My first video-game console was a cardboard box.
They called it the Nintendo Cereal System, and it was gifted to our world in 1988 by Ralston, a purveyor of fine license-based cereals. Unlike their other brands, such as Donkey Kong, Gremlins, and Ghostbusters, the NCS wasn’t inspired by an intellectual property but rather a piece of hardware—the Nintendo Entertainment System, an actual honest-to-God video-game console and the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world.
I’ll admit, the Nintendo Cereal System was a poor substitute. As food, it lacked the impossible flavor profiles of modern, cutting-edge breakfast treats like Waffle Stix, Go-Gurt, and Ice Cream Shoppe Frosted Rainbow Cookie Sandwich Pop-Tarts. Its selection of playable games was limited to exactly zero. And yet, without a doubt, the Nintendo Cereal System was the best console I have ever owned.
To gaze upon the NCS was to see true innovation: one box containing two different cereals, each representing a different game—Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. It promised “two different natural & artificial flavors.” Mario was fruity. Zelda was berry. Both tasted like sweetened sawdust. Their shaped pieces bore no resemblance to the source material. There was nothing good about the cereal, and that was fine, because I didn’t buy the Nintendo Cereal System for the cereal. I bought it for the box. And oh, what a box it was.
Across the top, in beautiful red letters, was the Nintendo logo. Beneath it sat a large square, its corners rounded to mimic those of a TV screen. On the left side was a poorly drawn interpretation of Super Mario Bros., and on the right, The Legend of Zelda. I cut a rectangle out of cardboard, just big enough to hold in both hands. With crayons, I added buttons—Up, Down, Left, Right, B, A, Select, and Start. A shoelace stolen from my sister’s shoe connected it to the cardboard console.
I would play that box for hours. My fingers mashed imaginary buttons as my imagination projected action onto that unmoving cardboard screen. I was Mario, flinging turtle shells like cannonballs, and Link, kicking lizard-men into dust. None of it was real, but it was perfect in every way. Reality never stood a chance.
That Christmas, I received a real Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the Action Set—the one that came with the two-in-one Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt cartridge and the NES Zapper, a light gun used to shoot down digital ducks. While my father plugged it into the TV, I read the manual from cover to cover. This is what it told me:
One day the kingdom of the peaceful Mushroom People was invaded by the Koopa, a tribe of turtles famous for their black magic. The quiet, peace-loving Mushroom People were turning into mere stones, bricks, and even field horsehair plants, and the Mushroom Kingdom fell into ruin.
The only one who can undo the magic spell on the Mushroom People and return them to their normal selves is the Princess Toadstool, the daughter of the Mushroom King. Unfortunately, she is presently in the hands of the great Koopa turtle king.
Mario, the hero of the story (maybe) hears about the Mushroom People’s plight and sets out on a quest to free the Mushroom Princess from the evil Koopa and restore the fallen kingdom of the Mushroom People.
You are Mario! It’s up to you to save the Mushroom People from the black magic of the Koopa!
It was nonsense, but my eight-year-old brain latched onto it like a Bloober, a squid the game warned me was “a guy to look out for.” I was Mario; the manual said so. It was up to me to save the Mushroom People. This was my story.
Except it wasn’t. This real, playable version of Super Mario Bros. was nothing like the game I’d been playing in my head for months. Instead of punching turtles and flying through the air, I mostly fell down holes and got mauled by Goombas, sentient shiitake mushrooms that have sprouted feet and fangs. My excitement turned to frustration as each death brought me closer to tears. This wasn’t a game. Games were meant to be fun.
That was the angriest Christmas of my life. The longer I played, the sloppier I got. My deaths piled up, my blood boiled. All that pressure needed a release, and jumping on evil turtles wasn’t doing the trick. I screamed and cried and swore off video games forever, which never lasts long when you’re eight years old. Little by little, I progressed through the game, until late that evening I stood on a bridge across from my enemy—Bowser, king of the Koopa—a fire-breathing, spike-backed dragon turtle.
My fingers jerked wildly across the controller. On the screen, Mario leapt over fireballs, then sprinted beneath Bowser’s legs to grab an axe someone had carelessly left on the far side of the bridge. With one smooth motion—so smooth you didn’t even see it—Mario brought the axe down, severing the bridge’s cables. It fell into fire, and Bowser followed. The king was dead. Long live me.
“Mom! Dad!” I shouted. “Come here! Bring the camera!”
I had accomplished the impossible and needed proof. No one in the history of video games could have beaten Super Mario Bros. in a single day. Was I the greatest video-game player alive? Yes. Yes, I was.
On-screen, Mario ran ahead to the next room, where Princess Toadstool was waiting to be rescued. When I saw her, my heart stopped. This was not the princess I’d been expecting. She was short; shorter than Mario. On her head sat an oversize helmet covered in red-and-white polka dots. Strangest of all, she appeared to be wearing a diaper. Ten words appeared above her head.
THANK YOU MARIO!
BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!
The game wasn’t over; there were twenty-eight more levels to go. Our princess had not been saved. Mario, that mustachioed shit-weasel, had lied to me. This wasn’t my story at all.
TWENTY-THREE YEARS LATER, I was in Santa Monica, directing voice recordings for Spec Ops: The Line, the tenth installment in the long-running military game franchise. It was May. Or maybe it was April. I could be wrong. For all I know, it was August. The year was definitely 2011, that much I’m sure of; but the rest is hazy.
This is not uncommon. The days and months blur when you’re locked in a crunch cycle. Faced with a steady rhythm of day-in, day-out shit-work, the human brain has a number of safety mechanisms designed to keep you from going insane. Losing your sense of time is just one. Emotional dampening is another. They’re good for a week or two, but the longer you crunch, the less effective they become. To hold off your inevitable implosion, you bolster your willpower with caffeine, alcohol, or substances more illicit; whatever sees you through to the other side, where you’ll come out wondering who you are and where you’ve been and why the world seems to have moved on without you. It feels as if you’ve traveled through time, the only evidence to the contrary being your pale, bloated body, which has somehow aged faster than should be possible, and so you stumble blinkingly into the sun, hoping to find the person you were before this started, and maybe—just maybe—feel whole again.
Which is all to say, I don’t remember what month it was.
Here’s what I do know: the world was gone. Everything except for the one mile between my hotel and the recording studio had been erased. From 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., I directed audio sessions for Spec Ops. From 7:00 p.m. to midnight, I wrote scripts for a second game being recorded down the hall. The only thing keeping me upright was a diet of Adderall, Red Bull, and cheap red wine, which was necessary to numb the pain of a bulging disc at the base of my neck. Sitting, standing, typing—they all brought pain. Since I spent most of my time doing two of those at once, it usually felt like fire was coursing through my veins. Thank God I was living my dream, or else I’d have really felt like shit.
Pain had no place in the studio. Inside, there was no suffering—only work. This was our final recording session with Nolan North, Christopher Reid, and Omid Abtahi, our three main actors. We’d been working together for nearly four years, and this would be the last time we were all in the same room. I had four hours to get everything I needed. There wasn’t even time to feel sad.
Halfway through the session, my BlackBerry blinked red. I had mail. My heart rate jumped well above its normal 121. A sudden layer of sweat burst across my skin, soaking my clothes and drawing them tight. Everyone knew I was recording. If they were emailing me, something was wrong.
SUBJECT: Hey
They’re starting the game with the helicopter chase.
The surface temperature of my body dropped two degrees.
“They” were Yager, the Berlin game studio making Spec Ops. The helicopter chase was a scene in the game that took place around the fifth or sixth hour. In it, the main characters steal an enemy helicopter, only to be struck down by a sandstorm. It was a big moment, the climax of our second act, and it had no place at the start of the story.
Flash-forwards are a cheap trick: instead of hooking your audience with a smart, enticing opener, you jump ahead to something exciting and action packed. It’s shameless, and I wanted no part of it. In fact, I’d already killed the idea a year before. We’d put months of work into the opening hour of Spec Ops. It was slow by design. Undercutting that with a flash-forward would reek of self-doubt. It would say to the player, “We don’t think you’re mature enough to handle a video game that isn’t all action, all the time. Have some explosions, you mouth-breathing yokel. Please don’t sell us back to GameStop.”
A change of this magnitude required an executive decision. Only three people had that kind of power. The first two were the creative directors, Cory Davis and François Coulon, neither of whom would make the decision without consulting the other. Since Cory was sitting beside me in the recording studio, I knew they weren’t to blame. That left only my boss, the Fox. Only he would have the gall to try this while I was stuck in recording, unable to push back. This was outright betrayal. Even worse, it was sloppy. The Fox should have known better.
I scribbled a quick scene on the back of my script.
We’re back at the HELICOPTER CHASE from the PROLOGUE. Walker can sense something is wrong.
WALKER
Wait! This isn’t right!
LUGO
Well, it’s too late now!
WALKER
No—I mean we’ve done this already!
ADAMS
What?!
WALKER
Fuck it! Never mind! Just shake these assholes!
Not my best work, but it did the trick.
I explained the situation to my actors. “We need to revisit the helicopter chase at the end of chapter 12 so we can grab some alternate lines. The scene will play out exactly the same as before, except for five new lines at the beginning. Nolan, after the chopper takes off, you’re overcome with a crazy sense of déjà vu. You try explaining it to Chris and Omid, but nothing you’re saying makes sense to them, so you shake it off, grab the Gatling gun, and start shooting down enemy choppers.”
That was all Nolan, Chris, and Omid needed. I fed them the lines, one by one, and three takes later we were done. Afterward, Nolan gave me a look. Like his character, he could tell something was wrong. He was right to feel suspicious.
There was no way I could reverse the Fox’s decision. Spec Ops: The Line would open with a helicopter chase, whether I liked it or not. But it wouldn’t be a flash-forward. The lines we had just recorded would only play during the chase at the end of act 2. By changing those lines, we were changing the story.
I grabbed my BlackBerry and responded to the email that had started this whole ordeal. “Everyone dies in the helicopter crash at the start of the game. Everything after that is a hallucination as we lie dying in the wreckage.”
This was my story, and I’d burn it all down before I let anyone take it away.