GALAGA
Michael
Kimball. Boss Fight Books, $14.95 paperback (136p) ISBN: 978-1-940535-03-6
Galaga is Michael
Kimball’s love letter to the game of the same name, his textbook, his
instructor’s manual, his encyclopedia and fan fiction, and is so much more than
any of these things. The book covers every
nuance of the game, references in pop culture, merchandising, and just about any other thing related to Galaga. Tattoo anyone? He’s got those to talk about, too. No worries.
And that’s fine and good, but there’s something Kimball displays with
this book – courage and love and survival.
How’s that for a magic trick?
Released
July 1 from Boss Fight Books, Galaga
is a work structured into 255 “stages”.
Not chapters. Stages. That’s right, you heard me. Why?
Simple. The game itself, the muse
as it were, is made up of the same number of stages. Kimball knows this, and hundreds of other
things about Galaga, having discovered the game in the arcade at the height of
the boom and too long before the bust, when kids were stacking quarters for
next in line and Madonna was just painting herself into a pop goddess. Kimball was there, best friend in tow for
some of it, living truly free in his own little patch of 1980s paradise.
Galaga can work on
several levels. Readers can enjoy the
areas of the book that deal exclusively with the game itself, or they can read
the autobiographical stages, a more human layer, and enjoy it at that level, as
well.
The
stages are mostly brief and strongly built, and rotate from sections devoted to
game play and advice and the cultural significance of the game, to sections
about anything other than video games.
These sections that break away from talk of the game are a testament to
Kimball’s bravery as a writer. In these
sections, he opens his chest to show the arteries across his heart, those
swelled with hope and those crushed from pain.
He offers it all.
And
that offering begins with this: “I always wanted to be playing some kind of
game. The terrible stuff happened when I
wasn’t playing games.”
Before
Kimball actually pulls us along with him into the complex world of the game of
Galaga, we’re given those two sentences.
When I read them, I literally caught myself holding my breath. It was unexpected, that’s all. Unexpected in the best possible way, in the
way that lights up the heart while the brain is already firing away. All systems go. But this was a book about a video game,
right? Well, yes. But then there were these two sentences.
Then,
just like that, we’re back to Galaga, and maybe there was just this momentary
mention of a troubled childhood to frame Kimball’s knowledge and interest in
the game. Nope. A short while later, Kimball shares, “To
understand how much Galaga (and other video games) meant to me, you have to
understand the difficulty of my adolescence.”
By
the time I came across the second reference, read it, and moved on, I found
myself enjoying the facts and figures about Galaga, but on the look for more
from Kimball’s troubled youth. Soon,
though, I felt relaxed again. And then,
another stage with tension and abusive fathers and brothers and the need for
escape and a place to feel safe.
And…wait.
The
pattern of being relaxed and then tense, at least for this reader, began to
mirror what the young Kimball must have felt – relaxed and safe when in the
safety of the arcade and then tense while at home, a place where he could be
attacked at any second without warning.
The
book continues in this way, and successfully so. The autobiographical moments do not render
the moments detailing the game of Galaga uninteresting. It just isn’t possible for that to happen
given Kimball’s obvious savant-like knowledge of the game. And if there were any question about this
last statement, moments like this consistently put that notion to rest:
“Somebody who goes by Kaden Dragon made a little Galaga scene of M&Ms,
which is great even if the colors aren’t exactly right.”
I’ve
never said this is a review, but the ending of this fine book is amazing. The duel means by which Kimball presents both
the game of Galaga and his life in connection could not be more expertly faded
out to its natural conclusion.
Trust
me, you’ll get your quarter’s worth. (July 2014)
Purchase Galaga HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of The Same Terrible
Storm. He survives in Eastern Kentucky. Visit him HERE.
