Pass the eternal summer afternoons inserting small silver chips in the flippers. That unique sound when the tab entered and the arcade machine came to life between colored lights and chiptune melodies.
Stay on Friday night alone, playing with your favorite console, eating bread and drinking drink while your parents were in the family malon. Remove the tetris on the micro to play a game on the way to school, or the game boy if you could afford a more sophisticated version of the pocket game.
Blow the Super Nintendo cartridge before turning it on, to take out the dust. Look the other way as you played, to see if the console ran faster when it bugue it. Go to unlock the PS2 to buy the promotions of two games per thousand pesos.
Different evocations of an imaginary built around video games, which come to the present through Play again? Nostalgia and video gamesby writer Daniel Hidalgo.
A book that belongs to the lightning collection of the Santiago-Ander publishing house, where we find informative and reflective passages about the video games of yesteryear, along with color illustrations and a glossary of terms that invites us to understand more thoroughly.
The author, already in his first lines, reveals that we probably do not find our favorite game, because it does not intend to be a historical cartography of five decades of video games, but rather, a compendium of memories and nostalgia, crossed by theoretical and literary analysis about the pieces that marked their life.
Therefore, a personal story, which summons to rethink those narratives that for the usual gamers were much more than just a hobby.
The writer faces his self of the past, that child and adolescent, who, from the mere enjoyment for fun, brings to the book the latent fascination that each video game caused, versus his adult self, who provides the perfect quota of seriousness and perspective to interpret it as a story that needs to be told from another point of view.
From that distance, between the past and the present, a narratological counterpoint is born that addresses video games as literary pieces that cross with philosophical, musical, artistic and aesthetic foundations, inviting us to participate in a fun and interesting exercise of analysis.
In this way, we find Super Mario Bros. entering a fantasy of accumulation of capital. To Kirby as the most recent representation of the figure of satyr. Pac-Man staging a dialectic and The Secret of Monkey Island being the Quijote of the RPG.
In addition to interpretations, some passages reveal special curious data for the Fandom, such as Bill Gates trying to overcome the world search record, the punching rubber buttons of the Arcade Machine of Street Fighter I, or that in 1990 there was a law that categorized flippers as entertainment halls, prohibiting the entry of students in class hours.
But not only theoretical crosses is. In several passages, Daniel Hidalgo shares us anecdotes and experiences, remembering the moment when his aunt gave him for his birthday a complete afternoon of chips to play in the official machine of the ninja turtles, or the confession that Mario Kart was the only video game where his younger brothers beat him by beating.
The interesting thing about this book is concentrated precisely on how the memories of what is evoked continue to resonate today, but differently. The feeling in front of the video game is the same, but the look is transmuting, as an exercise to keep it in force in time. The invitation is that: bring to the present your favorite video game and perpetuate it as a piece of your own history.
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