Video Game Collecting

I was maybe 10 or 11 when I first played Sky Shark in the arcade. I had many reasons to like it and it would be very common for me to be doodling bi-planes or buying a 2 dollar balsa wood plane. Those were the best and after a few days of play the wood would be splintered and I’d purposely “crash” it into hundreds of tiny pieces re-enacting a death blow from Sky Shark.

The Nintendo version wasn’t that great. The enemy and level design and difficulty was intact. But the music was way different (although not bad) but the biggest disgrace was the changing of the biplane to a World War II era fighter plane. Yuck.

One summer while still smitten by Sky Shark a near by drug store had a special on toy cars. 3 for a dollar! They were generic and did not have the quality of Hot Wheels or MatchBox but it had a huge variety of military vehicles. The tanks in particular looked exact to the ones in Sky Shark. I bought a bunch over that summer and by the 1st of July I probably had about 40 of them. My Grandfather who encouraged my knowledge of World Wars and would frequently share his experiences with me noticed my interests in bi-planes and bought me one that was made out of copper and had a pencil sharpener in it. Bad-ass!

I couldn’t wait for the 4th of July and the neighborhood kids and I planned out the greatest re-enactment of Sky Shark the world had ever seen. At a playground in our apartments we started making preparations. We recreated the entire first three levels of the game including the ocean which was made from a borrowed hose. We made hangars and turrets out of cardboard, boats out of bottle caps, tree twigs for palm trees and added hundreds of army men, most of which were already bloodied by our mother’s nail polish. These brave plastic men were absent from Sky Shark but their inclusion in our mock battle was an honor for them.

The final preparation involved the fireworks. A helluva lot of them! We borrowed and stole money from our parents and siblings. The “bad kids” stole hundreds of matches and lighters. Everything was PERFECT! At dusk the war would begin. And it did.

Smoke bombs of every color clouded the playground! Fountains showered hell fire down on to the brave pieces of plastic! Lighters exploded! Picollo Petes screeched out to the heavens. Some of the kids brought bottle rockets and other illegal fireworks! Piles of firecrackers gutted trenches into the sand, a village of Friendship Pagodas sprouted up and burned down to the sand almost instantly! This was the closest any of us kids had experienced war! Some of us became terrified when poisonous smoke from the burning army men caked our eyes. In the heart of the carnage some child lost their ear medicine. There was a random shoe here and there! A power wheels was abandoned -its tires melted down to the axels! In the distance… a mother could be heard crying out to her son: Dinner Time!

Burnt plastic lingered in the air the following morning. Though it would never be officially drafted and signed the neighborhood kids and I called a truce against the defenseless tanks and army men. This was no longer a Sky Shark re-enactment. At the request of our parents we buried the dead in that playground that morning.

Thousands of years from now an alien civilization will visit Earth and that battleground will be excavated. And written on a large rock buried in the middle would be the words of Albert Einstein: “I don’t know what mankind will use to fight World War 3, But World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones”.