All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

I am Nightmare. I am Nightmare in the deepest darkness and I am Nightmare even when the brightest halogen burns. I am Nightmare when life is tough, and real people around me die. I am Nightmare when I am completely angry at life and need to lash out.

I, as Neil Gaiman says, am a dark and stormy Nightmare. I have the voice, frightening, growling, ready to attack, like Mercedes McCambridge as the demon Pazuzu in
The Exorcist
. I carry the sword, the long, heavy magical blade called SoulCalibur. Within my chest is a jagged maw. It is forever open to reveal a blood red beating heart engorged after devouring the countless souls whose bodies I chopped and cut with the burdensome SoulCalibur. Always, I wear a black iron mask for I am awesomely ugly and evil. So don’t mess with me. You will not survive. Give me more souls. I need to snack.

In real life I am thin and bald, sometimes cute but never handsome. I have Crohn’s disease and am often half-sick. In my life, I would not punch you or cut you or even insult you (at least, to your face). I would be respectful, understanding, and nice, if somewhat cynical. Inside, I would despair and worry. But when I am Nightmare, I am nearly invulnerable. I feel alive and optimistic, full of life, healthy and strong.

I know one thing. Sick or not, sometimes I can’t stop playing. Time ticks away, the half hour, the hour, the whole evening, and then, it’s three a.m.; I’m in the zone, just as I am when writing. Normally, I like to savor a game rather than manically tsunami
through it. But I remember spending hours just nosing around in BioShock, the scariest, best game of 2007. At the beginning of the first level, which evokes the first episode of TV’s epic
Lost
, I was tossed from a crashing plane into the ebony ocean, where what seemed to be the skyscraper-tall fires of Hades burned all around me. Panic came over me, and then, a feeling that did not mimic real life, there was beauty in the danger. To gawk at the fireworks that played off the grim, foreboding water, I kept swimming even though the gasoline-induced flames kept shooting deep into the defenseless body that was the night sky. Dream. Reality. Beauty. Nightmare. Give me more.

Briefly as I play, I even feel immortal.

I am not the only one.

You probably have felt some visceral connection to videogames as well, no matter how old you are. In the dank confines of the arcade or the corner dive when the lights were low, you were the plumber who saved the dainty princess in Donkey Kong. As your fingers ached and your joints stiffened, you were the one who couldn’t stop playing Tetris. You even had visions of blocks falling softly as snow as you slept. In front of a nineteen-inch TV, you went long and completed the Hail Mary in Madden football. As Master Chief you saved humanity from the gross aliens of the Covenant.

You know it is just a game, a videogame on a plastic disk that bears the computer bits and bytes, endless numbers that meet with a chip to turn you into Nightmare, or Mario or Sonic or Master Chief. But within that disk is magic as big and entertaining as any movie or TV show. And when that disk spins, it is a Sufi dervish who makes celestial pictures and sounds that are an extension of you and me. So forget this sordid keep-up-with-the-Joneses life, with its e-mail spam, inane tweets, bills, mortgages, and recessions. Down the rabbit hole we go to control it all as the hero, for in every videogame
there is a hero. We admit it. We are junkies who must save the world. But we’re game.

Believe it or not, we’ve been gaming for more than fifty years. Man, how it’s grown, prospered, and evolved. The videogame industry in the United States is now a $20-billion-a-year juggernaut, surpassing movie, music, and DVD sales—combined. Just one game, the Houser brothers’ Grand Theft Auto IV, earned $500 million in its opening week, far outpacing the movie industry’s biggest force, James Cameron’s
Avatar
, which earned less than half that amount. Forty-two percent of Americans have videogame consoles. If you add computer games, 68 percent of us are gamers. And the average age of today’s gamer is thirty-five. Almost half of online gamers are female, and they play games with competitive zeal and attitude. And videogame consoles are now the guardians of the living room beyond games. They play DVDs. They stream movies from Netflix. They connect to Facebook and Twitter.
That’s
entertainment.