Sweet Ass Powers

Sometimes a broken product is far better than a fully functional one. Anybody who called for their horse in Red Dead Redemption, only to find a confused Swedish immigrant responding in its stead — still totally ready and willing to be mounted up and ridden about — understands this to be true. Possibly my best gaming moment ever was brought to me by a broken product, even though the game itself worked fine. It was a magnificent, epic hardware failure that I will never forget:

I had just bought Brutal Legend, and I was loving every second of it. If people tell you that game wasn’t worth playing, do not listen to them. They do not see epic van murals every time they close their eyes; they do not understand awesomeness; they are terminally deficient in vitamin rock. It’s not perfect, but it is a fantastic experience, and you should be ashamed of yourself if you let a few less than stellar reviews stop you from playing 1980s High School Burnout: The Video Game.

But I digress.

I had just gotten a new super move — one that let me play a guitar solo to bring a flaming zeppelin down on my enemies — but I hadn’t used it yet. I’m no philistine: I don’t cough at the opera, I don’t wear white after Labor Day, and I don’t play my bitchin’ murderous magical guitar solos anywhere but on a lightning-ravaged mountaintop. After driving to the top of the largest, spikiest, most appropriately metal peak I could find, I got out of my hot rod and played the solo. As advertised, a giant burning zeppelin came screeching out of the sky and slammed into the ground, setting the world aflame. The screen inverted from the impact. Random colors spewed out in every direction. The whole image shook and swayed and went to static, then did that old school “powering down” blip. Everything went black. It was perfect.

I thought it was all part of the special effects for the super move.

It was not.

My TV, an old CRT model, had exploded right at the climax of the zeppelin crash. I had to drop $500 on an entirely new television that day, all because of one use of one super move in a single video game — and I wasn’t even mad about it. The timing was just too perfect. That appliance could’ve gone out while watching Judge Judy disapprove of somebody’s baby daddy, but no: It was the Viking funeral of televisions — it died showing me a flaming, screaming blimp explosion while electric guitars wailed on a mountain top. I hope I die half as metal.