High Scores: SMB Underground

Underground, of course, is a synonym for cool—out of the mainstream, not quite suitable for polite society. The worlds of video games are often underground, quite literally: Mario’s sewers and Link’s dungeons and Samus’s extraterrestrial underworlds. Playing video games in the real world may require a descent—into Mom’s basement, for instance.

A Coming of Age Game: Alyse Knorr on GoldenEye 007

GoldenEye, for a generation of millennial gamers, came during the middle school/high school/college years. It’s more violent and gory, obviously, than the cute cartoony SMB3. And yet it also came out just before Columbine and just before 9/11—the sort of last moment of our collective innocence.

High Scores: Kraid’s Lair

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.

High Scores: Song of Storms

It’s a song of not knowing what to do with what you’ve just encountered. No matter how obviously meaningful the thing in front of you appears, there is no way you can learn its meaning. Not yet. It’s a tease, a feeling Zelda fans at least tolerate and likely love.

High Scores: So Many Men

Ostensibly, the song is heterosexual: a female singer lusts for the opposite sex, conjuring a world of endlessly disposable dudes. But “So Many Men” in any version is so very gay, the single gayest song I’ve heard on a videogame soundtrack, which might mean I’m not playing the right games. Nevertheless, even in DDR’s 90-second sample of Me & My’s cover of Brown’s original record—whose gayness was veiled, however thinly—the song’s call to my community comes through loud and queer.