Super One Player Pong -PC用

1. I slaved away on my opus, spending every waking hour of the next few weeks tweaking and tuning and programming and building and living and loving and dancing and dying, until finally I had completed it: Super One Player Pong! It was marvelous; from its simple design, to its elegant presentation, the arcade cabinet was like everything I had wanted to play, but unlike everything I loved before it, I could actually enjoy it.

2. Had I underestimated the time I had spent working on the game? Had it really been fifteen years that I had been down in the basement, pounding on an old keyboard, trying to make magic out of a few RAMs and a floppy disk cassette? That would certainly explain my long beard and malnutrition, as well as the fact that my new puppy, Sparky, had died the previous week, seemingly of old age.

3. I would reach up and put my quarter on the monitor, letting the other arcade attendees know my intention to play the winner, and stand next to the machine, eagerly awaiting my turn.

4. But no, that couldn’t be the case! The only logical solution had to be that the arcade that I had played in, nay, grown up in, was nothing more than a ghostly vessel, a spiritual ship for spirits passing through on their way to the afterworld, a lone ghost ship on the river styx.

5. But alas, when I turned the corner on Sylvan Street, and walked the fifteen steps to the location of the arcade, there was nothing but a fence surrounding a crater in the ground, a crater where the old arcade used to stand.

6. When the game ended, however, both players would always walk away from the machine, hand in hand, leaving me to stare longingly at the attract screen, or even worse, put my quarter in and awkwardly play with myself.

7. I rushed down to the local arcade, eager to show off my creation, to have it join the other three dozen machines that had taunted me with their required social normality.

8. He gave me a funny look at first, almost as though he was sizing me up, trying to determine if my question was made in jest, and then said, “That old arcade’s been dead for going on fifteen years now.

9. Or maybe it was because this was a haunted arcade, and all of the other people were in fact ghosts, and thus couldn’t communicate with the living.

10. And so my dream was born; I was going to create an arcade game that could be played alone.

11. There was an old man smoking a pipe nearby the crater, I asked him if he knew what had happened to the arcade.