The protagonist of Lucky Wander Boy, long obsessed with the video games of his childhood, is compiling an encyclopedic directory called the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments referencing every game ever played. Among these are many real games such as PacMan, Donkey Kong, and Microsurgeon (below). Nestled among them, however, is a fictional game called Lucky Wander Boy:
GAME: LUCKY WANDER BOY
Format: Coin-Op Arcade Machine
Manufacturer: Uzumaki Corporation; licensed to Midway
Year: 1983
CPU: (3 x) Z80X 9.232323 MHz
M6802 895.000KHz (sound)
Z80 5.000000 MHz (sound)
M6502 1.5 Mhz (vector)
Sound: (2 x) AY-8910 2.00000 MHz
(2) TMS5520 640.000 MHz
Screen resolution: 800 x 600 pixels
Description of the console: Both sides of the cabinet featured an identical three-foot-high portrait of a young man, assumed by most to be the title character, against a stark black background. The more-or-less traditional anime cartoon stylistics of the boy’s facial features stood in contradiction to the expression they formed, or refused to form. The Lucky Wander Boy’s face conveyed absolutely no emotion at all. He stared from both sides of the cabinet like a blank, blond, Janus, although after you played the game for a few hundred hours, the face underwent a subtle transformation, or you did, and you began to see not blankness, but searching.
On the game’s marquee, from left to right, were a gargoyle, an apple, and a screwdriver. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the first two never appear in Lucky Wander Boy, and the last only appears in Stage II of the game, along with sundry other items, after the player has progressed beyond the deceptive ordinariness of the first three screens.
Over at Coinop.org, DB Weiss’ fantasy has infiltrated our reality, as the details of Lucky Wander Boy are listed amongst those of hundreds of other games which have been painstakingly chronicled, tagged, and categorized by year.
From the entry:
Game Details:
Designed by a female Japanese game designer (virtually unheard of at that time) named Araki Itachi. Game was a commercial failure, largely because it was rush-shipped. Uzumaki had distribution agreements with Namco in Japan, and Midway in the US. Midway actually built and released approximately 100 of the games to the US market, hoping that another “wacky” Japanese game would be the next Pac-Man.
The game appeared to have a major flaw on the second level, where it looked like it was stuck in an infinite loop. You were able to wander about with a few objects over a mostly beige background, that cycled from dark to light over 30 minute cycles, with no real way to “die.” Needless to say, this wasn’t popular with operators, and most games were converted fairly quickly.
Part of the obsession of the novel’s protagonist is the belief (rooted in adolescent rumor) that there is a third level to the game. I see this as an 8-bit metaphor for the desert of potential in which those of our generation with education and boundless creativity often wander in for the bulk of their lives – paralysed by the nearly infinite opportunities available to them, but unable to progress to the next stage.
The book is a fantastic read, however, it’s doomed to only satisfy a tiny subset of the American population. Those who grew up haunted by the flashes and bleeps of Colecovision, Intellivision, and Atari – who also have a taste (or tolerance) for sharply deadpan postmodern literature.
Other fictional games from Lucky Wander Boy: Copywriter (feature coming soon), Eviscerator (Mortal Kombat knock-off)
