Nomen Ludi
By Rob Beschizza
[ed. note: This story first appeared over on boingboing.net but we loved it so much, we wanted to share it with you neatoramanauts in case you missed it. Special thanks to Rob Beschizza for letting us syndicate it!]
Heather returned to the states, her father ill with cancer. Alone and bored, I remained in London to finish my final year at Goldsmiths. From the sleep of childhood and all its aimless memories, an old computer game returned to haunt me.
My first recollection was a flashback at the airport, triggered by a scent: the same carpet deodorizer my mother used to use when I was a kid. Transported away from the echoes of Heathrow's PA system and the hubbub of waiting travelers, I found myself back in my old bedroom. A child sat at at the machine, intent on the controls. Deja vu crept over me.
Pixels shone like gemstones in darkness. Phosphors moved over the face of the deep and formed into random landscapes. Every play was different, a 64Kb window onto a universe of iterations. Music, naked square waves, rang out. I'd forgotten that place for a decade, but it had not forgotten me.
In the blackness of the monitor's glass, I caught my younger self's eye; a chill tightened my skin and I was back in the airport terminal, staring at the contrails of my fiancée's flight home.
In the days and weeks after, old neurons warmed like dusty lamps. I tried to look it up on the internet, but the game's name escaped me: this point of frustration, perhaps, helped turn curiosity into obsession. Weird memories crept into my daydreams. Sometimes these were vivid, declaring themselves the lost foundations of my personal mythology. Others were so evasive as to seem like tricks of the mind's eye, the subsconscious inventing internal unities at the final threshold of adolescence.
The oddest thing was that as a youngster, I'd hardly cared for the thing. It was just one of dozens borrowed from someone or other and copied on the double tape deck, the act of piracy its own transgressive reward.
Here's what I remembered of the scenario: a deposed king, stricken by amnesia, wandered the Orient in search of his former life. The genre was graphic adventure, each scene a single picture surrounded by the words--"get," "move," "look," and so on--that one could select to take actions.
