The video game aisle.
You saw shelves upon shelves of games upon games, from busted old cartridges to brand new games still in their plastic wrappers. Peering through dusty glass cases you could make out the vague shapes of old consoles and large cardboard boxes. Hanging on racks were after-market accessories and spare controllers. You could even see a few stand-up arcade machines. But something about all of these familiar things seemed off.
For one, either the labels for the games were blank or they were so garbled and washed out that you couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. The dust that settled on the inside glass of the display cases was so thick that all you could perceive were misshapen silhouettes of consoles that might not even be real. The arcade machines were covered in splotches of washed out colors instead of graphics, and their screens were virtually little more than static. Everything about it seemed washed out and garbled, like a painting run through a washing machine. The air was jelly thick with a liminal feeling of placeless-ness, a land without a past or future, only an infinite unchanging present.
You grab a random cartridge off the shelf, in some hope beyond hope that you could recognize at least which console it ran on. The shape was unlike anything you were familiar with, in the way that it was shaped like every video game cartridge ever. The label bore no signifier of what it was, only desaturated blobs of abstract color. The only discernible thing on it was a garage sale sticker that bore little more than a price of $5.00.
Then, all of a sudden, the cartridge started melting into a plasmid goo. It wobbled and squirmed in your hand as it reconfigured itself into a far more defined shape. Gone were its airs of vagueness and indecipherability. Now you knew exactly what this cartridge game was. It reformed itself into a Nintendo Entertainment System copy of Super Mario Bros. 3! The sudden shock of the object transforming from a liminal suggestion of the idea of a game into an actual real game with historical significance and recognizable iconography caused you to drop the cartridge as if it were a molten hot coal. As it clattered to the ground, it lost its defined shape and graphics and became nothing more than the other vague splotches that this store seemed to be made of. Cautiously, you bent down to pick it back up, and it sprung back into shape at your touch.
A nervous chuckle escaped your lips. You felt like now would be a good time to leave and pretend like none of this had ever happened. As you turned to leave, you were suddenly face to face with a hundred inch plasma screen TV. Connected to it was what appeared to be a Frankenstein’s monster of a game console, with slots to fit just about any cartridge or disk you could throw at it. Looking at the cartridge in your hand and back at the console, a powerful feeling of curiosity came into your head.
“Does that work?” you asked yourself.
Without thinking you grabbed a different game off of the shelf and stuck it into the machine, not even taking a second to discern what game you put in before hand. The theater sized plasma display changed from chaotic static to a black screen with white text that read:
Welcome to The Game Changer System
Then, the game began to run. You squinted at the screen, trying to make out what it was you put in, and eventually it all came to you. The game you put in was…