NFL Picks of a Thoughtful Fool, Week 11

You remember an arcade game called Robotron 2084? You controlled a little mutant guy in the middle of the screen and you were constantly under assault from killer robots. There were two joysticks, one that controlled which direction your little guy moved around the screen and the other controlled the direction he would fire. You could fire in a full 360 degrees, with an extraordinary firing rate for the time, and you never ran out of ammo. Cool game. I actually got pretty good at it.

I used to tend bar at this restaurant in Ann Arbor, a couple of blocks from the University of Michigan campus, and there was a Robotron 2084 machine set up in the corner. This was in the days before the Internet; when cable TV was a luxury, and there were no Starbucks, so the only thing the Michigan frat boys had to do at night was go out drink $2.00 pitchers of Stroh's until they lost any semblance of physical or moral equilibrium. At least once a night some drunken frat boy would stumble over the Robotron game, drop a quarter in the slot, and attempt to play. It was a remarkable thing to see.

There were the guys whose eye-hand coordination was so FUBAR that they could barely grip the controls and they would be paralyzed in confusion over how to work the joysticks while their little guys died one by one and the machine made one of those spiritually-deflating loser sound effects.

There were the guys who would put the quarter in and then not realize they had to push the start button and so would work the controls furiously but the little guy on the screen would not respond. Eventually they would give up in confusion and go back to their friends as if nothing happened and hope nobody noticed. (Free game for me! Woo-hoo!)

But my favorites were the guys who managed to actually play the game. They were invariably giddy and hyper-energetic, but their perception was so addled that they just kept firing in arbitrary directions even though they were convinced they were making progress. With each passing minute they would get more and more intense and keen on the game without even realizing they were just haphazardly shooting at nothing in particular, their alcohol drenched synapses completely overwhelmed by all the visual stimuli. This was a great source of morbid entertainment for me. There is comedy; there is high comedy; and then there are drunken frat boys playing Robotron 2084.

Article Author: David Mazzotta

David Mazzotta is author of the comic novels Apple Pie and Business as Usual.

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