I really love the mental image of some guy rushing the stage at GDC to get unreleased game content, if only because I think it proves a very salient point: Nerds want what they want real bad. To unweave a story from my Gossamer Skein of Personal Thoughts: When I read that Commodore 64 games were coming to European Virtual Consoles, my first, immediate thought was, “Well, shit, now I have to hack my Wii.” I’m probably not going to end up actually hacking anything — I don’t want to fuck up my chances of playing Smash Brawl online, and I really don’t like the thought of installing a barely-legal bootloader on a machine whose latest firmware update would detect changes and brick my system¹ — but the actual footwork involved with changing my system’s region code or spoofing my IP to pretend that I’m Dutch or whatever is at the bottom of potential concerns regarding unlocking any of my game consoles. Sitting up at 3 AM with a marblemouthed FAQ and a Torx wrench?² Sure, bring it on, so long as I can play Save New York or Bruce Lee afterwards.

The strength of a nerd’s love is intense, and I don’t just mean in the way that makes prom season uncomfortable. Consider the case of the Mother 3 community: Over the years, these guys have petitioned for even the barest scraps of new content — Mother 1 on GBC, continued development on Earthbound 64, or, more recently, an English-language localization and release of Mother 3. And when none of that helped — and only after none of that helped; when it became clear that it could not help — did they decide to just localize the fucking thing themselves. And all along the way, they’ve taken care to keep the games spoiler-free, going so far as to try and get the Mother 3 localization finished before Smash Brawl came out so that people wouldn’t accidentally spoil the laboriously-translated, hand-localized game by the one Nintendo actually ended up releasing. Like — this is more of a shit than I gave about my entire high school and college career, and these people are doing this in their spare times? If I took up squash, would I secretly discover that there are squash players dedicated to hacking their fucking rackets?³

The real beauty of this, too, is that the experiences that gamers go to these lengths to have are all fleeting and ephemeral. I spent over a hundred dollars and hours and hours of my time last year finding a copy of Vib Ribbon and a way to play it, sort of as a self-back-pat for securing a decent job and a respectable wage — claiming the spoils I’d earned by fulfilling a college-age desire, or something? — but I don’t play it any more than I do any other rhythm game; hell, I’ve played Audiosurf a bunch more, thanks to the robust leaderboard functionality that comes packaged in with it, and it does the procedurally-generated rhythm-game trackbuilding better, arguably, than Vib Ribbon ever could. (It also cost me — nnnrrghhhh!!! — $115 less to play.) And besides all that, right after I managed to get my J-region PSX set up and danced around some vector-drawn loop-the-loops to Silent Shout, triumphantly, fistpumping and wooting softly in the night: Sony announced they were planning to release the game as a PSN download.

But I don’t regret that purchase, because I own a tiny piece of culture, or history, or what have you — I was able to obtain an artifact from this medium that I inexplicably love, and interacting with it is satisfying and pleasureable. And this is — this has to be — what drives people to softmod their Xbox360s weeks after release, or to shell out half a million dollars for an unreleased Atari game, or to write a comprehensive sprite and level editor for a 15 year-old game. If I’d owned a PS3 when I heard about the Vib Ribbon DLC, I would have peed all over myself with glee — all that work I was planning to do, abstracted away! So this is why I’m mad at Nintendo for not just opening up their Virtual Console across all regions and slapping some disclaimers on it — if I have to sign a 14-page agreement to not sue them when I download some untranslated game from the Japanese VC store, so be it; I don’t care how they cover their ass if they can make that content available to the people who want it. And that’s really why I’m so enamored of the kid who bumrushed the stage at GDC: He saw something he wanted, a combination of two things he loved, somehow greater than both its constituent parts⁴, and he knew — from experience! — that there was only one way to be sure to get it: To take it by force.

¹ Ironically, the only thing that’s kept me from buying a PSP and immediately hacking the shit out of it has been Sony’s recent spate of exciting-sounding PSP releases and decent downloadable content — so long as it remained a console I would only buy to play SNES roms on, I was exciting about buying it, but as soon as I realized I would probably want to keep it around for its legitimate content, the dollar signs started adding up in my brain and I decided not to pay up for one, and at this point I probably won’t until the system retails for under $100 and I have to start scouring eBay for the decent legit games. The lesson here: Keep your releases more exciting than the hacker community’s developments.

² Or, in the case of the Xbox (which I finally got around to last summer), a mile of CAT5, a copy of MechAssault, and a USB< ->Xbox Memory Card dongle.

³ Google says nothing, but feel free to prove me wrong on this one.

⁴ Like, I love the shit out of Rock Band, but if you don’t think there was something even a little transcendent about the closing credits to Portal, then maybe you don’t really know how to love something.