“EarthBound” by Ken Baumann (Boss Fight Books)

This is the first in a series of reviews covering the recent Boss Fight Books Humble Bundle. If you missed the bundle, fear not! They’re all available on bossfightbooks.com, from $4.95 each.

 “The following is a contributor post by the Bookwarm Mage.”

First, a word or two about who these books are for. For you, probably, if you’re taking the time to wonder about this at all. And, if you’re feeling generous, maybe for your brother or sister who used to play 8-bit Super Mario and Final Fantasy games with you at your old house growing up. (Maybe you should give them a call, come to think of it, to catch up and reminisce.) Or for your neighbors, who had a computer in the basement where you’d play ZZT or Rodent’s Revenge. (Say, I wonder what they’re up to.) For your friends from school who taught you to program on your graphing calculator, between bouts of Drug Wars and Mega Man titles. (Those were the days!) Or, if not out of nostalgia, then out of simple curiosity, to learn about the fascinating rise of video games as a medium of expression commensurate with the written word. Or, like me, out of ambition to write one of your own someday, trying to get a sense of what they publish.

EarthBound, by Ken Baumann, is a lyrical evocation of what it’s like to play the game, and of how frustrating it is to try to give an account of it. Minute reflections on imagery and gameplay are interwoven with memoiristic vignettes and ruminations on art and nature. If you can get into the writing, which jumps back and forth between these disparate elements without any obvious transitions, and dances around its own inability to fully express the entirety of a lived experience out of a mass of details (much less the connections between them), the book comes together in a gripping welter of emotion and catharsis. I read it in a sitting and loved it.

Among other curious details, you’ll hear about a racist Tom Sawyer game released only in Japan and about “grandmas who carry around ‘coonskin purses’ made of actual human flesh flayed during the Civil War“. Alongside John Lennon’s song “Mother,” you’ll want to look up composer Keiichi Suzuki’s band Moonriders, and his other band, The Beatniks. You’ll range over the influences of Tom Bissell (Extra Lives) and John Gray (Straw Dogs), which may remind you to wonder about that lovely epigraph Baumann takes from Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Which is followed up by an appreciative foreword by Marcus Lindbloom, one of EarthBound’s translators, to set the tone. You’ll be treated to an inside view of nascent celebrity, as Baumann moves to LA to star in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and get a hint of the drastic redirection which took the author to St John’s College to study the great books.

Lest all this feel a little too highbrow, you’ll be reminded of the gross-out aesthetic of the ’90s with Ernest Scared Stupid, and apply that critical lens to the more recent cultural obsession with the living dead. With Baumann, you can muse on Moonside as a liminal space between EarthBound’s two halves, vicariously see your salary skyrocket in Summers, and do drugs in Dalaam. Hit the completionist Rubicon of the Sword of Kings and blunder through it. Look up the word stochastic, since it appears more than once. Consider Baumann’s favorite question, which he likes to ask after having described EarthBound to his interlocutors: “What sounds similar to EarthBound, to you?” And wonder about their responses: O Brother Where Art Thou, Harry Potter, House (the Japanese film, not the TV series).

Meander through the Magicant of your mind, have a near-death experience or two, talk about prayer and maybe even participate in it, and make a bid for self-transcendence as the way out of solipsism.

Around the midpoint of the text, Baumann writes:

To me, the most enduringly beautiful parts of EarthBound— and most indicative of the wistful, philosophical aesthetic Shigesato Itoi has cultivated since he stopped making games— are its three most reflective moments.

He lingers over the coffee break in Saturn Valley as the first of these moving moments, and leaves the reader to discern the others. He challenges us to revisit EarthBound, showing that in doing so he managed to reconnect with his eccentric brother, and to shed new light on their shared story.

In what proves to be a hallmark of the Boss Fight series, Baumann’s EarthBound reproduces in its style something akin to the whimsical essence of the video game, even as it seeks to explain it discursively. In this case it all works marvelously well.

9/10 — Excellent. A worthy subjective counterpart to Clyde Mandelin’s objectively preeminent Legends of Localization among studies of EarthBound.

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