The Nerd

What can I say about the Nerd? The Fucking Nerd? The first video that I remember was his review of The Wizard and Super Mario Bros. 3, both artifacts from a bygone era that I have no sentimental affection for. By the end of the video, when Super Mecha Death Christ (2000 B.C. Version 4.0 Beta, bitch) appeared on screen, I was shocked and humbled. I'm sure that at some point I'd seen more impressive special effects on YouTube, but the sheer imaginative integrity of Super Mecha Death Christ won me over and I became a fan. Not to mention the raw entertainment value of seeing him shoot lasers and rockets at the Devil himself with the Nerd dressed up in an array of video game accessories from previous episodes.

He's been responsible for weirder shit that I rarely see anyone talk about. Have you ever seen his lore video explaining the entire history of Super Mecha Death Christ that extends his timeline all the way from his creation to the filming of the Super Mario Bros. 3 episode? It's one of his animation experiments that's long been expunged from his website, you can only find them from reuploads, much like his video for pornographic Atari games. Another bizarre experiment of his that I remember was his Wizard of Oz animation, the one where Dorothy goes to Hell by following the red brick road. I can't imagine he's proud of it. The animation was terrible, the voice acting abysmal, but some of his provocative character designs were memorable enough that I still think about how stupid they were over a decade later. It's rare to see a character design as bold as a blue haired munchkin from the Wizard of Oz always looking like they're about to shoot heroin with a t-shirt that says "Eat Pussy". But, the most important part, was that all of his videos and animations were just shitty enough that I could see myself making them with my friends.

When I was in high school, another one of his videos that my friend showed me was his video on the game series Swordquest for Atari 2600, the one that had a nationwide competition with various puzzles that had hundreds of gamers competing for a chance to win real treasures. There was a golden sword with a silver blade, a goblet, a crown, a philosopher's stone made of white jade. We dreamed of what they looked like in person. All we could ever see of them were old photographs with stale 1970's air coloring them the same hue of that golden golbet fusing with the brown from the wooden display case. One of the silliest things that I can admit to was that at the end of the video, when I discovered that many of the treasures had never been recovered after the 1983 Video Game Crash caused the rest of the contest and final game to be cancelled early, my friend and I, in perfect seriousness, made plans to arm ourselves with assault rifles and body armor to drive to California to break into the home of Jack Tramiel just because we thought he might've had the sword and other remaining treasures. I even started trying to complete the last game, Airworld, all by myself in my pirated copy of GameMaker 8. Yet another project I'd never finish.

I think part of what attracted me so much to his work was that even as late as high school I was always a Nintendo kid. When I was really small and first introduced to video games by my mother, we had a Super Nintendo with just one game, Killer Instinct. My memory is fuzzy but according to my mother at some point I spilled either milk or orange juice all over the Super Nintendo so it stopped working and I didn't have any video games for a while. Later, my uncle ushered me into our family's computer room and showed me a piece of software that'd change my life and tastes for years to come, Snes9x, the first emulator I had ever seen. I'd spend countless weekends there exploring the SNES library, but due to lapses in taste, a lot of it was spent on Mortal Kombat (with an engine clearly inferior to Street Fighter 2), WWE games, a top down Jurassic Park game, various Alien games, Rock 'n' Roll Racing, god knows what else. I can assure you it wasn't with Earthbound or Final Fantasy 3. So, by the time I came around to the Nerd, not only were retro games already greased up into my eyelids, but shitty fuckin' games and all their attendant bullfuck and ass suckage, courtesy of Wayne's World for SNES.

Later in my life I'd introduce the Nerd to one of my roommates, and for the longest time we'd have entire seasons of his show playing in 3 or 5 hour videos on our living room TV, regardless of whether or not we were even in the living room. We'd simply let his presence permeate the atmosphere of our first rent house. The older his videos get and the more I rewatch them, the more I think "this is something special" every time I introduce someone new to his antics and filmography. Unfortunately, I've never been as prolific as the Nerd at any point in my life, and I characterize my own life and creative process as, at best, a series of failed romances, unfinished projects, impulsive creativity, and wasted effort. But, I think that's why I continue to watch his videos. His reviews, while not quite at the level of Mark Fisher's critical essays, and his animations, far from Miyazaki, have and will continue to play an important role in my own creative work and how I evaluate its meaning in my own life. I've only managed to cover a fraction of his output, and there's a lot more that I could sit down to talk about if I took the time to go through all of his videos again and pick out which ones I like the most and which mean the most to me, but I have some shit flinging cowabunga buffalo fuck of my own to attend to, and I leave it to you to fill in your own gaps.

1,042 words.

Rest in piece to his cat Boo, featured most notably in the Atari Jaguar episode.