Syracuse 3

The paper’s Editor in Chief was a tow headed man named Sten. He had the face of an underfed cherub and Ed Asner’s hairline. He was only a few years older than I was, and was newly married and in charge of the arts section of the Post-Standard. I remember him being giddy to have found a person to share his life with. Sten told me upfront, before we really knew each other, that the newlyweds had no plans for kids. They were, to quote Sten, too “footloose for that type of nonsense.”

But what ultimately bonded Sten and me together was a cursory conversation about video games. I was a serious writer; had the pierced ear and the patchy goatee to prove this to myself when I looked in the mirror in the mornings. Regardless, I still gamed, in secret, between classes. Wolfenstein was an obsession of mine. I played a haphazard port of it on my Apple (it was optimized for the PC), on a poststamp-sized screen. Despite this, it was a first-person shooter, a completely new kind of video game experience that dropped the player (me) into the boots of commando who sped along three-dimensional corridors in search of cartoonish Nazis and, in the climax of the game, Hitler himself, outfitted in a mech suit.

The experience was dizzyingly hypnotic. I fell into a trance when I played it. And my objective was to share this beatific experience with Sten.

And so I did.