paid post: from the archives, volume one
Big news: starting today, for paid subscribers only, I’ll be regularly posting writing from my archives. That’s a heavy word and usually it only applies to dead guys, so let me explain myself for a bit. I’ve been writing on the internet for money since 2011. Almost all the websites that have ever hosted my work are straight-up gone. That includes the shiniest one, where I was staff and where I did the most work, MTV. It also includes countless professional blogs and even one actual magazine.
But I’m cynical and know how internet money works (doesn’t), so I kept copies of everything. There were a lot of, you know, Saturday Night Live recaps, but some of it holds up and I think it’s worth sharing. So to that end, when the mood strikes or I remember something I actually liked, I’ll put it on this site and it’ll be around as long as I can host stuff here.
These will basically be my final submitted drafts. Occasionally I’ll tweak them a bit because they were filed on insane deadlines and I didn’t get to something, or because they had material requested by editors that I didn’t actually want to put in there. (I always said yes to edits in those days because I wanted gas money way more than a professional reputation.) Otherwise these are fully my work, from when I was in my twenties.
I wanted to share this week’s entry because I brainstormed it with my brothers and it made us laugh all night long. I still remember finishing it at 3 in the morning and thinking I would never write a better piece ever again. But none of you have ever read it because even back then, it was kind of a secret. For a couple years, I wrote video game features for a subsidiary of a company you’ve all heard of but I shouldn’t name. There is no longer any trace of it online.
And even then, I did it under a pen name. That was partially to preserve my “googlability” on the straight job market, and partially because the nature of the job was such that I didn’t treat it with the rigor of a true video game writer. Usually I had my brothers play games for me, and I would reflect on topics I actually wanted to write about. Family, history, nostalgia, how people distract themselves and why, how games differ from film and television as mass media, and why I found them interesting at all. It was never for normal reasons. I liked old stuff. Failures. Outliers. Bizarre experiments. Anything with a scandalous production history. Anything considered “the worst game ever.”
This was usually work I did at night, from the bed I had in the corner of my dad’s office. I thought my adult life had gone to hell. I didn’t want anybody at all to know about this stuff, and I was deeply ashamed. But it paid more than Target, more than retail merchandising, and I was endlessly thankful for that. It kept me going. It paid for road trips that led to work at places like Vice. Completely changed my life, and I like to admit that now. Here’s one of the pieces I wrote. It’s a review of BMX XXX.
Think about the last twelve days of John Wilkes Booth. He killed a president, stood up on a stage, yelled "Sic Semper Tyrannis!" and immediately became the most wanted fugitive in America. Most of his co-conspirators scattered, it was just him and some guy named Dave, and they were totally outside society, crossing the Potomac in a little boat. For twelve days, among the fields and dirt and trees, they walked toward oblivion as America's most hopeless, delusional outcasts. They were on the exact, mathematical wrong side of history. Think about that death march.
Eventually John Wilkes Booth made it to a farmstead owned by a man named Richard Garrett. You know how the story ends. That's where he dies. The Garrett farm. But try to put yourself there, at the edges of the quiet exploding into sudden spectacle. One day Booth shows up at their door, clumsily pretending to be a wounded Confederate soldier. The Garretts were rightly suspicious of him. He was ostracized from them. Excommunicated to a tobacco barn. Then the soldiers showed up. Then he was burned in the barn, then he was shot in the barn, and finally he was dragged to the porch of Richard Garrett's house, where in a few hours his mistakes caught all the way up with him.
Of course it doesn't end there, but we usually stop the story there. What came later wasn't nice. The Garretts never recovered from the trauma, and they never recovered from the huge financial hit caused by the destruction of their barn. The family's moment in history now ended, they slowly faded away. Their house became a morbid tourist destination. Thousands shuffled by in the late 1800s – it was widely known that part of Abraham Lincoln's story ended at this house outside Bowling Green, Virginia. But the tourists slowly stopped coming and the house ceased to exist even as mere rot sometime around World War II. And today it's nothing. You can't even find it. This part of history is just dirt and shrubbery between stretches of a highway. Hold on.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is a game where computer women play volleyball in hardly any clothes at all. It comes out in February of 2016 in Japan and comes out here, according to recent posts on the game's Facebook page, never. The goal of the game, if it has a goal, is to ogle the computer women. It's the third in a series. The first came out in 2003, when Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball arrived for the Xbox. If it goes down in history at all, it will go down as a bizarre curiosity from the adolescent phase of the games business. As a relic from a time when games hadn't quite graduated to mainstream acceptance and you could still sell a title like that to depressed teenagers without taking particularly visible media heat for it. You were more likely to see Entertainment Weekly give it an 80 word write up to the effect of "golly, those games sure are different now."
Okay, I'm back. America is bad at preserving history. What we preserve, we explode into myth. We curate and inflate. We tell tall tales. And that's just for our nice history. The good parts. The parts that happen in widescreen, that can get turned into movies directed by Ron Howard and documentaries directed by Ken Burns. Our disreputable history is a different discussion. We shun that. We ignore it out of existence. In between two lanes of a highway in Virginia, there's something we should have kept; the end of an insane and desperate story. But in a hundred years, people won't know anything happened there. Hold on.
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball will endure as a disreputable game that peddled cheesecake photos to teenagers. It was ridiculous. But it was not the most ridiculous dirty game that managed to get mass market awareness. That honor goes to something so conceptually putrid, so disreputable, so monumentally misguided, that it could absolutely never be made now, and not just because everybody involved is out of business. It's impossible to imagine it on a shelf in 2015, but it was almost impossible to imagine it on a shelf when it came out in 2002.
It was BMX XXX. Came out on all three consoles. It got considerable media attention, all of it rightly terrible. It was one of those "have video games gone too far?" news items FOX News or CNN could easily kill a segment with on a slow day. You can imagine how the segments went. The beats they hit without saying anything.
"Here to talk about what these game developers are selling to your kids is Some Guy In A Suit. Some Guy, thanks for being here."
"Thanks, Greta, or maybe Wolf Blitzer, you know, it's like you said earlier. I want to know how they got away with this. I want to know why this isn't banned. I want to know why there's…"
"No legislative oversight, exactly. Thanks for joining. Up next, some vaguely sketchy West LA-based doctors weigh in on the health of Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and Johnny Cash, all of whom are still alive."
And like most slow day news padding, it was forgotten the second some actual news materialized. So what was it? Well, originally it was a sequel to Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX. But development wasn't going according to plan, so publisher Acclaim Entertainment freaked out, pulled the ripcord, and put developer Z-Axis to work on a stunt-bike game crammed with both simulated nudity and clips of real strippers.
The whole package was repugnant. It had the sense of humor of a bunch of 14-year-olds drinking Miller High Life in a gravel quarry. It was about as close as mainstream video games got to being actual Tijuana Bibles. That is to say, it looked like something that should only be sold by carnies. It was a game that felt like the instruction booklet would have nicotine stains, a game made for bad kids to shoplift. There is no reason to ever play it.
It was a total failure of publisher conscience and it was a massive setback for those who wanted games to be taken seriously as a valid entertainment media. Cannon fodder for the politicians who thought video games should be regarded as a vice, with any and all attendant sin taxes.
It's disreputable history. The temptation is to forget it, because it would be so nice to forget it. But its ugliness, its moral and aesthetic hideousness, is a reminder that progress has been made in interactive entertainment. Games are too legitimate for something that monumentally tasteless to get bankrolled by a major publisher. In a few years it'll be easy to forget that's a recent development.
And it's what Tom Waits in The Fisher King would have called a moral traffic light. As a monument to bad judgment, it slaps us across the face and looks us in the eye and asks exactly one question. What are we doing now that will one day embarrass us so much we pretend it never happened?