Happy Birthday, Nintendo Project Resumed!

What a difference a year makes. The Nintendo Project has been resumed for a year now. Hooray hoorah and many happy returns. Allow me to indulge myself and tell a little story. Once upon a time there was a nice man named Phil. Phil had a very bad series of days and subsequently decided to write about old Nintendo games. All of them. From A to Z. The writing was fresh and exciting, but also very sad in places. Eventually Phil started writing about a TV show called Doctor Who, from 1963 to the present day. It was very very good writing, and Phil eventually decided to shelf the Nintendo Project somewhere around the letter H.

In 2012 or so, a weirdo named Frezno found Phil's Doctor Who blog as it was dealing with the exorcism of the Colin Baker years. He quite liked it! He continued to read and even tossed some money to Phil's Kickstarter, reading the entries in book form. Then the Nintendo Project was found and its arcane tomes consumed. Being a Hard Game Beater, Let's Player, and general old video game fart... he appreciated the idea.

August 2013. Poor Frezno was going through a bad series of days of his own. Somehow or another, the Nintendo Project came back to him. The idea of continuing took root, and the seed was planted. To continue the Nintendo Project, to go through Nintendo. Letters H through Z. Could it be done? Would it even be allowed? Phil was consulted, and his blessing was given. He even said he was honored... and with that, the Nintendo Project was resumed.

So hi. Here we are a year later, and what have we learned? Writing for Nintendo is fun, if not interesting and a little narrow in scope. A lot of the NES library is unremarkable, or even outright bad... but there's enough magic in that grey box to make all of it worth it. Something else interesting happened to the blog, after the first few rocky months. In its infancy, there was just a lot of straightforward talk about video games and whether they were good or bad. Then I went and took a break for a month to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month. In it was a smart-mouthed teen with psychic powers who, as it turned out, had a precognitive sixth sense that allowed him to dodge danger before it came at him. I came up with a name for this power, and that name was Valya. Nothing special. Just the Valeyard from Doctor Who, made a dash more exotic and otherworldly. I always write with cute little in-jokes like that, it fuels the word count and keeps me going. When I came back, more Doctor Who had inspired me. The Key To Time saga, featuring a White Guardian representing Order, and a Black one representing Chaos. I turned this into a battle for the state of video games. Lady Valya, standing for the powers of innovation and imagination that led to classics like Mega Man and Zelda and whatnot. The Nightmare, the advocate for everything wrong with the 8-bit. Cheap cash-in licensed dreck. Terrible controls. Awful and abhorrent things that existed only to make a buck. As time went on, we saw other deities approach. The dread beast GREED, the Trickster Beast ROMHACK, Peko the Destructor, Lady Capitalism and Captain Communism... the list goes on.

The second major shift in the blog happened about two weeks later. Some thoughtless human being went ahead and proposed to his girlfriend on a livestream, and I got to wake up and read about it on Twitter. I was happy for those two kids. They were great friends of mine! Then they went and invited me to the wedding... and happy feelings bubbled forth. I had to pay tribute. I went non-linear. I tackled Kirby's Adventure before I was supposed to, and made it about them. About the daydreams of travelling to a big city and meeting my good friends. Non-linearity would also become a Nintendo Project thing...as would dreams. So now here we are. I've taken an abandoned blog about old Nintendo games from an academic, and turned it into a ridiculous and esoteric pantheon of pretend gods, all vying for control between the years 1983 and 1995... and beyond. That's got to count for something, right?

Here's to the Nintendo Project. We cleared out five letters of the alphabet in a year. That's about a fifth of them! It's in no way close to being done, especially since I'm prone to vanishing or dicking around with other things... but it's my own little pet project for now. One day I might give up on it and pass the reigns to someone else, but I'm happy with what I've got here. A small handful of people read and (hopefully) enjoy my ramblings about old video games, and some of the big names have gotten above-average view counts. Time to give thanks, I suppose. To Phil Sandifer; it couldn't have happened without you. You started the machine, you gave me the go-ahead, and you were even nice enough to write about Mega Man 3 for me! I don't know how many of these you actively read (my fanboyish heart hopes the answer is "all of them") but credit where credit is due.

To the many Constant Readers; I would be talking to a void were it not for you. Some of you have even spread the little blog around to blossom its readership; mostly the big-name games. I appreciate it. You keep coming back for words on these old games, and I adore you all for it. Very special thanks to everyone who has contributed a guest post or otherwise collaborated with me. That would be John, Phil, Rainiac, CarpetCrawler, and Froborr. It was great having different perspectives on things, and I thank you for putting up with me.

Let's blow out our candles and divvy up this cake. Here's to you, silly red and white blog. Here's to you, grey box. Hell, why not? Here's to me. Now how about we see about that next year, and get a little farther this time?