Cause it rings true, I remember like everyone when it was a big deal, when the betweener pages of my early issues of Nintendo Power (my first issue was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for NES) used to tell me that now I was playing with power, portable power, or at least I would be, if I could ever ever get myself a Game Boy. I eventually scammed one out of my parents for my tenth birthday, once Nintendo started selling it without Tetris packed in, and they got me a copy of Yoshi's Cookie, probably cause it was cheaper than Tetris on account of it being Not Tetris. And look what it was worth to me back then, to anyone, christ, the Nintendo Power letters from these fossils who sputtered around between bouts of Game Boy Tetris, I'm the Nintendo Nana and all this shit. At a tender age my sister hoarded her money under the mattress for months and used it to buy a Game Boy of her own, and she chose Tetris, and ask her what the last video game she bought was, I bet it was Tetris.
Anyway, he tells me how this stuff was a big deal and I think, you know, it was—and really, is Tetris any less fun than it was when it came out? I kick it around on the train back to town, trying to adjust my mentality: they're selling these old games on Virtual Console for a few bucks and a half, or you can buy the cartridges for a little more, or less sometimes, and to whom are those buys really a deal? If I pop Tetris, or Super Mario Bros., or Sonic the Goddamned Hedgehog into the hands of a kid today, would they still have as much fun? It's hard for me to conjecture one way or the other—I'm speaking from a vantage point that is one only providing me with a view of myself, glancing down the valley as I pass through it solitary, the rest of these guys silently flanking.
I think about the games of today, and what they'll be worth twenty years from now, and if anyone will remember what the hell is the difference between Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed Revelations, and I wonder are certain game concepts just inalienably always "worth" more, a better twist from the lemon? It's hard to argue that they offer us less than the games of old, whether you look at the time it takes to "finish it" or the amount of data or the cart or the zippers and chazwozzers adorning the packages, but at the same time it's hard to say that games like Tetris will ever get old, can ever offer any less than what even the best one-and-done games of today serve up.
Can my friend not give away a Game Boy and Tetris because everyone already has one? Probably not, but maybe everyone's already played it? Is it cause of mechanical reasons like they don't got the AA batteries, or maybe mindshare reasons, they know they've heard "Game Boy" but don't think they want that? I wonder like back in The Age Of Reason if a man was offered a free chess set, would he turn it down. How long till Tetris is rendered tetris in our language? How long until Mario is just mario, we go play mario, which is moving an icon from left to right, dodging the obstacles?
Is poker less of a game now than it ever was, or Candy Land, or Scrabble, and what's it take for those things to enter the annals in the way that checkers and all this did long ago? Is that worth three bucks used from a plastic trench, paper stickers and the residue of the years grimin' up the bottom? Isn't it? If I found a chess set sitting out on the curb, next to a stack of cathode-ray televisions, would I take it? How do we decide what to charge for these things that are less amusement than breath, punched holes in our brains!
I guess for some people it's less than free, and for others it's thirty bucks for Tetris Axis, it's got a new name and new menus, and it is Tetris, the game that you could play on the free Game Boy. For some people, I tell my friend, clunking a can into the bag, things like Tetris are just a bunch of old crap, plastic and glass. Not The Game Of Tetris, huge swaths of the people I can now see swiping and pinching to zoom. How much would I pay for Tetris if it meant that without paying right now I'd never have Tetris in my life again? Thirty bucks again, a few hundred? My life's right to Tetris? What is "tetris," the concept, worth to me as a whole? They're questions I can't answer, all of them, and here they come.
I think maybe, as all these people pulse away, this seasonal turnover, that we're all the same, we people and the games we play, pushing and pulling from the big thing to forgotten just like the waves float on out or the frisbee coasts through the air and back again, and some days Tetris isn't worth free, and other days it's worth a number you can't peg except to say that man, if you had a Game Boy with some Tetris right now, that would be just about the greatest thing in this place.