That's a jab at the lord mayor of Trumpton, Donald McRonald Trump, in case you didn't know. Highly politicised with the lampooning, me.
But yes. I didn't want to get out of bed this morning. I've been putting my phone on the far side of my room the last few days to ensure I'll get up when the alarm goes off, and I was literally crawling on my hands and knees to the thing today. It was like crawling up through hell, shadowy sepulchral arms grasping at my legs and pulling me back.
But I made it, and get this: now I have coffee. Fresh, strong coffee. I must have crawled all the way to heaven. A heaven that trades at hegemonically-determined prices with the poverty-stricken farmers of Latin America, but heaven nonetheless.
Anyway. Day 83. One week to go! Or was that yesterday? Or tomorrow? I don't know how numbers work. Drrrrr. 90 minus 83, carry the two, multiply out the brackets...
The seventh day from today, not including today as one of those days, will be the 90th day. Big times.
I'm going to buy myself a Nintendo Switch to celebrate. I know I was talking about Ivan Denisoviching the shit out of my life yesterday, but I love videogames, I've wanted a Switch since they came out, and I've been using the promise of one as a carrot to coax me all the way through this challenge - a carrot that is now so very, tantalisingly close. Mmmm. Carrot.
I have to play the games I own first, though. That's the deal. I've got a Wii U, Nintendo's previous console, and I want to finish my games on that system before I get a Switch so that, A) I can feel like I've got my worth from them and I deserve an upgrade, rather than simply buying the Switch for its novelty and then throwing it into the giant pile of shame with all the other games I haven't finished once that novelty wears off - and, 2) So I can sell my Wii U to my flatmate guilt-free and recoup a chunk of money for the Switch.
So now I'm going to bang on about videogames for a few posts. Writing about what I'm playing will be a good way to create more accountability to help me see the games through - blogging always helps with accountability - and also I've barely written about games since I stopped doing the gaming blog I used to write years ago, and going back sounds like fun.
Let's start with some history:
In the beginning...
Back when I was the same size as my kitchen counter everyone at school was either a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid. You either owned a SNES, a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or a Sega Mega Drive. No one had both. It was a true dichotomy; the lines were ideologically divided, and completely non-permeable.
... Though, hang on. Perhaps you're staring at me right now, blinking rapidly, trying to stop your brain turning to soup. If so, let's back up even more.
Even more in the beginning...
For as long as there have been computers, there have been people finding ways to manipulate them into playing games. This is because games humanise technology, they help showcase it, because humans are playful beings by nature, and the universe itself in essence is a state of play. And it's also because computer scientists like to do goofy things on their lunch breaks.
Early games like Tennis for Two and Spacewar! (these names don't get any better) were built onto specific computers - huge, hulking machines with their own displays - and controlled via switches on the cabinets.
As the popularity of games grew, companies began to develop dedicated gaming computers that could plug into your television, with joypads for controlling the action. The home gaming console was born. These devices at first came with one or a couple of games programmed into them, though later systems would allow games to be individually loaded via tapes, floppies, and cartridges, and even later CDs and DVDs, and so on.
During these first embryonic years arcade cabinets, featuring a single game, set up in pubs or rec rooms, dominated the market. But home consoles were gaining in popularity. Simple handheld devices also emerged. And later, when PCs began to be found in every home, people started playing games on these as well. Videogames were spreading like wildfire, or a particularly nasty fungus. Anywhere you could put a computer board, someone would find a way to run Pong off it.
And then, in 1977, the market crashed. The ubiquity of all these Pong clones saturated the market, and bored players. The bottom fell out of the industry. But it recovered quickly, and, by the early 80s, thanks to new games like Space Invaders and Pac Man, more revenue was being earned by videogames than by both pop music and Hollywood movies combined.
But, once again, by 1983 a surplus of near-identical machines playing near-identical games had flooded the market, and North America saw another enormous crash. Personal computers were beginning to take off, and there were too many consoles, and too many low-quality games, available. Retailers didn't have space to stock the stuff, and consumers didn't have the motivation or money to buy it. Many companies folded. Atari, one of the most successful developers of the time, infamously ended up burying 700,000 copies of their E.T. tie-in game that they couldn't sell in a landfill in the desert of New Mexico.
The concept of the home console was dead in the water. Analysts predicted that videogames were a fad, and one which had now reached its end. I almost grew up to be a long-distance runner or a tree surgeon.
And then along came a little Japanese company called Nintendo...
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