by Mike Peck
by Mike Peck
I'm what most would consider a grown man. I have a job and a driver's license. I pay taxes. I can legally buy beer in any state and can vote in New York. Yet twice a day I do my utmost to beat the living shit out of Scott, a co-worker of mine, at Super Street Fighter 2.
It's no exaggeration to say we're addicted to the damned game. When we both started with my current company about a year and a half ago, we discovered a Super Nintendo machine that my boss had bought to use in a videogame study. Sitting on the shelf by it was a copy of Street Fighter 2. We threw it in the machine one day when we were bored and thus began our downfall. When Street Fighter 2 Turbo came out, we bought it. Then, the current version came out and we bought that too.
Since then, our routine has rarely varied. We eat our lunches quickly so we can get down to
business. We pepper the afternoon with occasional barbs -- God help whichever one of us is the
hapless lunchtime loser and has to withstand the gloating winner's mock concern. "Listen, I feel just terrible about what happened. Is
there anything I can do? Can I buy you a beer?" or "Listen, you're getting better. I'm seeing
glimmers of promise in you. Really." After work, we're in the office for atleast an hour,
whaling on one another.
Why? It's fun, plain and simple.
Most videogame fans -- the industry term for us is "gamers," but I hate that -- have their own preferred genres, be it fighting, driving or role-playing games. Me, I prefer fighting. There are few things more fun than kicking the hell out of someone, humiliating him or her with special moves and following it up with poor sportsmanship and mockery.
Scott and I exhibited frightening tendencies from the word go. In the early Street Fighter, we quickly learned which characters were decent and which were weasels. Accordingly, we also quickly realized that allowing ourselves to pick the characters wouldn't work, so we bought dice to roll so we could fairly determine whom to play. We also made up score sheets to keep running accounts of who won with which character. The latest version takes care of that, allowing the cartridge to randomly pick characters for us so we can devote more energy to ridiculing each other.
