I don’t know why this is, but this month has turned into a regular Space Invaders, uh, invasion. As I noted in an earlier blog post, I’ve been playing Space Invaders Extreme a bit the last few weeks (well, whenever I get a chance to actually play games, that is). It’s a really, really fun DS game made by Taito in honor of the original game’s 30th anniversary, featuring the same basic gameplay with a bunch of new power-ups, cute references to other games, and fun soundtrack. Space Invaders Extreme is genuinely fun and I’m happy to see that a Space Invaders Extreme 2 is on its way in a month:

Anyway, riding my wave of interest in that, I went out and ordered this fun, pretty shirt from Glennz:

… which I wear proudly. Seriously, weirdest tank design ever.

And, just yesterday, I noticed a new Space Invaders-themed shirt became available at Threadless:

It’s just a hair too cutesy for my tastes, but I might still get it. And, atop that, just yesterday, I received in the mail an early birthday present from my longtime internet pal Rachel, who spontaneously sent me this fantastic Space Invaders hat (which she bought off of etsy, I believe):

I’m awash in Space Invaders! Space Invaders everywhere! Look at me, I’m covering myself in a 30 year old videogame!

…

Okay, I’m not an idiot, I can see what’s going on here. Just last week, I was rereading a few chapters out of JC Herz’s Joystick Nation.

It’s a generally good history of games, though it seems to be written for those that remember old classic games and don’t fully understand what’s happened since. What struck me on this read which had never been salient before was her age and how similar her gaming experiences were to mine — and how this has shaped her views of what “counts” as legitimate retro gaming fandom versus simplistic yuppie toy nostalgia. On page 71, she makes her position fairly clear:

Actually, there is considerable debate among videogame nostalgics as to what constitutes “classic.” Like most forms of popular culture, it boils down to “what was popular when I was a kid.” But underneath the thick, soggy layers of nostalgia, there is the legitimate argument that many of these game consoles and arcade machines were the first of their kind. One can justifiably argue that the Atari 2600 (1977) is a classic in the way the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985) can never be, because Atari’s machine was the first cartridge console to gain mass acceptance. Atari, Intellivision, and Colecovision are all from a period when videogames were breaking into the mainstream and creating a culture of their own, during the first rise and before the first fall of the videogame industry. Comparing a Pong console to a Sega Master System is like comparing a ’57 Chevy to a ’79 Mustang. One is from the period that created car culture. The other is simply a machine whose sentimental value will rise as its original owners wax nostalgic for their youth, the same way that Nintendo and Sega’s 8-bit consoles by twenty-first-century yuppies who have abandoned, rediscovered, and recycled their old toys into retro reference points.

Oh, snap. Now, I don’t agree with Herz’s assertion that there is any way to declare some period as being legitimately worth of nostalgia — the NES/Famicom and Sega Genesis/Megadrive are certainly, unequivocally important systems in the history of this medium and it’s just Herz’s provocative silliness to relegate them to the “’79 Mustang” heap. After the post-E.T. industry implosion, there’s no way one can argue that Nintendo didn’t just revive videogame culture, but reshape it around new franchises, new forms of gameplay, and a new prevalence that the Atari 2600 never fully had.

That said, Herz’s point about taking elements of one’s past and reshaping them into nostalgic touchstones is something that hits pretty close to home. I am of the generation that used to play Space Invaders at the laudromat, used to play Tempest at the Bowling Green State University union’s game room, used to spend quarter upon quarter at the Tron machine at the Toledo, Ohio Southwyck mall’s Red Baron. Though, ten years after Herz’s book, “gamer nostalgia” is now most closely associated with the home console, there’s an aging group of us who keep coming back to the iconography and gameplay from these early, first examples of global gaming culture.

In a final bit of interesting synchronocity, I came across an interesting blog post about neuroscience and nostalgia that was making the rounds yesterday. Here’s an interesting chunk:

One study has hinted that in some cases the positive feelings of nostalgia are actually just the positive sensation at having recalled an old memory correctly, rather than any emotional impact the original memory may have had. In my case, ELO’s music was instantly recognizable as sounding like the 80’s, while not being specifically tied to a particular event in my life. But while this nostalgia was a new creation, there are examples of more specific, neutral, memories becoming nostalgic with time.

I heard a lot of Duran Duran on the radio growing up. But I didn’t like them. I never bought their albums and if I thought of them at all, I thought they were just more disposable pop garbage. And yet, when I’m lazing back and indulging in VH1’s “I love the 80’s” marathon, I feel all reflective and pleasantly nostalgic when I hear “Hungry like the Wolf”.

So, maybe a lot of this comes down to me just feeling happy that I still recognize stuff from my youth? Perhaps my sense of nostalgia over old, classic arcade games is just a way of publicly flagging to everyone “hey, everyone, I remember something from a long time ago!”

Anyway, it’s been an interesting week in which my gaming, clothing, reading, and blogging habits have all intersected. Funny how that happens sometimes.