Muster's Last Stand: Part One

Now Arriving at Madtown

There comes a time when every Tecmo boy must become a Tecmo man. And on March 3^rd, it was my Steve Christiening. After months of inadvertently studying the game on new levels, I thought it was time to put this new knowledge to the test. So I gathered up my belongings, kidnapped my friend, Ryan the Lodgefather, and left my real world behind to dive into the land of Garbage and, as we’d later find out, actual garbage.

White Castle and Fleischmann's Royal Vodka:
Where were you when I needed you most??

We skimped on a luxurious ride through the beautiful rolling hills of western Wisconsin, and instead shoved ourselves into the back of a packed Megabus (a double-decker behemoth of stank and all sorts of illegalities). About thirty minutes in, the WiFi that was boasted as an added benefit for our comfort was, like all ‘benefits’ of the Megabus, a total sham. Having to reboot my phone every five minutes just so I could play two-letter words in my very heated Words With Friends game somewhat helped to pass the time, while the rest was utilized by taking peeks at the young man in front of us viewing a family-friendly website about how to ‘Drill Your Bitch’.

Eventually, we prevailed through a storm that took many Tecmo lives that night, but not without losing a piece of our own innocence. Despite learning some lingo that may have saved us on the mean streets of Madison, such as “muhfuggah”, “shih”, and “six-fo”, it was a ride we’d hoped to soon forget. Luckily, there was a chance at that possibility when we found that there was a stop smack dab in the middle of college bar paradise. Somehow we came to the decision to choose that stop over going to the park and ride on the edge of town that may or may not have been on some border of a Madison turf war.

After shaking some sense back into our “smart” phones, we got our GPS warmed up to look for the Plaza Tavern, a site we’d heard much about but, for the next half hour, couldn’t find proof of its existence. Some told us they’d never heard of it, while others claimed it was now a whiskey joint. Either way, we were still able to acquaint ourselves with the snow-caked street signs and somewhat mocking diagonal streets of beautiful downtown Madison.

Undaunted, we soldiered on to find this legendary den of iniquity on some side street surrounded by invisible puddles that made sure my feet would be about as wet as my whistle for the remainder of the night. Alone save for a few couples feasting on what were sure to be the famous Plaza-Burgers we’d seen advertised outside, we bellied up to the bar and proceeded to engage in some down-home sauce-covered meat and a delicious local brew, the Hopalicious, while yakking it up with the bartender on our Tecmo-related endeavors. 

Soon enough, our conversation caught the ears of a couple of Southern boys from the Lone Star State, Kevin and Jeff. A steward of the skies, Kevin got himself and his brother up to Madison on a free flight, apparently ready to put their collective boots up some collective Northern ass. Soon enough, the menu came out featuring two-dollar rail drinks that couldn’t be denied, something that could also be said for the top-loader that, by that point, I thought I physically saw struggling to free itself from my bag.

B is A and Y is B

Now I was trying to keep it a secret that I had this machine with me, as it was a cheap console I bought at some mall gaming store because the lousy comic shop down the street had an affinity for price-gouging old Nintendos. As such, it only came with Super Nintendo controllers. I wasn’t one to complain, as it was the system I grew up on due to my parents thinking it was more important for me to have Paddington Bear books in 1991 instead of an NES system which, when we finally did procure one, was on its way out around 1993 or so. However, knowing I was now a mere mortal among the gods that would soon be arriving, it was important to keep my dirty secret hidden. Of course, four amaretto sours and a few beers later, dis muhfuggah aint give no shih.

Not the first Tecmoized TV seated on a beer fridge ever

After the gracious bartender hooked us up to a nearby television, we played a few rounds against the brothers from Texas, ignoring their condescending head shakes when they tried to figure out the controllers. “B is A, and Y is B” I found myself saying, a phrase I’d wind up shouting throughout the night and probably into my sleep later on. Things worked out, with me getting a nice branding from Jeff as his Saints out-kicked my Jets 6-0 and Ryan winning a battle of hometown pride by riding Anthony Carter over Kevin’s Cowboys. 

In the midst of one of my not-sure how many games by this point, I hear a voice behind me: “So it’s Mr. Butt Douglas himself”. Now you have to realize that my nickname is as immature as it sounds, a result of a drunken night of bowling a few years ago, but by this point I had to stick with it as it was carved in a few monuments back home that Butt Douglas was, in fact, ‘Here’. So actually hearing it from the mouth of none other than Matt Knobbe himself was a bit embarrassing. Nonetheless, I owned up to it, putting on a big smile and outstretching my hand to meet the godfather of online Tecmo. 

Soon enough, I was rubbing shoulders with Chet Holzbauer, the doomed organizer of this travesty of a tournament, who said to me, smiling, a beer in his hand, “I’m not that great…” and a few other Tecmo legends that before then were about as make-believe to me as the Tooth Fairy and Bob Nelson. QB Browns and the Average TSB Player, Tony Orenga, were now at the bar with controllers in hand, and me shouting over their shoulders “B IS A AND Y IS B!” to the point of obvious annoyance. They were moments I was hoping to capture for a lifetime, although my only real memory still seems to be when I set my full glass of beer on a slanted arcade ledge and then watched in slow motion as it slid off and on to my until-then non-hobo-smelling jacket. At least it saved a few people from getting shards of glass in their feet the night before Muster’s Last Stand.

Before long the bar was filtering out and we were saying our goodbyes, if only for the time being. Somehow seven hours had passed in what seemed like about two, and I was packing up my machine and my bastardized controllers, leaving behind not a single trace of the Tecmo-laced debauchery that had occurred just moments before. Despite our best intentions, the Super 8 we had booked ourselves at wouldn’t let us transfer to the Super 8 south of town that our Texas friends were staying at, so we headed to the streets of Madison to try and hail a cab. 

The first hour wasn’t very fruitful, however, with most of the cab companies apparently thinking we were looking for prostitutes (Ryan still hasn’t told me the details of his conversation with the driver). Of course, Murphy’s law paired with the laws of using our phones non-stop to drunk-text our wives and God knows who else eventually left us with dead phones on the equally dead avenues of Madison. Thankfully enough, with Madison still gerrymandered into the “sickeningly nice” region of the upper Midwest, some dude saw us struggling to wave down a cab and got on the horn with a company that was able to pick us up. We were then whisked away to our hotel on the opposite edge of town to get the much-needed three hours of sleep before we had to wake for my early round on the biggest Tecmo-related day of my life.

TO BE CONTINUED...