They Sleep In My Mind (Little Samson, Lode Runner, The Lone Ranger)

Huh? What were we talking about again? Feels like I've been asleep for three months or something. We passed out on the couch watching some movie about kung fu brothers, or some such bullshit. Then the weird dreams. Childhood and faith in friends overflowing. A bunch of sonnets about a little blue guy. Still, I'm up now. Let me rub the gunk out of my eyes and tell you about... Little Samson? Now there's one that was forgotten. You can easily go over what "everyone knows" about Little Samson. Really, the point is that not many people know about Little Samson. It's a Taito game that came out in 1992, well after the Super Nintendo. The NES was already dying, and the populace at large didn't give a fig about it. Little Samson, then, became an alchemic object defined by its scarcity. I know that it is one of the rarest Nintendo carts. In fact, experiment time. I'm going to look it up on Ebay. Right now. Four hundred dollars at least. Jesus. Rarer and more desired than even Earthbound. An object defined by its forgotten nature. It was good enough to want, but nobody in 1992 wanted it. By the time the ROM pirates sailed the seven seas of the Internet and discovered the treasures within, it was too late. It was a rarity. Something to be hoarded in a dragon's den. That's half of the story when it comes to Little Samson. Let me tell you who it reminds me of; another forgotten face. A man who called himself L0rdVega. With an 0. He was a Let's Player, a somewhat famous one back in the heady days of 2008 or so. He briefly had a thing going with one of my other LP friends, and then they broke up and he fell out of the world. Where did he go? We don't know. We may think of him at times like this, but for the most part he sleeps in the back of the mind. Forgotten. Just like Little Samson, he slumbers deep within the mind's eye. Now and again, he will escape... but escape is difficult. You can ask Lode Runner about that.

Oh, this is an old one. The title screen says 1983. 1984. Some guy is locked away in a dark place and needs to get all the gold, and avoid the other guys running around trying to blink him out of reality. Are we inside the dragon's den now? Is the gold part of his hoard? Run, Lode Runner. Scoop up the copies of Little Samson. There's a complete in box Earthbound there as well, still in the shrink wrap! My god, if you make it far enough you might even find Stadium Events! The pinnacle of rarity! Dare we wish for Nintendo World Championship? These names hold a certain power, and the electronic worlds they create are altered by them. Most of these rarities are moreso regrets. The world had its chance at cheap Earthbound, when the clearance sales happened. Few of you cared. A vision comes to me now. A nice young man looking at Mega Man 6 on the cheap, and taking advantage of the deal. Not to hold it on a shelf, but to enjoy it. Is Lode Runner held on shelves? Probably, but not as an object of scarcity. I can get a complete copy for less than 25 dollars if I so chose. It is a game. A game with puzzles to solve that is fun, maybe.

Now the world of collecting has collapsed into anarchy. Like the Old West, a world of bandits charging ludicrous prices for pieces of rare plastic with microchips inside. We need a hero. A Lone Ranger. This one is a rarity. Not just in collectible terms, where it will run one 30 dollars for just the plastic... but in terms of gameplay. It reminds me of Zelda 2 and its endless adventure, except top-down. And in the Wild West. With shops and punching and shooting and my god this is brilliant and I want more of it. Oddly enough, I don't even remember it for that. No, I remember it for one last forgotten relic of the past. Nintendo Power. We've talked about it before. Or someone else did. We must really sit down and discuss it proper, but Nintendo Power itself is a forgotten relic now. They do not make them any more. The Lone Ranger is where Howard Phillips bowed out. After helping a spiky-headed punk repel a bandit attack, he gave away his bow tie and rode off into the sunset. Like L0rdVega would 20 years later. I don't know where either of them went, but I like to think that they had adventures too numerous to name.

And that's how I choose to remember it.