I think what’s so attractive about old nes games is, it’s just popped out to me, how dark they all feel — just a little surreal and a little mysterious. Blaster Master and Simon’s Quest and Zelda and Metroid — there’s so much which can’t be seen — you don’t know what anything is, and have to fill it in for yourself. All of the creatures in Blaster Master are a flat gray. The colors in Zelda are completely two-dimentional blobs; it has indistinct sound effects and rocks which look like turtles. Metroid is all black and empty, as is Blaster Master — and, actually, lots of Zelda and Simon’s Quest, really. They feel. . .unexplored. There could be anything in any niche. It’s like a dream. . .

With today’s games, you see everything and you know where and what everything is. The jellyfish in Blaster Master Look like the Metroids. Goonies II — well, that’s a strange one. It sort of overproves the point.

Life Force and Gradius. . .

The games which were hardest to play, I think, were the darkest ones — Gradius and Metroid and Castlevania 1; all great, but all kind of depressing. The games of today are… Microsoft/Apple spawn. They don’t feel real because they’re made to feel too real. Old NES games are like a dark fantasy — they feel so unreal that the mind makes them more real and alive than anything today could strive to be. And they’re mostly smaller than this text. . .