Nostalgia is all about counting the hits while ignoring the misses. This is especially true with childhood nostalgia, where youthful affections gain intensity over the temporal distance and blot out less pleasant memories.

The gap between “what was” and “what we choose to remember” has been a recurring theme over AT’s decade of posts. My relationship with the subject has been complicated and sometimes contradictory, with historical curiosity and nostalgic wistfulness existing in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Come for the old videogame ads, stay to piece together a case study in the dysfunctions of consumer capitalism.

In spotlighting a year as significant as 1983 was for me, there’s a real risk of falling into the nostalgia trap, of letting selective memories of material culture paint a skewed image devoid of the host of horrors that accompanied those flashes of joy — and there were horrors, a’plenty.

For starters, I was eleven years old. When adults celebrate youthful freedom from responsibility, they tend to ignore the agonies of limited agency that are the flip-side of that “blessed” state. I’m talking about the tyrannies — however mild or benevolent — imposed by school, adult authority figures, and other socio-economic factors absolutely beyond a child’s control.

That’s just a universal baseline. The specifics of each individual childhood can be, and too often are, far more harrowing.

In 1983, I lived in a two room apartment with my parents, my little brother, my disabled paternal grandmother, and my teenage aunt. The inherent stresses in such a dynamic were further amplified by economic concerns, with my mother having to take a full-time job after my dad was laid off for a good stretch of time.

The situation also escalated my parents’ ongoing mental health issues, leading to strange and terrifying outbursts which fell on my head with greater frequency — my mom’s weird tendency to violently lash out in response to some random trigger (such as a kid asking for a glass of milk or making irritating noises with his mouth) or my dad’s alcoholic rampages of mental cruelty. Avoiding them in such cramped quarters was nigh impossible.

This was my 1983, as was the mad afterschool rush past the intersection of School and Merrimac Streets, the point at which my elementary school tormentors would give up the chase. Most of the time.

Geekdom’s heroic journey narrative is fond of spinning these horrors into a persecution based on tastes. “The jocks” mocking “the nerd” for liking Star Wars or Spider-Man. These (suspiciously similiar) experiences are in turn used to justify gatekeeping and exclusionary hierarchies of fandom, where the bullied become the bullies.

None of that jibes with my experiences. I was never picked on or called “fag” or physically attacked because I liked comicbooks or videogames. I was picked on because kids can be cruel and spiteful and will instinctively seek out a perceived “weak pigeon” to stand that the bottom of the pecking order.

Maybe it was because of my clothes or my ineptness at kickball or awkward socialization skills. It doesn’t matter, because it was going to be something. if the mark didn’t fall on me, it would’ve fallen on someone..and I’d probably would’ve joined in while thanking the Baby Jesus it wasn’t me.

1983 was when I had the pre-adolescent realization that my childhood friends were on separate life trajectories. Bonds formed through geographic proximity were giving away to ones formed out of shared interests. I was the meek A+ student in a crowd of proto-heshers shifting from childhood hi-jinx to adult criminal behaviors. There was no S.E. Hinton-esque painful moral stands to be made, just an agonizing struggle between the fear of getting dragged along or the fear of being left behind.

All the small-scale personal horrors of 1983 unfolded under the looming dread of the Mother of All Nightmares…

…global thermonuclear annihilation.

It kept me awake at night, wondering if the “birds were in the air” at that very moment. Every siren, every test of the emergency broadcasting system, every new report of global tensions or close calls brought me close to absolute panic.

The terror was even more acute in my household because my father was a defense contractor who also did post-armageddon prep exercises as a sergeant in the National Guard. He didn’t hide any of this from me, and would let me read his leaflets about proper body disposal methods and the effects of radiation exposure.

I was absolutely convinced the world would be engulfed in atomic fire before I saw my teen years. While I don’t buy into that anxiety being the core plank of the Gen X “slacker” pathology, it most certainly inflicted enduring scars on my impressionably youthful psyche.

Going back over those times, I find myself wondering if my embrace of 1983’s high points (relatively and personally speaking) was in direct proportion to the horrors I experienced — points of light in the darkness, and all that.

Up until 1983, the vast majority of the comics I read were back issues or bundled remainders picked up via flea markets or in polybagged three-packs sold at the supermarket checkout aisle. The few new releases that filtered down to me were wild card outliers passed on as gifts or picked up in trades with some incredibly fortunate friend whose out-of-state grandparents happened to live right next to a fully stocked funnybook shop.

Occasionally some almost-new release would turn up in amidst the Ford Era quarter bin overstock — typically some newsprinted proof that the “New DC” wasn’t as unstoppable as advertised — but otherwise my childhood comics fandom involved resigning myself to reading catch-as-catch-can fragments from yesteryear. It affected my tastes and my buying habits. Uncertainty about ever getting to read the conclusion of a multi-issue story meant that I picked up stuff that gave the most bang for my fourth-of-a-buck — guest appearances, giant-size issues, team-ups, or any other cover-level hook that promised to mitigate the frustration of getting stuck with a cliffhanger ending.

That situation began to change in 1983, when my buddy Brian discovered that a local newsvendor had a spinner rack stocked with current funnybook releases. The “local” was somewhat relative, as the place was in the heart of Woburn Center and a good two miles away from the neighborhood where we lived. Getting there as an eleven year old was a major expedition, one that involved a long-ass bike ride and a good deal of deception aimed at disapproving parental units. (My parents were less strict than most, but even they weren’t thrilled with the idea of their eldest crossing the nightmarish Route 128/38 rotary to buy a ‘fucking SU-PER-MAN comic.”)

Brian and I did it, though. Not regularly, but happily. This was also the first time when I had a leg up over my friendly rival on the collecting front. My maternal grandparents lived only a half-dozen blocks from the newsvendor, and the Saturdays I spent at their duplex meant more opportunities to pick up the good shit before Brian could. What I didn’t want could then be used as leverage in trades for stuff of his that I did covet.

While the newsstand was a mostly reliable place to acquire new releases, it didn’t stock double-sized issues or annuals for some reason. Those had to be scored either through the trading grapevine or from the neckbearded dude who used to sell polybagged recent back issues during one of the frequent “collector shows” hosted by the Woburn Mall. It was from him that I picked up the epic finale of the X-Men‘s “Brood Saga” (gorgeously illustrated by Paul Smith) and the tail end of the original Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe‘s run. I devoured both with rapt adoration that would deeply affect my fandom in the years to come.

Even with these increased levels of consumer access, my buying habits hewed closely to those of the guest-star-and-novelty-driven ones of the flea market days. Getting excited about an Air Wave appearance might be a difficult to wrap one’s head around, but it was something new and different to a kid with little knowledge of the cynically speculative side of the industry. After all, why would they team Air Wave up with SUPERMAN if DC didn’t have confidence in the character’s star power? (Yes, I know the question answers itself, but that realization wouldn’t come for another few years and many painful experiences.)

There was a 1983 debut that grabbed me enough that it became the first series I followed from the start and the first series I followed on a regular basis, full stop —

— the New Mutants.

The teen mutant melodrama was a big deal at the time, being the first ongoing spinoff from the speculator-and-fan-favorite X-Men series. As befitting a “big event,” the team made their debut in a prestige format graphic novel. I was given a copy of it (which a still own as loose pages gathered in a tatted cover) as an eleventh birthday gift by my uncle. He also gave me a copy of the first issue of the 1982 Wolverine miniseries signed “All the best, Andy!” by Chris Claremont himself, but it couldn’t top the oversized intro of “the next generation of Marvel mutants.”

The concept hooked me on multiple levels. From a collector’s standpoint, there was something compelling about getting in on the ground floor of what was pitched as the next big thing. From the perspective of a kid hitting the cusp of adolescence, the on-the-nose allegory between pubescent angst and mutant melodrama resonated on a deeply personal level. It was in the same vein as the early Spider-Man stories, but Claremont brought a bit more sensitivity and verisimilitude to the subject matter than Stan the Man could ever muster…while Bob McLeod’s art was more in synch with contemporary teendom than Ditko’s style ever was. (It’s not an absolute question of “who is better,” but rather one of “who was better for that particular moment.”)

And I’m not going to lie — I had a massive crush on Wolfsbane.

After finding the first issue of the ongoing on the spinner rack, I made a dedicated effort to keep up with the series, right down to memorizing the release dates and planning my trips to the shop accordingly. I managed to keep up with it (with a few missed issues) right on up though the bizarre Bill Sienkiewicz run, which I wasn’t crazy about at the time but have since grown to appreciate.

As I got in the habit of following a current series on a regular basis, I started to follow other series as well in the months that followed. All-Star Squadron was a early add, alongside Atari Force, Justice League, and Iron Man. Around the same time, CVS and the Christy’s chain of convenience stores started adding comics to their magazine aisles, making it even easier to keep up with old favorites and try out new (Big Two) things.

By the time I discovered a full-fledged direct market shop within biking distance in late 1984, the new phase of my comics was already in full swing.

1983 is where it began, though, and it continues to color the material for me in odd way to the present day. I’ve collected complete runs around many of the isolated single issues I read back in those days. Whenever I read them en masse, those later purchases are “just comics” to me. The ads and references might elicit small flashes of nostalgia, but the comics are just parts of a narrative stream — until I get to one of the issues I owned back in the day, at which point I get hit with a multimegaton blast of Proustian melancholy. It completely transforms my reading experience, turning dormant memories into lucid flashbacks for eighteen to twenty-two pages. Then it’s back to business as usual.

I guess what I’m saying is that Starfox joining the Avengers is my own personal “episode of the madeleine.”

As a kid, pop music was something I passively encountered rather than actively sought out. The twin vectors of exposure were my parents’ record collection (the Easy Rider OST, the Doors, Neil Diamond) or my elementary school classmates (AC/DC, the Bay City Rollers, the Grease movie soundtrack). Apart from occasionally environmental wild cards — such as getting spooked by Supertramp’s “Logical Song” at a drive-in’s snack bar — these defined the boundaries of my listening experiences.

Things changed up a little after my teenage aunt moved in with us in 1980. While not a dedicated new waver, she alternated the suburban hesher standards of Zep and the Stones with spins of the first Clash LP, early Adam Ant, and the Blues Brothers, inadvertently shaping my tastes in ways that would only become apparent years later.

Mostly I just went along with the flow, paying note to certain songs only if they lent themselves to some satirically scatological interpretation.

Between “Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth” and Greg Kinh’s “The Breakup Song,” my pals and I got a lot belly laughs performing the “jack off” gesture in time with the saliently prurient parts of the songs. If only my current audience was so easy to please.

My aunt’s youthward shift of our domestic incidental music was kicked into overdrive after a cluster of events which took place towards the end of 1982.

1. To help make ends meet after my dad was laid off, my mother took a job at stereo component factory staffed by a motley bunch of wannabe musicians and audiophiles.

2. My family bought a Chrysler Cordoba with an 8-track player, and my mom took advantage of that by picking up a half-dozen recent K-Tel compilations to listen to while driving.

3. My dad got himself a Panasonic boom box to provide tunes when he was out working on his leathery tan.

4. Boston’s 103.3 FM station switched to a “hot hits” format under the WHTT callsign.

5. I hit an age when having specific musical tastes and interests became an essentially part of my pre-adolescent identity.

All of the above also happened to coincide with the high-water mark of the “new music” phenomenon. Though the sounds of the post punk diaspora failed to gel into a full blown fad during the period immediately following disco’s demise, it was given a new lease on life thanks to MTV and the bands’ forward-thinking embrace of the music video format. The paucity of material (abetted by MTV’s whitewashed playlist) and popularity of the format allowed many otherwise “outlandish” acts to go head-to-head — in the public consciousness if not the charts — with the AOR establishment.

Yet while the video aspect was important from an exposure standpoint, it was working in tandem with the equally significant fallout of punk rock’s imperfect paradigm shift which allowed scores of offbeat subgenres to nibble at the fringes of the mainstream. As they disproportionately came to dominate the discourse, they set the tone for unaffiliated acts seeking a slice of that pie.

The dominiance of AOR, soft rock, and smooth R&B wasn’t toppled, but they were forced to share space with artists that, in many cases, qualified as novelty acts. The trend only lasted until the industry could adapt to the new videogenic status quo, but its brief moment arrived the most effective point of personal impact.

It was the soundtrack for a new decade, of pixel-abstracted videogames and chrome-sheened futurism and nuclear dread. It was bizarre and otherworldly, in ways that dovetailed perfectly with an eleven year old geek’s obsession with funnybooks, sci-fi, and the apocalyptic promises of the coming digital era.

It was the awakening of my generational awareness, the sense that these were songs specifically speaking to me.

And so I’d camp out at my mother’s sewing table in our cramped kitchen-slash-dining-room, parked in front of my dad’s boom box, dial turned to WHTT, waiting eagerly for each hourly rotation of my favorite tracks.

It’s shocking how much power these songs still wield over me, even thirty-odd years later. It’s not just limited to the “cooler” stuff that I sought out on used vinyl once my punk puritanism began to slacken in the early 1990s, either.

The slick, the cheesy, the haunting, and the cheesy — they’re all part of that nostalgic tapestry, whether I’d like to admit it or not.

Each time I queue up the Billboard Hot 100 for 1983 as an at work playlist, the number of skip-aheads shrinks in direct proportion to the number of fucks I have left to give.

When 1983 began, I was ten-going-on-eleven, starting the second half of my fifth grade year. That was a significant grade for kids at the Linscott-Rumsford Elementary school because the teacher was a — GASP — man, a polyester-clad F. Murray Abraham lookalike who had a rep for being both a Fun Dude and an impatient hardass. (He was the same guy who’d later loan my little brother his Star Trek VHS tapes.)

It would be the last full year I would live in North Woburn. There were six of us — my parents, my little brother and I, and my father’s disabled mother and teenage sister — crammed into a tiny two bedroom apartment halfway between Route 38 and the industrial park. Personal space was at a premium in those days, but could still be found in the semi-heated “back porch” (actually an enclosed foyer-slash-laundry-room carpeted with grungy industrial pile of a goose shit green hue) or the space below the sideboard in the combo kitchen and dining room, where the Atari 2600 was hooked up to a dying portable color TV donated by my paternal grandpa.

When even those private refuges felt cramped, I had the entire North Woburn wilderness in which to stretch my legs — either in kid-broody solitude or alongside a constellation of childhood pals. There was the troubled and reckless Artie, the cheerfully clueless Scott, and my shifty cousin Jason. Sometimes we played colors and hide ‘n’ seek with neighborhood’s parallel contingent of girls our age, sometimes we’d lob fragrantly rotting crabapples at them as we howled past them on our store-brand knockoff BMX bikes.

Outside that cul-de-sac culture was my buddy Brian, a fellow Boy Scout who was the only other kid in school as obsessed with funnybooks as I was. Brian orbited our group but was never fully a part of it, especially after his family moved to a ranch home by the Burlington line a few months into the year. We still kept in touch, though, as the bonds of shared geekiness overcame geographical distance. Brian was the one who sparked my interest in Jack of Hearts, thanks to a stack of old Iron Man comics (read in his backyard toolshed turned clubhouse on the day Reagan was shot) and an unwanted issue of Marvel Two-In-One he tossed in my direction.

We were given — intentionally or though parental oversight — great licence to roam free at the very age when we were eager to test the limits of that freedom. Sneak off to the mall over in East Woburn. Sneak off to the multiplex by the highway. Sneak off to wilds Down Back to build secret hideouts from jagged scraps of construction waste. Yeah, there’d be a chance of getting grounded or a whupping or an emergency tetanus shot, but that didn’t discourage even the most tyrannically parented among us from diving in headfirst.

It helped that the our neighborhood was rough ‘n’ tumble to start. When you’re growing weed in the backyard or tearing an illegal go-kart around the block, you’re not as inclined to be uptight when a bunch of noisy tweeners spray “BALLS” in industrial adhesive on the street and set the letters on fire with a stolen Zippo.

I could probably make a strong case for the aesthetic merits of the stuff I plan to cover from here on out. It was a significant moment, for good and ill, but that’s ultimately irrelevant to what I’m trying to unpack here.

1983 was the year that I became aware of the wider world of pop culture, within the context of an emerging sense of self outside the hand-me-downs of parental-pleasing osmosis. If I was born a few years earlier, it could’ve happened in 1979 and been so much cooler. If I was born a couple of years later, it could’ve happened in 1986 and been irreversibly damaging.

As it happened, I muddled through this developmental phase at a moment where I don’t have to angst too much over a “chicken or the egg” scenario…except where Fame is involved.

When I embarked on my deep dive of Google Books’ digital archive of Billboard, I picked 1975 as my starting date. That year offered the best intersection between my childhood nostalgia and my historical interests — enough faint memories to avoid abstraction while offering a solid vantage point for observing the ascendancy of disco, the emergence of punk, and the proliferation of numerous paradigm-shifting consumer technologies.

While there were plenty of painful slogs through the cocaine-sprinkled hellscape of the 1970s music industry, I kept on trucking because I knew each hype-saturated testament to Sturgeon’s Law would bring me another step closer to the rose-tinted Promised Land.

There were times when I despaired of ever getting there. Google’s Billboard archive sufferes from multiple gaps ranging from a single week to several years on end. In some cases, that actually dovetailed nicely with the narrative thrust of the project — for example, the six-month gap from late 1979 and mid-1980, when forced optimism about disco’s future made a jump-cut to hindsight-driven postmortems for the fallen Boogie Wonderland.

Mostly, it was just frustrating, especially once I started closing in on my anticipated target zone — so much so, in fact, that I ended up skipping ahead a few years to focus on the rise of 1980s home video and VHS rental boom instead. (The need for Halloween Countdown material also played a part as well.)

As luck would have it, American Radio History — the place where I found the fascinating set of Panorama scans — recently added a near-complete run of Billboard to its industry periodical archives. Not only does it contain the issues missing from Google’s collection, but its scans are also clearer, cleaner and much easier to read.

Re-energized by this discovery, I picked up where I’d left off half a year ago.

Yesterday, I finally arrived at my destination —

— the Elysian Fields of 1983.

In the finale of the US version of The Office, the otherwise clueless Andy Bernard points out you only tend to recognize the “the good times” in hindsight after they’ve gone.

That was not the case with 1983 and me, because my eleven year old self knew exactly how great things were in his little corner of the universe at that moment — with “great,” of course, being a relative term. I won’t deny nostalgia’s softening effect on my memories, but it was still a pretty fucking amazing year even after discounting for that psychic inflation.

When I started to write this, I figured that I’d bullet-point some the high points of my 1983. Having gotten this far, though, I realized that these memories would be better served by the multi-part feature format. Each individual subject can receive its proper due, I won’t have to worry about coming up with topics for the next couple of weeks, and you get to see more of my mental scarring present for public display.

Sounds like a plan to me.

The Mighty Mike Sterling recently fielded a reader question about the Legion of Super-Heroes’ decline from a fan favorite franchise to its current state of sad irrelevance. Mike did a great job breaking down the Legion’s tragic cycle of reboots and diminishing returns, which has been on my mind since I revisited those funnybooks recently.

There is something that does tend to get overlooked in these discussions, as most tend to point the finger at the post-Zero Hour reset when it comes to figuring out where things went off the rails. It’s not untrue, but that do-over — and the rot that afflicted the franchise — was a direct consequence of the “Five Years Later” relaunch that preceded it.

I loved the “Five Years Later” run. It was an interesting new direction for the Legion at a time where “grim ‘n’ gritty” superhero fare still held a degree of novel edginess. This was especially true for the Legion, where the teen heroes of a (mostly) utopian future were recast as outlaw freedom fighters in a strife-ridden galaxy. The series kicked my childhood affection for the super-team into the realm of dedicated fandom, especially as the stories contained numerous continuity references and Easter eggs that led me to seek out the original source material.

That said, the run suffered from numerous problems that are especially apparent when read en masse during the present day. The big plot thread — “will the Legionnaires reunite and free earth from the sinister Dominators” — was laid out from the get-go, but the requirements of sustaining an ongoing series meant there long stretches of filler between the vaguely implied progress on the main front.

On top on that herky-jerky tedium, Giffen and the Bierbaums had few qualms about hacking a bloody swathe through three decades of Legion continuity. The tally of death, mutilation, and destruction would have enough to make even Geoff Johns pause. First they blew up the moon, causing billions of fatalities, and then the followed that up with destroying Earth as well. Unlike previous Legion catastrophes, there was was no plausible route for returning to the old status quo, and perhaps that was the writers’ plan all along.

If the direction of the series felt erratic within the confines of its original metaplot, it became entirely rudderless once that story concluded. Big developments would be done, then undone over the course of a couple of issues while the creators struggled to find some compelling reason for things to continue. This was even further complicated by the decision, spurred by fans who longed for the old “teenagers in outer space” days, to spin off a companion monthly featuring the teenage not-clones of the Legion’s Silver Age incarnation. It was a move intended to please everybody, but satisfied no one.

In that light, a hard reboot of the franchise was the only workable outcome. It was a chance to start fresh, while weaving the contradictory and piecemeal elements of the Legion’s early years into something a bit more cohesive, contemporary, and inclusive. It managed to sustain its momentum for a good while, too, spanning two titles that effectively amounted to a bi-weekly series. When it began to falter, however, the decision was made to grim things up again before yet another reboot. Hell, even the most recent attempt to re-establish the pre-5YL continuity went into extremely bleak territory before DC gave up on the Legion altogether.

As Mike said, the problem isn’t reboots in and off themselves. Used strategically and sparingly, they can breath new life and spur interest in ailing franchises. Yet the “easy out” the offer presents a slippery slope. Why bother with course corrections when you can crash the fucker into the ground and start over without any entanglements? Eventually, though, you’ll end up where both Hawkman and the Legion now find themselves — saddled with so much baggage that a clean start is nigh impossible.

It’s a shame, but I think the blame the post-Zero Hour Legion gets for mucking things up should be more accurately directed by the softer reboot which preceded it and served as the franchise’s real point of no return.

“On the evening of April 16, 1917, Comrade Kermit stepped onto the platform and addressed the awaiting crowd. ‘Down with global capitalism! We are defenders of the Rainbow Connection, comrades! The lovers, the dreamers, and myself know that we have finally found it! We have nothing to lose but our slightly visible strings!’ He then spastically thrashed his arms in the air as the masses cheered their approval.”

“Fozzie, known in Party circles as ‘The Bear,’ was one of Kermit’s closest confidants. A vocal proponent of expanding the revolution to the restive massess in Lidsville and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Fozzie was instrumental in beating back the coalition of counter-revolutionary armies led by Captain Kangaroo. A master propagandist and convincing orator, Fozzie’s famous dictum ‘Have you heard the one about the reactionary kulak? Wakka wakka wakka!’ incited bloody pogroms against the landed gentry and urban bourgeoisie classes. Forced into exile after Kermit’s death, Fozzie retreated to a fortified compound in Mexico City where he was pecked to death by an agent of Gonzo in 1930.”

“Miss Piggy (nee Maria Porcidonova) was a nursing student at Veterinarian’s Hospital when she became radicalized by contact with the puppetariat. A fierce advocate of revolutionary violence, she was arrested for karate-chopping a general of the Old Regime to death during broad daylight in a public square. Conflicts with Chairman Kermit over revolutionary goals led Piggy to stage her own failed insurrection. She was sentenced to prison and later executed during a wartime purge.”

“Though a familiar face in Chairman Kermit’s inner circle, Gonzo’s strange behavior and opportunist tendencies caused a great deal of mistrust among his fellow revolutionaries. These suspicions were proven true during the power struggle following Kermit’s death, when Gonzo seized control of the Party and swept aside any all perceived threats to his rule. In addition to the violent purges and pryotechnic show trials directed at so-called ‘enemies of the state,’ Gonzo was also responsible for the devastating famine caused by agricultural reforms unwisely steered by his fixation upon poultry farming.”

“Statler and Waldorf were veteran revolutionaries, and quick to criticize the missteps and failings of their peers. While tolerated — if ignored — during Kermit’s reign as Party chairman, they were among the first victims of Gonzo’s purge of the Old Guard. Both willingly attended trial, confessed to the surprising crime of conspiring with foreign powers against the puppetariat, and were summarily executed. Why — knowing what the outcome would be — did they chose to come there? Perhaps we’ll never know.”

– excerpts from Whose Hand Up Whose Ass: The Rise of the Muppet Socialist Regime by Andrew Otis Weiss

In between the bus duels and dirtbike wilding of last night’s XBL Grand Theft Auto IV gaming and bullshit session, Mike Sterling, my brother and I had an informal chat about the 2600 Era of gaming. It centered mostly around the Great Crash of 1984 (as these conversations tend to do), an event that decimated the console gaming industry while dumping a shitload of deeply discounted game cartridges within reach of youngsters who couldn’t otherwise afford to buy them.

Most of the games were utter drek, of course, but the concept of quality is fundamentally alien to the psyche of a ten year old. Novelty, affordability, and the persistance of a creature with a surplus of free time can mitigate a host of sins, and it took an exceptional level of cruddiness to penetrate those blinders.

As a result, my curiosity was piqued when Mike mentioned a 2600 game so horrible that he made the effort to return it to the store and demand a refund of the one dollar sale price. I asked him which game it was, and his answer triggered a simultaneous “Wait, that sounds so familar” response from my brother and me.

Goaded by long suppressed memories and the need to experience a game deemed too awful to play by a man who sincerely enjoyed the 2600 E.T. game, I sought out the game in question…and it is indeed a stinker of the highest magnitude.

Behold, SORCERER!

Sorcerer was one of three games released by Mythicon on the cusp of the Great Videogame Crash, and it epitomizes the in-it-for-a-quick-buck philosophy that characterized most of the efforts from that period. Atari’s hubris regarding market share and sales prospects for high profile, undercooked titles didn’t help the industry’s fortunes, but it was the flood of low-grade shovelware from fly-by-night developers like Mythicon that really killed the golden goose.

Sorcerer isn’t so much a game as it is a hastily programmed collection of elements smooshed together into something vaguely gamelike. As the titual spellcaster, the player mounts up on his trusty magic carpet and proceeds through a series of visually underwhelming screens to battle with what appears to be a French acapella group…

…and the most patriotic hellspawn ever.

Though the enemies appear in clusters of three, they actually constitute a single object when it comes to dispatching them with the sorcerer’s slow-firing, one-shot-at-a-time energy bolt. They also lack anything resembling a pattern, preferring instead to simply jerk about in the throes of a virtual panic attack.

Progress far enough, and the game will treat you to a “dodge the lightning bolt” level, which is as bland and pointless as everything else in the game.

After spending an hour attempting to come to grips with Sorcerer‘s gameplay, I began to wonder if it would be better to approach the title not as an ineptly made shoot ’em up, but rather as a pixelated treatise on existentialism — progress and accomplishment are meaningless concepts, perseverance will inevitably be rewarded with an ignominious death, and the only logical course of action is to hit the kill switch and be done with it all forever.

Today we’re going to turn the spotlight on one of the lesser known series of men’s adventure novels published during the Me Decade…

A total of sixteen Electric Warrior novels starring the “glitter assassin” Bolan were released between 1971 and the series’ abrupt conclusion in September 1977. Here are some choice excerpts from the various books:

Once there was a man of peace named ‘Toby Tyler’ who lived a quiet life of contentment with a girl named Desdemona. When she died on that terrible and bloody night three years past, so did Tyler…only to be reborn as glittering avenger with the soul of a prehistoric predator. – from Volume 1, An Electric Warrior Is Born

***

A quick blast from Bolan’s 12 gauge “Slider” blew open the contol room door. The Thin White Duke was long gone, leaving only a tape recorded message in his wake:
“Sorry, I couldn’t be there to meet you in person, old chum, but other matters beckoned. I’m sure you’ve already figured out that the Jean Genie and her Diamond Dogs were merely catspaws in a grander scheme. I’d ask you to join me, but I already know what the answer will be. A shame, really. Look at yourself, you’ve think you’ve got it made, but I think you will soon find the taste is not so sweet. Adapt and survive is the only wise policy, my anachronistic friend. Toodles!” – from Volume 4, Here Comes the Night of Death

***

Emerson slammed his fists down on the Destructo-Moog’s keyboard. Lethal waves of sound blasted from the ultraphonic sound system. Bolan staggered from the sonic onslaught but did not collapse.

“Give it up, Bolan! Embrace the future…and your death!” Bolan responded to the virtuoso’s taunts with a flick of his feather boa. The weighted cord inside coiled around Emerson’s neck, constricting his windpipe. Emerson was as good as dead, but Bolan wasn’t taking any chances. A quick tug, the snap of a broken neck, and the deed was done.

“Your mistake, Keith, was trying to fool a child of the revolution.” – from Volume 7, King of the Rumbling Prog

***

“I got the feeling a hard rain is going to fall, pal. We’d better stick together.” Ferry smirked as he wiped the late Virginia Plain’s blood off his hands with a rag. Bolan wasn’t sure what to make of man. His skills were unquestionable and his assistance on this mission was invaluable, but something about the Man from R.O.X.Y. rubbed him the long way. Eno may have vouched for him, but Ferry dressed too slick and acted too posh for Bolan’s comfort. And then there was the man’s inexplicably grating accent… – from Volume 13, Ladytron Killer

***

Bolan didn’t know which was worse — the pain of his shattered body or the fact that he had fallen into such an obvious trap.

“Don’t expect the Captain or his band of foulmouthed louts to help you. They’re too busy hanging out with the Jesus of Cool.” The Duke reached through the twisted remains of the passenger side window and grabbed a fistful of Bolan’s majestic curls. “That’s the problem with being a hero, Marc. It rarely lasts for more than just one day.”

The Duke’s skeletal henchman produced a pistol. “What shall we do with this poor, injured passenger, boss?”

The Duke paused for the briefest of moments. “You know the drill, Wild Child. Wham bam thank you ma’am.” – from Volume 16, Rosegarden Funeral for a Metal Guru

One of the more baffling aspects of fan behavior is the tendency to suspend qualitative judgement when it comes to fan’s objects of affection. Past experience, empirical evidence, and ominous portents get shoved to the margins when certain Pavlovian buttons are pushed. There will be plenty of post-situ moaning and whining about getting burned, but there is little hesitation about leaping into the fire in the first place.

So it was with Teen Andrew and TransBot. As I mentioned a few days ago, I used to be a pretty fervent fan of anime, especially the giant/real robo stuff. The popularity of the Transformers and Robotech franchises meant the toy and hobby stores of the mid-1980’s were well-stocked with all manner of shady (and shoddy) bootleg mecha-merchandise intended to siphon off a sweet slice of the market share.

The phenomenon wasn’t limited to just toys and models. Videogames also cashed in on the trend, though this was wasn’t so much cynical marketing as the simple realities of the gaming industry at the time. American game developers were either still struggling from the industry-wide crash of a few years prior or had moved into the realm of computer gaming. Arcade and console fare was dominated by Japanese imports reflecting Japanese popcult trends. That robo-jockey stuff was big in America at the time didn’t hurt, either.

That’s not to say that cynical manipulation didn’t factor into the equation, as the name “TransBot” suggests a deliberate attempt to piggy-back on the name recognition of a couple of hot properties:

In practice, the formula comes closer to this:

While the official screenshots and gameplay footage suggested epic battles against faux-Zentraedi battle pods…

…the game is actually a very dumbed-down rip-off of Konami’s Gradius. The player must blast through waves of uninspired enemies — spiked balls, tumbling cube ships, and hamburgesian flying saucers — across a horizontally-scrolling generically “sci-fi” landscape. Shooting the transport trucks that occasionally roll across the bottom of the screen gives the player access to power ups, which improve weapon strength or transform the player’s ship into an unmissable target a rather goofy-looking robot.

In order to compensate for the utter shallowness of the gameplay, the developers decided to spice things up a little by tossing in the much loved gimmick of arbitrary and artificial difficulty. Unlike Gradius (or even Action Fighter), where sequenced power ups add a strategic element to play, TransBot uses a roulette-based system of determining upgrades. Nabbing a power up sphere causes an icon to rapidly cycle through an alphabetical sequence of potential rewards, leaving it up to the player’s reflexes and blind chance to determine the end result.

If this wasn’t irritating in itself, the fact that the power ups have only a limited number of uses and the boss level can only be reached by use of a specific upgrade in a specific location makes the game a nigh-unbearable exercise in frustration.

That didn’t stop me from wasting a few score hours of my life playing and attempting to beat the game.

Why? Because it had giant robots in it!

Duh.