The PK 27 -- Game No. 19

The year is 1982, and I am four years old. I'm living in Ottawa (well, technically Nepean, but "Nepean" sounds like a urinary tract infection, and, fuck anachronisms, it's part of the Greater Ottawa Area now). My hobbies include staring at the television for an ungodly number of hours each day, occasionally coloring in coloring books (because that's what they're for!), and being told what to do by my parents (Aw!) and my brother (Ow!). I have a pretty good memory, but oddly enough I don't remember ever farting. Weird.

One day my old man -- though he was a relatively young man then; it's just a figure of speech, dude -- comes home with something called "a computer." It's all pretty lame, seeing as how you have to spend hours upon hours typing in code in order to get anything on the sucker to work, but then I learn, probably with a grape drink box in my grubby little hands, that it plays games, and who doesn't like games? (Dogs?) It's made by some unassuming calculator manufacturer called Texas Instruments. It and one game in particular will change my life forever.

That game is Munch Man. Obviously, it's a ripoff of Pac-Man, a fact I knew at the time; but kids -- and Koreans -- care little of such trivialities. Because it's fun! Imagine a world in which one Mr. Eoin A. Forbes's first home gaming experience is a letdown...Now there's a goddamn scary thought.

Just look at that demonic fucker up there. You're mine, Cone! Not so fast, Triangular Prism! And you, you purple thing that looks like a portion of either a guitar neck or a picket fence, I'm saving a special level of torture for you, one reserved for enduring talky Diane Keaton movies and withstanding the inane chatter of newbies at my local watering hole. (You know what, that is so weird! Your family and friends back home will positively have aneurysms after laughing so hard at the fact that Koreans write the number nine backwards.)

If Pac-Man is a jolly fat yellow man not unlike Samo Hung, Munch Man is his Jack o'Lantern-faced evil twin, content to shit all over your living room floor. The eternal question of why the dude's name is Munch Man when he does not in fact eat anything is pretty clear now, isn't it?

He already ate.