Jason Morales, Shawn Clark, Bobby Brankiewicz, Ric Peavyhouse, David Warden, Collin Johnson, Dash Reid, Jason Switzer, Mitchel Labonté, David Portnov, Ashli T., Javy Gwaltney, Royce Rezendes, Andrew Ferguson, Anthony McDonald, Seth Henriksen, Ben Rathert, Patrick Polk, Donald Hopkins, Matthew Millsap, Nate L., Sean Flannigan, Michael Scuderi, vilmibm, Black Lives Matter, John Olson, Malachi Dean Royer, Rusty Collins, Brett Bicksler, Nick Chaimov, Connor Bourn, Nathan Penland, Brayden Egan, Ken Nagasako, Matt Bell, Chris Price, Tamara Henderson, NESJumpman, Ryan Myers, licensetobill, Chris Davis, Nick Henderson, Michael Andrews Dr. Omar Zeid, Samuel DeSarno, Ceth Stifel, Rob H, Heath Bsharah, CK Malone, GigaSeifer, Nick Eliopulos, John Pope, Kyle Hall, Jordan Keith Albaugh, Some Other 1, Steven Vondra II, Bobby Burton, Alvin Yates, Marisa Henriquez, Sam Moseley, Jamie Perez, nigh tmare mo de : a bo s s f ig h t bo o k s ant h ology

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ALSO FROM BOSS FIGHT BOOKS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

EarthBound by Ken Baumann Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams ZZT by Anna Anthropy Galaga by Michael Kimball Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin

7. Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham 8. Baldur’s Gate II by Matt Bell 9. Metal Gear Solid by Ashly & Anthony Burch 10. Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner 11. Spelunky by Derek Yu 12. World of Warcraft by Daniel Lisi 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Super Mario Bros. 3 by Alyse Knorr Mega Man 3 by Salvatore Pane Soft & Cuddly by Jarett Kobek Kingdom Hearts II by Alexa Ray Corriea Katamari Damacy by L. E. Hall

18. Final Fantasy V by Chris Kohler 19. Shovel Knight by David L. Craddock 20. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic by Alex Kane 21. NBA Jam by Reyan Ali 22. Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow 23. Postal by Brock Wilbur & Nathan Rabin 24. Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini 25. Resident Evil by Philip J Reed 26. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask by Gabe Durham 27. Silent Hill 2 by Mike Drucker 28. Final Fantasy VI by Sebastian Deken ★ ★

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