Kickaround Nixon

“I, on the other hand, am not going anywhere. Queer little Ahab, that’s me, looped by the neck to my own callous malady, that hubris du jour of my time, Pac-Mania.”

So begins the tale of Nick Sunder, the misplaced and misguided biographer of the doomed 1983 North American Video Game Challenge. Cast out from Wisconsin, Nick soon crosses paths with Jasper Fostercats, a young redneck-cum-Virgil who has recently joined the U.S. National Video Game Team. Together, the two travel the underworld of the 1980s American arcade scene, all the while the focus of Nick’s “Great Eye” grows sharper. Its subject: the (team) captain and originator of the USNVGT, a disillusioned man named Ashley Miles.

Miles has his own Great Eye—to pass the 256th level of Pac-Man, known otherwise as the Kill Screen. Kill Screen Kill Screen Kill Screen.