It's fair to say, if a bit macabre, that I am collecting "retro" (that hurts to admit that the games/systems I grew up with are classified as retro) games due to the death of a once quite close friend. Dan's widow offered me a game that he and I had spent months playing together, Castlevania Symphony of the Night for PS1. This game means the world to me, as Dan and I spent 1997 finding every single piece of food and items we could, and upright and upside down, we searched Castle Dracula. This game is quite expensive today, especially a black spine first printing. I lost my copy decades ago, while Dan kept his original game. I had to have it, and his widow happily extended the copy to me. I am quite grateful for her generosity.
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When he passed I was not collecting games. I had a few of my old, original games, and an Xbox 360, from back in the day but that was it. Nothing that could be considered a collection. She would change this, however. His widow generously gifted me with dozens of his games, from N64 favorites like Blast Corps and Super Mario Kart and his Jungle Green N64, and some PlayStation games. A Panasonic 3DO FZ-1 that was once mine along with Road Rash. Somehow, over 20 years later, this system and game found their way back into my loving arms. I had no idea he had even kept this system and game.
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| Like an old friend, returned |
Since receiving these pieces of a friend's history and friendship, I began adding to it. I've re-collected a Sega Saturn, found a near-mint PS1 at a flea market for 30 bucks. My collection is miniscule compared to some collections I've seen out there, but this one feels special to me and perhaps me alone. I felt some sort of connection with Dan in a time where connecting with him is purely in my memories alone. Dan and I hadn't talked much for years. Until Thanksgiving 2019. I met up with him and another close friend that night at Best Buy to get a jump on Black Friday sales. Dan and I each bought a dozen blurays. As we were leaving I would end up giving him a ride to his car, as it was closer for me than it was to go back with our mutual friend.
So before I bore you too much with the mundanity of a simple memory, this was the last time I would ever get to see Dan again. So I agreed, thinking to myself I hoped this meant that he and I would hang out again like we used to. We met in high school, at Patapsco High in Dundalk, 1995. We were sophomores. Somehow video games were mentioned in Mr. Forrest's class, and we hung ever since. We spent entire days and into nights and into mornings playing PlayStation or 3DO or Nintendo 64. He'd chug liters of Surge and we'd have The Chemical Brothers on in the background.
I showed him electronica or dance music and he introduced me to Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith movies. We went to the movies no less than 25 times together in the '90s alone. We had front row ringside seats at the 1998 WCW Great American Bash PPV in Baltimore that you always dream of having, and I still have the shameful youthful guilt of giving the fingers to every wrestler not in the nWo for hours. I re-watch matches on YouTube and I get red in the face. But we were kids, caught up in the moment. Even getting tickets for the event was an adventure in of itself, a night which included a transient pooping in a box in front of us and a head-on car crash at 2am. Dan and I shared stuff that I will never forget.
But that Black Friday evening finished with Dan and I in Walmart. We were once again shopping for blurays back in Electronics, and pints of Ben and Jerry's. I took him to his car, we gave each other version of the handshake, the nWo wolfpack kiss (you fans know what I'm talking about), and we went home. We texted a few times throughout the years, but we never did hook up again.
The last time that we talked was on Independence Day 2022. I mentioned that I had found our Scream movie ticket stubs. He remembered that we had seen the first 3 films together in theaters. I said I'd give him his stub when I see him next. He was dead a few days later... Our relationship stuck in limbo, never to reconcile into friendship again. There's a physical pain that comes with that lost chance of redemption. All the things I wanted to tell him are stuck in my head like remnants of a leftover shake in a blender that didn't make it into the glass.
I am an extremely sentimental person. I have no qualms about this. By keeping some of Dan's old games I feel like he will never be truly gone, and that's up to a therapist and me to decide if that's healthy or not later, but it helps me to cope today. It helps me to keep those memories of him and I working at two different McDonald's together, or hanging out at Eastpoint Mall or any of the half dozen arcades we would frequent fresh in my brain. I'll never forget Dan getting yelled at by Mr. Forrest in 1995. "We're not friends, we don't hang out," Mr. Forrest said to Dan outside the class beside the lockers after Dan continuously called our teacher by his first name. Unlike Mr. Forrest and Dan, he and I were friends, and we did in fact hang out together.
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| Dan at our annual Memorial Day cookout (probably 2005) |
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