World´s Greatest

I just got an email out of the blue from John Hatch, my best friend when I was a kid. It was great to hear from him, and in writing back to him I remembered that I need to update you all on the Super Mario Bros. 2 world record attempt saga. You see, the Christmas morning when I unwrapped my copy of Mario 2 (along with Adventure Island and Super Team Games for the Power Pad - that was a good haul) I immediately called John to gloat and to see what NES games he had scored. (Note: My Nintendo's name was Conrad, and if I'm not mistaken John's was named Blade.)

When last we left our hero, he had sent his world record-setting video tape to Twin Galaxies, the official governing body for video game world records, but they sent me an email saying that the tape had gotten smashed in the mail. This demoralized our hero, but he decided to start training again and send another tape, this time potentially surpassing his previous best time of 34 minutes and 17 seconds.

By that time, our hero was surprisingly rusty, and it took several more weeks of training before he felt confident enough to start recording his attempts again. In the meantime, he noticed that someone else had claimed the world record with a time of 42 minutes and 59 seconds. Our hero was undaunted and slightly amused by that weak time.

Then one day I (yeah, I got tired off the whole "our hero" thing - I bet you did too) had an absolutely amazing game - so fluid, so few mistakes, so many inspired passages. I knew it was a good run, but I was amazed when I finally looked at the stopwatch at the end - 31 minutes and 40 seconds! Over two and a half minutes better than my smashed-tape time.

This time I was smarter and I took the tape over to the media conversion lab at the University of Michigan and put it on DVD and made a few extra copies. I sent the DVD out the day before I left for Brazil. When I was in Brazil I completely forgot about my DVD until I was in Minas Gerais talking to Renata and Paulo (Maggie's old mission companion and her husband) about video games and I wondered if my score had been posted yet. I didn't have access to a computer until we got to the hostel in Salvador, and when I went to the Twin Galaxies site this is what I saw:

So yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of a world record holder. I know that it's for something really trivial and someone will break it some day, but it's pretty cool to be able to say that there was a time when I was the world's greatest.