What if Mario collected monsters and fought coins? What if Tecmo Bowl had a third player who controlled a stadium-mounted laser? These were the questions asked by a particular kind of fan fiction I read growing up—the stories videogames could have had, if their rules of play were changed.  

Remarkably, this entire subgenre was the work of one person, posted as plaintext files to a BBS (“The Ornithopter”) that I frequented on the sly around this time.  Stuart Michigan was prolific, with a knack for memorable prose that could border on the disturbing; I recall a sexy vignette from an Arkanoid story where your ball caused bricks to mate with adjacent bricks, creating more bricks.  To this day, the last line of his Tecmo piece haunts my brain: “There, one yard short, Bo knew pain.”

Michigan was one of those creatures of the proto-Internet who became a towering legend for a small number of people.  There was a story passed around, for example, of how he snuck into the 1993 Computer Game Developers Conference and, before anyone knew what was happening, absconded and crossed two state lines with George “The Fat Man” Sanger’s trademark hat, itself a gargantuan, 10-gallon set-piece of millinery whose rhinestones (it was whispered) had been found at the scene of Elvis’ death. Today, they’d probably do it to promote some cut-rate bundle of independent Mac software.  Michigan did it for the glory.   

Over time, the Stuart I’d known dissipated, leaving behind a substrate of embellished qualities and anecdotes that may never have occurred in the first place.  I would re-read his works from time to time, meticulously rescuing them from one failing hard drive after another.  Once, I even canvassed the email addresses I’d harvested from the Ornithopter days, asking after his whereabouts.  There was no response.

I began to suspect that Michigan’s intent in writing these pieces had been to show designers how their choices about gameplay mechanics could impact the stories players took from their games.  Not “stories” in the sense of the in-game fictions they’d built, but the more personal, emergent meta-fictions that players generate for themselves, and that still proliferate in a real world where players inevitably share their experiences.

Michigan had a talent for building layers of story around even the most narratively fallow of games, and so I experienced a sharper recall of his work when Jamin Warren asked me to write about Modern Warfare 2’s controversial “No Russian” mission.  Short version: The player, undercover, is asked to participate in the machine-gun butchery of a few hundred civilians at an airport.  At first, I began a straightforward-enough essay, but as I worked, I found myself enervated by my own recursive parsings of a fundamentally nihilistic enterprise.   

That was when he emailed me.  His terse message to the Ornithopter diaspora (“I’m unretiring.  S”) included an attachment that blew what I’d been working on out of the water.  So I submitted Stuart Michigan’s piece instead.  I’m glad that I did.  Welcome back, Stuart, and this time may you enjoy a run of sequels to rival even the Call of Duty franchise.

Some Russian
by Stuart Michigan

Two soldiers pressed close against the mountainside, the lit end of their shared cigarette visible in the dark like a fiery camel’s asshole.  It was as cold as the hell of Elton John’s “Rocketman.”  They had been there for days, waiting for contact from their man in the field, and were running out of songs to mine for temperature metaphors.  Currently, they were on Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years.”

“This part,” said the roguishly handsome Private First Class Angus Treadwell, in a voice reminiscent of a Hollywood movie actor.

Private Carly Henrietta spat down the side of the mountain and computed its trajectory, because she was a math whiz. “Right here, with all the woodwinds and strings?”

Treadwell chopped his hand down in a gesture that usually meant “Enemies are near,” but in this case meant “Be quiet, it’s the sax solo.”  When it was over,, he opened his eyes and said, “Right there.  The moment in all of music that most clearly communicates, ‘As you hear this, two people are fucking.’ Beautiful, right?”

Henrietta shrugged.  She wasn’t sure, but sometimes a partnership means being accommodating. With the poise of Beefeaters moonlighting as boom-mic grips, each held what looked like a six-foot sandwich toothpick, only spray-painted silver and loaded with millions of dollars in telecommunications equipment. They were both elite members of Task Force 142, a human surveillance network with a single purpose: to monitor transmissions from Task Force 141. 

Right then, the channel cracked open.  Treadwell chopped his hand down, and Henrietta mustered her training to stifle an image of a naked Paul Simon.  They heard the muffled rustling of clothes, the sound of zippers going up, and finally of guns being loaded. “Remember,” said a voice dripping with evil to the point of sounding post-processed, “No Russian.”

“This should be good,” said Treadwell.  He scratched at his groin with confidence. “There’s been chatter about 141’s big undercover gambit for months, some kind of ultranationalist terror-cell infiltration.  Back at base, generals were tripping over each other to read the pre-mission reports.” 

The next thing they heard was gunfire, then screams.  Henrietta squinted, an epiphenomenon of the mild synesthesia that helped her extract pictures from sound.  Four shooters.  M240s.  The kind of gun that turns elephants into hamburger.  After seven-point-three seconds (Henrietta counted exactly) it stopped.

Crack. “October, checking in.”  Alexei Borodin was Private Allen’s alias but October was his codename, after The Hunt for Red October.  It was a popular codename. 

“Fuck me, we’re shooting up an airport.  These guys just took out a hundred, two hundred in a security line—now they’re standing 50 feet ahead of me, waiting just past the bodies, not looking back.  Jesus.  I didn’t shoot anybody but they didn’t seem to notice.  Almost looks like they need me to walk up to where they are before they’ll keep going.  Tempted just to stay where I am until the next Tunguska Event.”

Henrietta stirred, glanced at Treadwell.  “Well there's an easy way out.  The Tunguska Event was—”

He cut her off.  “Meteor impact, Siberia, 1908.  If it flattened more than 500 square miles, I know what it is.”  

Crack. “These bastards suck at their own rules.  Swear I just heard their leader say ‘For Zakhaev.’  So now it’s ‘Some Russian?’ Is a witness going to think that’s a Turkish guy?”

Crack.  A burst from an assault rifle, louder than usual, October’s first. “Okay, sometimes you have to make judgment calls, and I just made one to pop one of these goons in his fucking head.” A muffled but audible call of ‘traitor’ from the evil voice. “Yeah, headed for cover.”

The connection fuzzed, the signal bending in their earpieces.  Henrietta clenched her fist. “Damn it, he’s hit.  Guessing in the arm—must’ve torn his cochlear mesh.”  She'd spent three years developing October's subcutaneous nano-mic, under Oscar Kendall, a massive genius whose astounding porn collection made him one of the military's proudest embarrassments.

Crack, fuzz, crack.  October’s voice came in distorted.  Heavy, labored breathing. “Hiding in a restaurant.  Noticed—no matter how many times I shoot the chairs in here, they don’t take damage.”  Now October shouted: “Everybody into the restaurant! The chairs are bulletproof! каждое к ресторану! мебель панцырь!”

A muffled crack. “My God, screw everything.  I just rolled a grenade under Makarov’s feet and it blew up and HE DIDN’T DIE.  Are we positive he’s not from space?” A wet impact.  “YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! I AM PRIVATE JOSEPH ALLEN OF THE UNITED STA—”

The line went dead in a way it hadn’t before, even between songs.  Treadwell and Henrietta stood up on the mountain in silence, wondering if the trip had meant anything at all.

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