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Number one:
This one comes from an article that was supposed to be published somewhere, about Tokyo Game Show. It never went up anywhere. So I put it here.
***
[Our heroes -- me and Chuck Franklin -- are finishing up a laid-back conversing session with Bandai's super-producers.]
"What's that T-shirt you're wearing?" Matsuyama asked me.
"Oh, it's, uh, Young Gatt."
"Never heard of it."
"It's Chinese. For Xbox."
"Oh."
"I think this is the best T-shirt I've ever gotten for a videogame," I went on. "I just like the colors, that's all. I wouldn't wear this anywhere else."
"Heh. You didn't get one of the Grand Theft Auto III shirts, then, did you?"
"Uh, no."
"You should get one. Go play the game."
After saying farewell to our Bandai friends, Chuck and I went around the Capcom booth to scope the line for Grand Theft Auto III. It was pretty long. The guy told us it would take an hour, or maybe a little less. We popped back into the press room, one hour and forty minutes left in the show. Not a soul was around. Websites had been updated, and foreign journalists were already back in Tokyo, enjoying bars – except for a German man who sat at a far table interviewing Ayami Kojima, illustrator of all things Castlevania. Without any competition, I sat at a computer, popped in a Memory Stick, and started to upload photographs to my FTP. Then, Chuck and I went to play Grand Theft Auto III.
We waited an hour to play a game I'd owned for two years. We had to wait five minutes just to get into the line – the Capcom guys were jittery about letting us in without IDs – we'd truly left them behind in the press room, we said. Yes, these are real press passes. I apologize for not wearing a leisure suit and a gold chain like your typical modern American journalist. He didn't like my explanation, so I offered him another one, and in Japanese: you can walk into a 7-Eleven store in this damned city and pick up a comic book magazine in which an elementary schoolgirl gets raped by an octopus, yet you're not going to let an American see people get shot?
He didn't continue his argument.
The demo units for the game were contained entirely in a giant box into which ten people were allowed at a time. The T-shirt in the hands of every departing player widened my eyes with awe: black, slim, with the design of a white cartoonish handgun and the words "GRAND THEFT AUTO III" in Japanese katakana. I own that shirt now, and it doesn't fit, so I can't call it the best T-shirt of TGS 2003 – no, that title goes to the collection of SNK shirts, of which I have a full set. They just barely beat out the Young Gatt shirt because of their variety and potential eBay dollars.
No, the T-shirt, glorious as it might be, is not what makes me want to tell you this story. No, my storyteller's desire burns because of what happened inside that box. Yes, my number one moment of [TGS] 2003 was playing the Japanese version of Grand Theft Auto III, and for a totally different reason than some dumb T-shirt.
The experience went like this: Standing outside the box that contained the Grand Theft Auto III demo stations was a large African-American man in a police uniform. He led us in single, and sat us down at demo stations. The interior of the box was supposed to look like a police van, I gathered. Sounds effects pumped in over speakers. Rain, gunshots, cars. Until the last person entered the room, kids poked their heads in around the door – unluckily for them, each television monitor was covered with a black shroud – one I had my head underneath as I sped toward the game's first goal. When the door was closed, the guy walked up and down the aisle, periodically jumping and pointing his gun at the players-to-be. Suddenly, three more African-Americans stormed in with toy guns. The speakers blared the sounds of gunshots as the lights flashed red. The cop ran out of the room, thugs giving chase. The lights came up bright. The speakers started to play happy pop music. And in came the girls.
One girl for each player. Each one wore a tiny little skimpy dress. Each one was the kind of made-up Japanese girl you see entertaining the lucky dumb gangster who's going to get killed in the next scene of any given American crime movie. Chuck looked over at me – my head was still buried beneath the shroud, almost done with the game's first mission.
The girl sat down next to me, and touched my shoulder.
"I'm Miki."
She then threw up the shroud on the television screen.
"Oh," she started to say, in English. "You're already playing"
"I've had the game for two years," I said, in Japanese, starting to remember the conversation with the booth staff guy.
"You're pretty good," she said, ignoring my Japanese like I'd ignored her English.
"Your English is better than my Japanese," I said.
She scoffed. "Well, yeah." She had a perfect Los Angeles accent. "I'm from LA."
I paused the game.
"Really?"
"Really."
"Tell me more."
**
"My girl wouldn't talk to me," Chuck said, as we sat in the press room sipping orange juice and coffee fifteen minutes later.
"I think it's because she saw you were a gaijin, and just figured she didn't have to."
"So the girls . . . they were there to just, what, speak English to the players? Even if they were Japanese?"
"Yeah."
"So why did the girls have to be Japanese? Why didn't they just hire white girls?"
I shrugged. "This is Japan, man. You've been here longer than I have. You should have stopped asking questions by now."
Fifteen minutes later, we were hefting our bags of stuff through the main hall of Makuhari Messe. Crews were already at work deconstructing various booths. Yuji Naka was giving a closing speech to the employees of Sega who'd helped out this year. Chuck and I headed past the Square-Enix booth on our way out. We passed by a trio of girls in normal out-on-the-town clothing. Over their right arms, they held plastic dry-cleaning bags containing their patent-leather Square-Enix minidresses. Under their left arms, they held giant stuffed blue Slimes. Chuck and I told them they were lucky, and one of them said, "I know! He's just so cute!"
***
I'm writing this, now, back in Tokyo, on New Years Eve, watching the countdown of the top 100 music videos of the year. Here, the year-end issue of Famitsu has a two-page spread on Grand Theft Auto III, and they're calling it the most noteworthy game of the year, even though I played it first two years ago. The title of the review by actor Yamaguchi Masao is "It is because you are free that there are things you must do." Reading it, I feel both like I could write a companion piece called "It is because you are free that there are things you cannot do," and that something has arrived somewhere, this year, and it's not just Grand Theft Auto III in Japan. Something is lined up to happen next year.
And next year begins in sixteen minutes. Just three days and sixteen minutes from now, don't you know, I'll be meeting a girl for a date. She's a Japanese girl. Her profession happens to be that of a booth babe.
Just three days into its starting, it looks like 2004 might be interesting.
****
(Epilogue I wrote while in Korea)
It's now seven in the morning on the day after Christmas. My friend isn't home yet. I walked down to Dunkin' Donuts just a moment ago. On my way back up to the apartment building, I came across a videogame store in which the owner was just getting around to turning on the lights. The thin walls seemed to yawn as the lights flickered on. When all the power was alive, I heard a familiar sound a few feet away. I tracked around to the side of the little shop. It was about two degrees Celsius out there, and my fingertips were collecting frost. There, sitting on the ground against the wall of the game shop, was a tiny arcade cabinet with a tiny TV and a tiny NeoGeo joystick. There was no coin slot. I sat down on a milk crate and pressed start.
Moments later, I stood up in a frozen sweat, thinking I'd head back down there after I got some donuts and some sleep in me. I just don't have it in me for free Neo-Geo right now, after writing all this what I wrote right here, not when
YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT METAL SLUG 3
--tim rogers used the bathroom forty-three times in the composition of this piece
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