A number of Nintendo’s main franchises have roots in horror films. We get Mario via Donkey Kong, which is of course via King Kong. And we get Metroid via Alien: the boss Ridley is a nod to Ridley Scott; Mother Brain is analogous to Mother, the Nostromo’s onboard computer; the parallels between Samus and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are not negligible.
In a series of fifteen sparse poems that flit across the page like half-remembered meditations, Vince’s speaker visits the psychic remnants of their life, the intersections and edges of their experience within a landscape that has turned them into “a / Body rounded / to Zero.”
Phantasy Star 0 played like I imagined a heroin overdose would feel: slow, stultifying, mind-numbing, a product of poor decisions.
I waxed a valenced enemy to ones like these, mawkish and mutant, I shot them
bodiless, a bunch of vapors in the cool. So it continued: new raptors, ghost bricks,
a face on four stems.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
