40 Bit Gaming

Not Cool, Bro

There was a story floating around in the late 70s that when Fonzie got his library card on the show Happy Days, U.S. libraries saw a 500 percent increase in the number of real life kids getting their own library cards.

Turns out the story is apocryphal, but it was totally believable because Fonzie was cool. That’s hard for the young’uns to believe now but it was true back then. With his leather jacket, motorcycle and jukebox fist bump, The Fonz was TV’s ur cool guy (followed by Michael Knight, then B.A. Baracus, but neither of the Simon brothers on Simon & Simon.)

Gamed Stock

Back in the mid-aughts, before there was Spotify, I was in a “tape club.”

There were ten people in the group and each month, one member would burn a mixed CD and mail a copy out to each person, that way you got a new CD of music each month. (FWIW, my mix was “Songs to Walk in Slow Motion to.” My friend Zack still had the track list, and… it’s not that great, though I am proud it has not one but two lesser-known Swedish bands that aren’t The Cardigans.)

Anyway, this tape club was started by a guy named Jim Greer. Jim went on to co-found the gaming website/community Kongregate. Kongregate was acquired in 2010 by GameStop.

X’d Out

Two months after they launched, next-gen consoles are still almost impossible to get. Unless you are a ‘bot or some sentient script code, your middle-aged fingers can not click fast enough to get either an Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5 today.

Or yesterday, when I actually tried to procure one. News hit that Walmart would have both consoles in stock at noon Pacific. Right at noon I went to the site, which… promptly crashed. At 12:00:15, I refreshed the screen and got a message saying they were out of stock and to try again at 12:10.

At 12:10:05 I went back and got another brief crash and another out of stock message. At which point, I threw in the towel. And then threw away any notion of getting an Xbox anytime soon.