Freud, Nintendo, and why there is no privacy for black people

or, how to become famous with your eyes closed.

If the History Channel were to do a series on video games, had about a $50 budget, and decided to do everything with clip art, the end result would be pretty close to Game Wars.

Game Wars [original Japanese: ゲーム機大戦] is a bizarre retelling of video game history, starting from the Atari all the way up to the PS3, except it’s done like a war drama. Battles over market share are depicted as actual war skirmishes, with the losers exploding or getting sawed in half. The Nintendo appears as a tank, the Game Boy is a fighter jet, the Sega Genesis sports a laser cannon and optical death ray, only to be smashed by Nintendo and Sony. All this with weird computer voice narration, strange inside jokes, and dramatic music.

Sega gets blown up a lot in this series.

In other words, it’s right up my alley.

So anyway, I was watching the sixth episode, and they started talking about the Virtual Boy. The Virtual Boy, for those who don’t know, was a notorious flop in Nintendo’s otherwise (at that point) stellar record. It was kind of like a laser-lit Game Boy that was attached to a stand, and you would look through a scope to play the game. It was horrible.

This series is notoriously harsh on failed systems, and I was looking forward to seeing how they would make fun of it.

But what I saw on the screen next almost made me fall out of my chair.

Text: ‘Virtual Boy, by Nintendo. 15,000 yen. Played via a set of goggles, takes 6 AA batteries’

Shown in the bottom right of the screen was an image of the Virtual Boy being used by someone that looked really familiar. I recognized the hair, I recognized the backpack, I recognized the jacket.

My backpack. My hair. My jacket. I was in the video.

I paused it, and freaked out a little.

Just a little.

It gets weirder.

The image in the video was a little blurry, so I wasn’t totally sure it was me. Maybe my ego had gotten the best of me? So I decided to try to find a copy of the original image. It turned out to be a lot easier that you might expect. I googled for the most obvious keywords for the image: ‘Virtual Boy’ and ‘Afro’, and found a tweet from 2012 talking about the picture.

Translation: ‘I was looking at the 3DO [another game system] and I found the Virtual Boy. I never owned it, but wow, it’s nostalgic. There’s an Afro Boy playing the Virtual Boy in the Wikipedia picture, it really reflects the times’

I tried clicking the link included in the tweet, and it sent me here:

Yeah. For a little over two years, this picture of me has been in use on the Japanese Wikipedia entry for the Virtual Boy.