Grand Theft: Life

Two hooded monks in purple robes hover high in the sky against a backdrop of a gray full moon, as an orange tornado swirls furiously, determined to rip a hole into the next dimension. Below two warriors, Sub-Zero, a man with lightning in his eyes, wearing a green smock and a domed rice pickers’ hat shoots lightning at his shirtless foe, Nightwolf. Nightwolf gets back up and kicks Sub-Zero in the guts, making him spit out blood. But it’s too late. Sub-Zero activates his fatality mode, grabs Nightwolf’s head and rips it off his body. Sub-Zero has won the match!

Marvin Morales, 32, watches this video of “The History of Mortal Kombat” on his Xbox with Nostalgia. The scene is from the original Mortal Kombat ten years ago. The game has come a long way, having two movies based on it and five sequels. Morales, a long time fan is lying on his sofa chair in his tiny dark Tenderloin studio saying how happy he is the franchise has gone well.

Morales only has one visitor tonight and most of the time plays these games by himself. He doesn’t mind his social life is dead; he parties plenty as Playstation pumps out boring games in the early 90’s.With all the great games coming out on Xbox and Gamecube lately there doesn’t seem to be much point to go out anyway.

That’s because Morales, a lifestyle gamer, bases his existence around the latest releases -- not unlike a large portion of the 145 million Americans who, according to NPD research group, say they play videogames on a regular basis. The number of gamers who are “casual” versus “lifestyle” is difficult to determine, but with the average age of gamers at 27, and so many of them saying their videogame playing goes back as far as they can remember, the number is significant. A lifestyle gamer, like a Trekkie or a football fan, is defined as someone who spans time with their hobby and makes it part of their identity.

They landmark their lives by the systems they’ve been playing over the years from the Atari to the Xbox. Morales’s life focus has remained constant from the moment his parents bought him the Atari 2600 in 1979 and instantly hooked him on simple electric light shows like Pong, Bonk Adventure and Caveman.

The Atari 2600, launched in 1977, sells 30 million units in the US and starts a generation’s obsession with home console systems. Morales remembers the golden period of the 2600 lasts until 1983 when things go sour as companies try to make a fast buck pumping out cheap low-quality games. The most memorable is a mega-flop low resolution E.T. game, where gamers move around a brown blob and keep it from falling into holes. That all changes in 1985 when the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) comes out and introduces classic games like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and Kirby’s Adventure. With its identifiable characters, faster processor and superior graphics the NES is a rebirth to a slumping home console market and introduces younger gamers to the party.

“At my high point I was playing ten hours a day when NES came out. It was like an addiction, I could barely go to work,” says Morales. Fortunately he can bring his addiction into the workplace because his job at this time is at the mall selling Nintendo games.

The late 80’s mark the beginning of the Role Playing Game (RPG) era of video games with hits like Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. Much like the imagination game Dungeons and Dragons the RPG’s require large amounts of time to complete, as gamers have to train their characters and build them up with potions and powers before they can solve complex puzzles, battle goblins and move onto the next level. Gamers are building relationships with these games comparable to what people feel after reading a long novel.

“I think playing Final Fantasy III for Super Nintendo was my most memorable gaming experience, because it was the first epic RPG that I could play, and it sounded and looked good. It had such a great quest, it kept me spell bound by story alone. I remember the first time I beat that game it took me 86 hours,” says Justin Leeper, 24, a staff writer for Game Informer magazine, a Minneapolis based video game news source.

Andy McNamara, 32, Game Informer’s editor-in-chief, says his love affair with video games began when he boots up his father’s pre-Dos ASCII computer in 1976 to play Star Trek. The graphics are a bit lacking, he remembers, with the Enterprise represented by the letter E and the Klingons by the letter K, but he never gets bored.

McNamara says his videogame fixation is like his father’s passion for playing puzzle games and reading novels. But with Videogames he has the narrative of a novel and the fun of a puzzle game all in one.

There is a stereotype of the constant gamer being a pale ghoul with bloodshot eyes and yellowish foam around his mouth who parks himself in front of the TV and computer all day, says Leeper. A statistic from Sony says 4% of gamers play alone, but no one at Game Informer thinks that’s accurate. With so many bestselling one-player games on the market the percentage must be much higher.

Still, whether gaming causing people to become more or less social depends on where they are in life, according to McNamara, who says in the past he and his room mates would play multiplayer sports games. While now that he’s married he divides his videogame time between two-person games he can play with his wife and other games that he plays by himself.

“It does help with socialization because it’s one more thing to connect with people on. The more hobbies you have and the more things you’re well versed in the more you can connect with people. I have a lot of friends I just talk video games with. That’s the sole basis for some friendships,” says Leeper.

Karli Winatta, 22, a computer science major at SF State says he has eight consoles in all, including his first system, the Sega Master System that his aunt bought him in Indonesia in 1986. He spends most of his time these days playing Nintendo Gamecube and Playstation 2. He’s doesn’t consider himself antisocial because he enjoys hanging out at the arcades at Fisherman’s Wharf and the student union. He also tries to get people to play console games with him at home, but he usually can’t and ends up playing alone.

Winatta, another Final Fantasy nut, says in the past he plays games for three hours a day but lately he’s been cutting back to one hour because too much gaming has been interfering with his school work.

“I’m sick because I had to stay up late writing a paper because I play video games too much of the time,” says Winatta.

One unexpected byproduct of people’s long-standing love affair with video games is a recent focus on its history. The history of videogames mirrors hip-hop exactly in both timeframe and commercial direction. Hip-hop starts out in the late 70’s with simple raps and sparse beats, and grows into a lush sounding mass marketed product. Just like hip-hop fans get nostalgic for Grand Master Flash and still listen to the “old school,” older gamers still like to play with their Atari 2600.

This look backward is spawning a new fad called “retrogaming.” The retrogamers are programmers who are revamping old games and creating new titles for Atari and other outdated systems. These retrogames have a cult following, and for the people who play them it’s like they never grew up.

“My interests seem to becoming more involved with the history and lore of classic gaming's past. I truly believe that electronic entertainment can be an art form,” says Michael Thomasson, owner of Good Deal Games, a company that produces retro-games.

“The classic gaming community is a fairly close group and our love of the hobby makes us pretty aware of what is happening in the retro scene.”