The Head That Wears The Crown (Heavy Barrel, Heavy Shreddin')

The obvious question—the only one that makes any sense in context, is what exactly is heavy here. Or perhaps more usefully, what is the nature of the weight? The 2.6 ounces of an NES controller are essentially immutable, after all—in a strictly literal sense these allegedly heavy games weigh no more than Bubble Bobble or Airwolf. All pixels are weightless. Clearly, then, we are in a realm of something else; a metaphoric weight akin to moral obligation. 

There certainly is a morality at play in Heavy Shredding; that old familiar logic of cobra command. Here we are on an island, tasked with destroying the enemy's underground artillery base. Who are we? Who is the enemy? The game remains wholly silent on this. We are a man with a gun and they are an island military base; these things combine like knight and princess, plumber and weird mushroom thing, The manual clarifies slightly; terrorists have done this, and the base contains a nuclear weapon. But this is not knowledge—merely further trappings of cobra command, a symbolic system that exists to compel run-and-gun action. It is only in the larger context of Reagan/Bush America that these isolated and compulsory symbols acquire any sort of moral dimension—one of neoliberal militarism and American economic imperialism. Even still, this morality is meant to be automatic—a simple and reflexive symbology. A terrorist implies a commando to shoot him. These things must be. 

This is not weight but its opposite. The entire point is that these are not heavy moral decisions; merely the reflexive consequences of politics as aesthetics. (So politics, then.) The bullets, the tanks, the death tolls, ll of these are as insubstantial as the pixels. Heaviness is forbidden, suspect, probably queer or commie. Once again we reach a dead end.

Of course, had the alphabet run the other way we'd never have made the mistake in the first place; clearly Heavy Shreddin', a snowboarding game that can be described as a sort of proto-SkiFree only with a snowboard. This is a game of blissful amorality; there is simply the hill, the snow, the exhilaration of speed. Moral heaviness lies self-evidently outside of its system, an irrelevance, perhaps even the thing this game is meant to be a tonic to.

A third sense, then—something akin to what is heavy in heavy metal music. This can be understood as a heaviness of aesthetics. Heavy metal is excessive music, a genre whose promise is that it gives too much. The pleasures it offers are explicitly ones of overstimulation. This is, of course, a difficult thing to judge about thirty year old video games. It was bad enough a decade ago. Are these games overstimulating? Were their simple and heavily abstracted graphics and tinny soundtracks a blast of thrilling sensory overload? It's possible in the abstract, but it's hard to imagine either of these being among them.

Perhaps the useful way to think about this, then, is to ask what run-and-gun military action and snowboarding have in common. Once that's determined we can move on to figuring out how this thing might be heavy. The obvious answer is a sense of coolness. Shooting terrorists is cool. So is snowboarding. Indeed, snowboarding is on some level defined precisely by the fact that it has a coolness to it that skiing lacks. These things are heavy because they have a sense of swaggering grandeur.

In this regard "heavy" might be understood as a synonym for "super" (the term that would eventually be used for the cooler successor to the NES, but already used for ten separate NES games) or "power"—prefixes that serve simply as intensifiers. But in this case the two objects in question point towards more concrete terms. Snowboarding and the military are not simply cool—they are masculine. This is boy stuff. And that's true in a way that the other intensifiers aren't. Sure, video games and the NES had a certain masculine aesthetic to begin with—the sleek cyberpunk grey and red design wasn't exactly playing for the same crowd as Polly Pocket, y'know? (There's a lot to be written, incidentally, about the way in which Nintendo console design evolved versus its competitors.) But Power and Super do not suggest the sort of masculine bravado as this suite of heavy games.

One could point out the fragility of this—the way in which the heaviness of these games feels defensive, a point undermined by the ardency with which it's made. But the true is a moment of the false, and this is no exception. And if the secret history of masculinity is that it's a burden to bear, well. What more is there to say on the subject?