Pride and joysticks

One Tulsan’s passion for retro gaming gear and the nostalgia of nerddom

He wears a black shirt with the Ghostbusters chasing the ghosts from Pac-Man. Jeans and a t-shirt, like he never left the arcade. He speaks with a matter-of-fact, broadcast-quality elocution, and occasionally staggers his words for added effect: “I only have the Wii connected (semi-dramatic pause) for Gamecube compatibility.”

He’s Jesse Hardesty. And he’s a retro gaming nerd (first console: the Magnavox Oydessy 300, released in 1976, which he promptly deconstructed). 

I’m immediately charmed. 

When I step into his retro-gaming room—a shrine, really—it’s with the awed silence generally reserved for the arrival of extraterrestrials in a Spielberg movie. The lightswitch is covered by a joystick game pad. Toggling the joystick brings up the low lights. Pressing either of its gray buttons elicits the “pew pew pew” of 8-bit laser blasts—Asteroids or Galaga-style, respectively. It has the feel of a recording studio crossed with an interactive gallery.

Subdued track lighting illuminates the glass display cabinets which bookend a couch covered with a Pac-Man maze blanket and a couple of ghost pillows (specifically, Blinky and Clyde). The ambient light of the glass towers bathes a carefully arranged collection of pristinely packaged vintage games for various consoles. The dim walls are marked by bookcases and cabinets loaded to capacity with cartridges, discs and gaming ephemera. 

But the star of the show is at the front of the room, a glass and metal display case holding more than half a dozen game systems spanning decades, all efficiently wired to a nearly extinct multi-channel switcher (“I’ve got 8 outputs on that bad boy”) which runs through a modern home theater rig. It’s a veritable stable of gaming history. There are nods to modernity with the PS3 and Wii U; Sega is well-represented with the Saturn, the Master System and Genesis; and the shrine is peppered with Atari—the 7800 and the Jaguar—and obscure shit no one remembers, like the NEC Turbo Duo. 

“I just A/V-modded that with a new s-video circuit that has not been shown to the public yet,” he says of the Turbo Duo with an unmistakable hint of pride. Translation: Turbo Duo owners? It’s about to get real. However many of you there are.

Most everything is hand-customized. Consoles are outfitted with more advanced electronics and upgraded audio and video outputs so that the oldest games don’t look like pixel chaos on the HD flat-panel that many of these systems were never meant to be displayed on. He makes his own cables and hardware when the need calls—which is exactly the kind of thing that differentiates a run-of-the-mill gamer from a real-deal awesome fucking nerd.

Gamers are fans. They speak a language most people understand. Popular culture is, well, popular. Nerds speak in their own dialect. “Standard CX-40’s in there,” “that’s a K600 AMD processor with a deactivated internal and external cache,” “it’s got a Roland LAPC-1 soundboard for MIDI,” “that’s a 2600 homebrew by Paul Slokum, the same guy who did the synth cards,” “DOS Box helps. ScummVM is pretty handy, as well.”

Gamers just want their gear to work. Nerds want to know how the objects of their obsession work. While a collection like Hardesty’s would be the ultimate fantasy for most players, the nerd’s predilection to tear that gear apart and know all of its facets, and even add a few of his own, is what sets the nerd apart. A gamer is a fan. A nerd who plays games is a fanatic. Hardesty is a nerd, and I feel warm nostalgia looking at the installation, nostalgia for these very things that fulfilled my life during a seminal, lost era. But does he feel it, too? Can you feel nostalgia for a place in time if a part of you never stopped living there?

Hardesty recently organized the eleventh edition of the Oklahoma Video Game Expo, which he started in 2003. Attendees and contributors often bring in their own rare systems to be set up for all to play. 

“The OVGE, I’ve always thought of as a living, breathing, video game history museum,” Hardesty says. “One year, I had a guy bring not one, but two Altairs and they were both set up to play Star Trek.” You’ll have to hit up Wikipedia to find out why that is amazing (It is.)

The last OVGE took place at P.J. Gamers in August, but the air conditioner couldn’t keep up with the 40-odd arcade cabinets in use, so Hardesty has yet to begin preparations for the next OVGE.

“I know I should,” he says. “The Superbit Con guys are already taking registrations for 2015. But the fact of the matter is, I’m going to have to find another venue.”

There’s no apparent rivalry in this micro-community, per se, though names like Delph Meek, Justin Edlich and Rob “Flack” O’Hara, as well as competing regional events, are mentioned with a competitors respect. 

“Superbit Con gets 2,000 people,” he says. “Tokyo in Tulsa gets 3,000. We get at least 500 hundred every year, but that’s not huge.” 

And while that’s relatively true, the exclusivity winds up feeling even nerdier—and more genuine.