Adam Giorgi
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Player One, Press Skol

When I was young, I had a football ritual. Each week, usually on Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings, I would play a video game preview of the forthcoming Minnesota Vikings game, Nintendo or PlayStation controller in hand. Like many rituals, this one was motivated in part by superstition; my hopes supposing, that if I played well with these virtual Vikings, the real world counterparts might soon follow suit and do the same.

Vikings fans know all too well the anxiety and heartbreak that such rituals are constructed to stave off, however feebly.

I grew up in a home full of these kinds of rituals and traditions. My dad has been a Vikings season ticket holder for 36 years — six years longer than he’s been father to me. We’ve been going to games together for as long as I can remember. We’ve been there for the highs and the lows. We’ve watched the Vikings play across a few states and a couple continents. Vikings Training Camp was an end-of-summer tradition, beating out even the State Fair for the regularity and consistency with which we honored it.

In less than a week, I’ll be there in the stadium again, as the Vikings take the field once more. Before that, I will resume my weekly ritual, striving to pilot the Vikings to victory in video game form — and preemptively manage my game day stress.

This season, however, I want to do something new. I want to share that ritual with you: my friends, family, and fellow Vikings fans around Minnesota and beyond.

For the uninitiated, we live in an age where watching other people play video games is popular entertainment. Like, really, seriously popular. It’s a concept that some might find bizarre, but technology has only accelerated for younger generations an experience that had already taken shape in the years of my youth, and which my friends and I found so intuitive and instinctual even then. Before I owned any video game consoles of my own, I would rush to my friends’ homes, eager to watch them play Sonic the Hedgehog or Starfox 64, reveling in the moment, even if I never got a turn at the controller.

That’s the backdrop upon which I’ll begin broadcasting my weekly ritual, in an online show that I’m calling “Press Skol” — the title being a play on the “press start” directive that greets players at the beginning of so many games, old and new.

Starting this week, you can watch me play a video game preview of each Vikings game, through every game of the regular season, and however far beyond that the football Gods decide to carry us. Sports video games have proven to be a pretty decent crystal ball, it turns out.

I’ll broadcast the experience live on Twitch, and will upload videos to YouTube for later, on-demand viewing. I hope to be joined each week by other players who will play at my side, a rotating cast of friends and fans who have interesting experiences and perspectives of there own to share.

So here’s the important stuff: If you want to join us on the ride, you can bookmark twitch.tv/giorgiporgie for the live show, and bit.ly/PressSkolMN for the YouTube recordings. And if you want to join me on the show, get at me on Twitter or comment on this post. Finally, if you’re still struggling to wrap your mind around what this is all about (or can’t fathom that this is really a thing), I recorded a test episode you can check out on Twitch . Keep in mind, this was done for test purposes and is a bit rough around the edges (though the predicted end result wasn’t too far off from the real thing).

Wherever this goes over the next few months, I hope it will be fun and entertaining. I hope you’ll watch. I hope you’ll share it with friends and fellow fans too.

And above all, I really hope it’s the Vikings’ year this year.

Skol Vikes. See you out there.

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