There Remain Some Few Wolves
Only once have I purchased something at the Nintendo store, a mug in the shape of Boo, a ghost who plays the part of an intractable foe to the Super Mario Brothers. I had long considered Boo an aspirational figure as he could not be defeated by typical means, forcing the player to go to great lengths to avoid him or suffer his wrath. The mug cost $12 and served as an ashtray for seven years with distinction until I surrendered it to the custody of a former roommate.
This is to say, there's very little of interest at the Nintendo store at Rockefeller Center. Like most shops dealing in neither clothing, food, nor furniture, the merchandise is of the sort to be loved briefly and discarded. Stuffed plumbers and Pokemon are sent from afar to pollute our landscape and our bodies with their innumerable plastic fibers.
This wasn’t always the case, as for many years the store had displayed an original Game Boy that had survived a bombing in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. The device’s blackened, fried exterior did little to belie the functioning internal electronics. Hooked up to an external power device, the folks at Nintendo kept the Game Boy powered on and running Tetris, the legendary pack-in title that came bundled with every system.
I'm not sure what the fine people at Nintendo of America were trying to communicate with the Desert Storm Game Boy. There's the sort of obvious explanation that it was there to show the quality and resilience of Nintendo's products— not even the force of a deadly explosion could stop a Nintendo product from delivering on its promise of fun. It could also have been that it was just an oddity, some strange thing that you might have been interested in.
But whatever the reason Nintendo had for displaying the device, around 2023 they decided that they would do so no longer. The given reason had something to do with the device's safekeeping, which makes little sense given it had survived a literal explosion and was at no risk of theft in its glass display case.
The real reason, I believe, has more to do with what the Desert Storm Game Boy could not help but quietly assert: that bad things happen, sometimes even to the kinds of people who buy video games.
By displaying the battered toy, Nintendo was tacitly acknowledging that we live in a world that has wars and bombs. And why would they ever want to do that?
Mr. Nintendo was never interested in fielding questions like “there was a war?” or “who was in the war?” or “what were they fighting about?” As such, it stands to reason that he should never have allowed that charred little totem to radiate its darkness from the heart of its sanctuary in the first place.
A very long time ago some guy saw a wolf and said “what if I could make an indoor version?” And so over the course of eons he sanded down the sharp corners and turned it into his buddy. Gone were razor-sharp fangs and the killer instincts of an apex predator. Eventually, he got rid of everything scary until he was left with a dog.
The Desert Storm Game Boy is by its very nature highly resistant if not completely immune to the societal impulse to “doggify” reality.
Charred, quietly singing the Tetris theme to itself, the burnt-out Gameboy stood as an anchor to the outside of Nintendo's world. It could never have been domesticated.