January 25: High Score

Recommended by a friend, my husband and I started watched a Netflix Documentary called "High Score" about the history of video games. I am learning all kinds of delightful fun facts: the shape of Pac-Man was inspired by a pizza missing one slice and Kirby was created as a tribute to lawyer John Kirby who helped Nintendo win a huge trademark infringement case against them by Universal Studios over King Kong vs Donkey Kong. I was also delightfully reminded of some of the better times in my childhood, playing video games with my brother and reading the coveted Nintendo Power magazine to learn all the secret locations, tips, and tricks of our favorite games. 

There is also this delightful moment in the first episode where they interview the winner of the 1980 Atari National Video Game Championship. Born Bill Heineman, she is now Rebecca Heineman. She said that playing video games as a kid "allowed me to be myself. It allowed me to play as a female. I've always identified as a woman. Unfortunately my anatomy didn't agree. So when I played video games, [I could] ignore the world around me. It was the only place that I was able to find solace and peace." It was a fascinating human interest story, and it was delightful to see Rebecca's transition via video games. I have always enjoyed all kinds of games, and I also find that it is one of the only times I get to comfortably be my nerdy self. 

We've only watched the first two episodes, but I am hooked, and look forward to watching the whole series. After watching, we were itching to play some video games, so we played a few rounds of Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch. I grew up playing the Super Nintendo and then the N64 versions of Mario Kart, and the Mario Kart 8 is such a marvelous tribute to those games (featuring several of my favorite tracks from both). My husband is very good and wins practically every race, every time. I often come in second right behind him, because I'm not so shabby myself. This version of Mario Kart records your achievements for each set of tracks you play. If you win all 4 tracks in a set, you get three stars, and one of our goals has been to get three stars in all of the sets-- it's the equivalent of getting the high score. I chose to play a set where we only had two stars so we could try to get 3 stars. My husband wins the first race, so in my mind, we need him to win the other three races and I will support him in this victory by distracting the enemies (i.e. shooting them with red shells). In the second race, I am killing it and easily in first place most of the game, with my husband right behind me. But since I was trying to get us three stars, I slow down to a stop as I approach the finish line and say, "ok hun, go ahead and take the win". But he also slows down to a stop and says, "no, you win". We fight over this for a few seconds (that's how far ahead we are of the other racers) when we are both get hit by a lightning bolt which jolts me across the finish line and I win. And we begin delightfully dying of laughter. This was hilarious. So hilarious that we replayed the highlight reel and saved it to our file so we can rewatch it any time we want. He was laughing so much he was crying. I love how much fun we have together, especially in these seemingly so simple moments in life. (By the way, he went on to win the other two races, so I still maintain he should have won that race so we could have gotten three stars.)

With delight,

♥Jamie