Capitalism + Communism = Nintendo?
My friend and housemate, Josh, is a history major with a special (and somewhat perverse) interest in the history of the Soviet Union.
Sometimes I want to look at him and say, \”What\’s wrong with you?! Communism failed, man! The cold war is OVER. You\’re never going to be a CIA spy.\”
But I don\’t say that.
Anyway, Josh\’s senior paper is going to be about \”the perpetuation of the cold war ideology and the negative/evil portrayals of soviets found in professional wrestling and Nintendo.\”
For this, I salute him. Rather than contributing to the historical record yet another boring, bland analysis of economic policy or domestic strategy, Josh is going to write something that people might actually want to read.
When he\’s done, I\’ll try to put some excerpts up here. In the meantime, here are some things that came up during his research, and my subsequent googling:
1) Living vicariously through the victorious 1980 USA Olympic hockey team wasn\’t the only way to stick it to the Soviets in the 80s. There was NES Ice Hockey too. If you really want to relive it, here\’s what it sounded like.
2) Tetris shows that the commies were bad capitalists but wonderful space-use planners. Before long, though, the Yanks had got it, and soon they were rubbing in the poor Soviet\’s noses – they built a huge building-sized Tetris game to mock and humiliate the game\’s creators.
3) Game Over : How Nintendo Conquered The World by David Sheff looks like an interesting read for anybody who has contemplated how they might use a small, gray plastic box to attack a neighboring country.
4) If you ask me, there\’s no way Josh can cover Nintendo and wrestling in the same paper. But, then again, he is the last survivor from the planet Kripton. Here\’s the wrestling stuff: Nikita Koloff and Ivan Koloff. Relation? Uh, yeah…they\’re both Russian. Duh.