EarthBound
by Ken Baumann
2014
When I was a kid, in the 90s, I had a Super Nintendo, and for awhile, a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Games had basically the same price back then that they do today, usually $50 new, which is sort of incredible when you consider how much inflation has happened since then, and the general purchasing power of 1990s dollars. Even more incredible, a lot of the SNES games I owned, I got by saving up my allowance, $5 a week, for like 2½ months per game. Because of Nintendo Power, there were a lot of games I knew about and was fascinated by that I never had the opportunity to purchase. One of those was the game EarthBound, a weirdly postmodern rpg about modern American kids who awaken psychic powers, and travel the country saving it from aliens.
EarthBound the book is the first in the Boss Fight Books series, and the author, Ken Baumann, is the graphic designer for the whole series. I read another of these last year, for the game Spelunky, that was written by the game's creator, Derek Yu. The Spelunky book was excellent, combining insight about the game and the decisions that went into making it with biographical details about was going on in Yu's life at the time, and how that impacted the game too. EarthBound also blends writing about the game with the author's memoir, but the problem here is that Baumann isn't the game's designer, he's just some guy.
Technically, Ken Baumann is a very minor celebrity. He was an actor on the show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and when the show ended, he helped found this book series, and created Sator Press, which has since been acquired as an imprint of my favorite Ohio indie press, Two Dollar Radio. In his early 20s, he had a major health scare that almost killed him. His life story is moderately interesting, moreso than mine. But with respect to EarthBound the game, he's just some guy, and all the pages he spends talking about his biography are pages he doesn't spend talking about the game, its influences, its cultural impact, etc.
Some of it seems relevant! Baumann is about a decade younger than me, a Young Millennial instead of an Old Millennial, but he was also a 90s kid, and he did buy a copy of EarthBound and play it back then. He bought it again and played it again when, after about 20 years out of circulation, Nintendo re-released EarthBound as a downloadable game for the WiiU, which gave the game a new and much larger audience, including a lot of people like me and Baumann, who remembered our childhood fascination with it. So the parts about Baumann's life when he first got the game do help to inform his reactions to it, especially things like his engagement with things like horror movies and 90s gross-out humor that were part of the same cultural milieu that gave rise to EarthBound. But a lot of this felt like Baumann used the existence of the book as an opportunity to write about himself in a way that only occasionally contributed to the ostensible purpose of the project.
EarthBound is a game about kids on a journey. The hero, Ness, discovers he has psychic powers the same night a meteor crash lands in his town, and aliens kidnap some of his neighbors. Ness uses baseball bats and yo-yos as weapons. He stays in hotels, calling home when he needs money, or feels lonely or homesick. He joins up with a psychic girl who he rescues after she was kidnapped for her powers, and later with a child prodigy and a young Tibetian monk-in-training. The mechanics of the game are similar to the Final Fantasy series, but the visuals are a distorted 1950s Americana (50s revival was an important element of 80s culture), and the style is surreal and parodic, closer to Thomas Pynchon or Philip K Dick than to Tolkein or D&D. And at several key points, the game breaks its own rules to create unique, patience-testing challenges, like a door that can only be opened by not touching the controller for several minutes, a special item you can only receive as a random drop by defeating hundreds of extra enemies, or a boss fight that's won not by fighting, but by prayer.
Baumann structures the book around a walkthrough of the game, and his dual experiences playing it as a kid and an adult. He does talk about cultural influences on the game, and its tepid reception in the American market in 1994. I would have liked more of that, honestly, especially since he had no real access to information about how the game was made, or any way to interview anyone involved with making it. (Though both would've been nice, if he could've managed it!) And while I found the amount of autobiography to be excessive and distracting, he did at least manage a close parallelism between the events of the game and the way he ordered telling the events of his own life. Someone a little more interested in the author than I was might read this and see a real achievement. It's definitely a better book about Ken Baumann than it is a book about EarthBound. I'm left wondering if Yu's was the best book in the series, and if all of them lean so heavily into memoir, or if others more closely resemble the journalism of the 33⅓ series.
EarthBound the book is the first in the Boss Fight Books series, and the author, Ken Baumann, is the graphic designer for the whole series. I read another of these last year, for the game Spelunky, that was written by the game's creator, Derek Yu. The Spelunky book was excellent, combining insight about the game and the decisions that went into making it with biographical details about was going on in Yu's life at the time, and how that impacted the game too. EarthBound also blends writing about the game with the author's memoir, but the problem here is that Baumann isn't the game's designer, he's just some guy.
Technically, Ken Baumann is a very minor celebrity. He was an actor on the show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and when the show ended, he helped found this book series, and created Sator Press, which has since been acquired as an imprint of my favorite Ohio indie press, Two Dollar Radio. In his early 20s, he had a major health scare that almost killed him. His life story is moderately interesting, moreso than mine. But with respect to EarthBound the game, he's just some guy, and all the pages he spends talking about his biography are pages he doesn't spend talking about the game, its influences, its cultural impact, etc.
Some of it seems relevant! Baumann is about a decade younger than me, a Young Millennial instead of an Old Millennial, but he was also a 90s kid, and he did buy a copy of EarthBound and play it back then. He bought it again and played it again when, after about 20 years out of circulation, Nintendo re-released EarthBound as a downloadable game for the WiiU, which gave the game a new and much larger audience, including a lot of people like me and Baumann, who remembered our childhood fascination with it. So the parts about Baumann's life when he first got the game do help to inform his reactions to it, especially things like his engagement with things like horror movies and 90s gross-out humor that were part of the same cultural milieu that gave rise to EarthBound. But a lot of this felt like Baumann used the existence of the book as an opportunity to write about himself in a way that only occasionally contributed to the ostensible purpose of the project.
EarthBound is a game about kids on a journey. The hero, Ness, discovers he has psychic powers the same night a meteor crash lands in his town, and aliens kidnap some of his neighbors. Ness uses baseball bats and yo-yos as weapons. He stays in hotels, calling home when he needs money, or feels lonely or homesick. He joins up with a psychic girl who he rescues after she was kidnapped for her powers, and later with a child prodigy and a young Tibetian monk-in-training. The mechanics of the game are similar to the Final Fantasy series, but the visuals are a distorted 1950s Americana (50s revival was an important element of 80s culture), and the style is surreal and parodic, closer to Thomas Pynchon or Philip K Dick than to Tolkein or D&D. And at several key points, the game breaks its own rules to create unique, patience-testing challenges, like a door that can only be opened by not touching the controller for several minutes, a special item you can only receive as a random drop by defeating hundreds of extra enemies, or a boss fight that's won not by fighting, but by prayer.
Baumann structures the book around a walkthrough of the game, and his dual experiences playing it as a kid and an adult. He does talk about cultural influences on the game, and its tepid reception in the American market in 1994. I would have liked more of that, honestly, especially since he had no real access to information about how the game was made, or any way to interview anyone involved with making it. (Though both would've been nice, if he could've managed it!) And while I found the amount of autobiography to be excessive and distracting, he did at least manage a close parallelism between the events of the game and the way he ordered telling the events of his own life. Someone a little more interested in the author than I was might read this and see a real achievement. It's definitely a better book about Ken Baumann than it is a book about EarthBound. I'm left wondering if Yu's was the best book in the series, and if all of them lean so heavily into memoir, or if others more closely resemble the journalism of the 33⅓ series.
Love Earthbound! Ya it's too bad this wasn't written by Shigesato Itoi.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, and not at all related to Earthbound, Shigesato Itoi has a book that's translated into English, basically a like interview or series of essays along with the scientist Ryugo Hayano, that is nominally about the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster but is also kinda just a discussion on science communication. I read it during Covid, have forgotten a lot of the particulars, but I remember liking it.
Coincidentally, I think a friend of a friend of mine is currently in Japan interviewing Itoi? I'll follow up with my friend on that and hopefully it'll be worth checking out.
Oh I forgot to mention the name of the book:
DeleteWe Want To Know: A conversation about radiation and its effects in the aftermath of Japan’s worst nuclear accident
Thank you for the recommendation! That sounds really interesting. And yeah, during the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster and during the Covid lockdown would both be times when you'd really want to understand how to effectively communicate scientific knowledge to the public.
ReplyDelete