Josh Grimmer - The Summer of 69 Lives

Hey everybody, before I get started with my essay, I just want to publicly thank our lovely new Editor-in-Chief, Katie McMahon. When I decided to shut down the blog a few weeks ago, she came up to me at work and whined about how lame I was. I asked her if she wanted to take over the operations of the blog, to which she responded “fuck that.” Well, the joke's on her, because a few weeks later, here we are. It was so sad. She begged and begged for me to let her run the blog. I ended up selling the rights for about $250,000. Joke's on her, once again! This thing is barely worth $100,000. Oh man, I'm a fucking awesome businessman. Look out, Wall Street! Here comes ol' Josh Grimmer!

To all the writers who made this blog possible from the very beginning, thank you. Treat Katie the same way you treated me – with begrudging indifference.

Grosses bises,

Josh Grimmer, Former Editor-in-Chief

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I was born in 1985 to a lazy, single mother. I was an only child until age nine. I was, in fact, the only child in my entire family until age nine. All of these factors add up to one thing – hours and hours of video game playing. My entire childhood, as well as most of my adult life, was defined by what video games I was playing. Most extended memories are sort of managed by where I was in any given game. “That happened while I was trying to find every level in Super Mario World.” “That was the summer of Final Fantasy 6.” The most significant event of August 21, 1993 was when I saw somebody beat The Legend of Zelda for the first time. Also, my mom got remarried.

Despite what the people of the G4 network would like you to believe, video games are not, will not, and have never been cool. They are entertainment for indoor children. There's nothing cool about sitting down with reams of graph paper and attempting to map out the entire planet from Metroid, which I have done three different times. The second two were just for fun. That's seriously about as lame as lame can be. Occasionally a news story will pop up about how video games “aren't just for kids anymore.” Nintendogs, Babysitting Mama, and Imagine: Prom never get mentioned in these reports. Video games aren't just for kids, they're just mostly for kids. Like, 85 percent.

Video games are also for adults with arrested development, such as myself. A while ago a friend of mine got a real, grown-up, corporate-type job. The kind of job where you make business deals. Business deals used to happen at golf courses, but now they happen over XBox Live. Call of Duty 4 parties are apparently a thing in which people who have jobs that require suits participate. That's how networking happens now, I guess. Call me old fashioned, but I really prefer to play video games alone, like the asocial creature I was raised to be. Online gaming holds very little appeal to me, though I am currently on the precipice of the “Spring of Marvel vs. Capcom 3,” which will almost certainly force me to register for online gaming. I'm a little squeamish thinking about it.

Well-crafted video games create a sense memory for me. Just hearing the music from Final Fantasy 6 brings a rosy warmth to the back of my skull. I get the same thing if I think about the first level of Super Castlevania 4. This nostalgia really isn't much different from going through your old records and remembering the summer that all you did was sit around and listen to Daydream Nation or This Year's Model or whatever. It's also about as lame. I know that my children won't want to hear stories about the first time I beat Ganon or that one fight I had with Mother Brain. These nerdy memories are for me, and I'm pretty happy with them.

Josh Grimmer lives in North Hollywood with his wife and cat. He used to run this blog, but now he only sorta runs this blog. Let him know what you think about his dumb bullshit at http://twitter.com/JoshGrimmer