Lucky Wander Boy
I cannot be what I am
so I become money, quarter by quarter
and live as long as I can live1
I can’t remember playing Pac Man or Pong in the early 1980s, but I did. I know this because my parents, graduate students from Africa, had no money for a gaming system and I was always taking advantage of moments when we were at someone else’s place where they did happen to have Atari or the more exotic Intellivision.
I remember being seven and moving to Portland where I discovered I wanted to be Tracey Falhauber – the teenager (13) living down the street who owned an Atari and listened to (make sure you whisper!) rock music2. There was a horse pasture across the street and we could feed horses too but if given a chance I chucked the nature stuff without a second thought so I could play Space Invaders.
It wasn’t until the 1990s when we (posts like this don’t make sense without inclusion of my brother) had a system on a permanent basis but even then it wasn’t bought – a family recently arrived from the US let us keep their Nintendo since they didn’t have a TV or voltage transformer for it.
So I speak with a form of legislated nostalgia when I broach the subject of classic video games and yet the gaze backward feels so natural. So real.
I am on the verge of finishing Lucky Wander Boy, a charming book of video game mythology that takes the reader on a journey through classic gaming through the eyes of an Adam Pennyman: copywriter, slacker and game junky. Perhaps it’s the sheer amount of memory and passion that the author, D.B. Weiss, emits that makes any reader feel an aged relationship with video game consoles and gaming itself.
In the first chapter3 Pennyman begins a project: the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments, an archive of classic gaming. We are treated to a philosophical distillation of Pac-Man that whets the appetite for more gaming ethos:
“The Pac-Man’s insatiable hunger for the dots and Power Pills that fill the corridors of his maze-worlds suggests weighty parallels, such as the ravenous hunger for More Life that Darwin saw in all species… Also we are reminded of Marx’s “need of a constantly expanding market” that “chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe”…
The reader is taken passionately to the adolescent Adam Pennyman’s basement where he played Intellivision’s Microsurgeon frantically to keep his grandmother alive from cancer. Then the story receives its focus, a fictitious game called ‘Lucky Wander Boy’.
Pennyman’s journey to find Lucky Wander Boy and himself in the process is a funny account of self destruction and catharsis. Game system emulators, Polish women, buried cartridges, Hollywood – all twist into this strange braid: a perception, an experience, a philosophy. Non-accidents like this are definitely worth the time.
Not all those who wander are lost4
1Weiss opens with this quote from Tony Barnstone's "Why I Play Video Games"
2To this day I maintain a special relationship with Van Halen because of that kid
3Entitled ‘wakawakawakawaka’: You've got to get this.
4Tolkien
7:59:37 PM 
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