It’s a Secret to Everybody
This is a quick post explaining why the hell I’m doing here. If you don’t care about me and just want to jump into the actual retrogaming goodness, move on to the next post.
When you’re a kid, you take most things at face value. You have to. You don’t know better. You don’t wonder why a given video game is the way it is, for example, because you’ve never encountered video games before or maybe even any form of culture before. A given thing doesn’t seem weird to you because you don’t know enough about the world to know what’s weird. That was my experience, anyway, growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, in a golden age of video games.
As I got older, however, I started thinking more about the decisions that create culture — and specifically the ones that ended up making the video games that we played back when. I found I really liked discovering why a thing ended up the way it did — what other cultural property was being referenced, what breakdown between two languages made it hard to spot, what story made an otherwise nonsensical thing take on meaning.
From 2003 to 2021, I had a blog, Back of the Cereal Box, where I wrote about these things but also everything else, and while I got some cred for putting two and two together, I always felt that video game archeology would be better off on its own, where I could boil the origin stories for this or that into easy-to-read posts that also pointed to, say, more posts pertaining to a certain game series or a certain type of cross-cultural disconnection instead of, say, the ramblings of a twentysomething gay nerd trying to figure out life and living. The overlap for both types of post was basically a few friends from college and whomever I was dating at the time.
Anyway, this site is that — another blog, basically, but also an easy way to sort all this information out and make it accessible for anyone who is interested.
If you’re reading Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games and you’re into what I’m doing here, there’s a chance you might have seen a… thing I did in 2009: a massive, honestly too-long post on Back of the Cereal Box titled “It’s a Secret to Everybody,” about the origin of video game character names. The basic idea was good. The execution sucked. It got a million clicks anyway, thanks to pick up from a bunch of the gaming websites at the time. I still think the text “It’s a Secret to Everybody” is an amazingly awkward chunk of syntax that evokes the 8-bit era perfectly. Today, it manages to mean a lot despite the fact that I’m not sure an English-speaking person ever uttered those words in that order before they were doing it as a nod to Legend of Zelda.
Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games is essentially the better-thought-out version of that. Appropriately enough, around the time I started this project, Blogger sent me an email telling me it had deleted that original post, for no reason specified. Whatever. The content still does exist, split into chunks after the fact, but the best parts of it are going to end up here, polished and expanded upon.
So if you’re only experience with me was the “It’s a Secret to Everybody” post and your reaction is “This fucking guy is doing this again?” I would understand, but I’d also say that I’m approaching the subject matter carefully and respectfully. I’d like to make this a place where people can learn more about the games they love and, ideally, something they can use as a means to answer their own longstanding questions about why a certain video game thing is the way it is. Should you have a correction, clarification or any otherwise relevant info about anything I write about here, hit me up and I’ll update the post.
I’m down to write about anything that could be considered classic gaming, but my personal areas of interest are Nintendo, Capcom, and Square — and specifically in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. I know *a lot* about Super Mario Bros. 2, so expect to see a lot about Super Mario Bros. 2. But as I keep making posts, I’m hoping to veer away from Nintendo and into a broader look at old video games.
