Tommi's Way - Chapter 2 of 30
Tommi's Way - Chapter 2 of 30
Tommi's Way: The Video Game That Doesn't Exist - Chapter 2 of 30
The following is a series of chapters from the novel Tommi’s Way - The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist. Each chapter will be uploaded on pilleater.com until the novel comes out with everything in it (that also entails revisions and reformatting). You can catch up by reading the first or previous chapter. Otherwise, each chapter can be read as an isolated article with not context of the past and future. Reader criticism and influence plays a huge part in shaping this future novel. Just like Fantasy Flight’s “Living Card Game” model, this project is also a “living novel,” where the novel changes form as the reader base influences the author’s direction through comments and criticism until it is finished. This is what makes this work of art a true “novel,” where this innovative artistic device (i.e. the living novel) determines “the new” in the novel, akin to the reader’s gaze in Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose.
Chapter 2: When I First Saw Tommi’s Way
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I believe the first time I saw the game was likely in 1997, although it could also be 1999, 2000, or at the latest, 2001. I was born in 1991 and I don’t think I saw the game in store past 2001.
The title is also an entire misnomer. The game existed in a blue box with a pink, crystal like font that curved to look like the word “Tommi,” and yet it could never have been “Tommy.” Tommi owned a “Way.” The letter “W” was curved into the second letter “m” of Tommi. It could very well look like a disturb artificial intelligence generation of what I thought I saw.
There was a couple of anime characters on the front of the box. At least two girls with big tits, and serious looking guy, and a dragon-like creature over the title.
The company who made the game I thought was Hudson. The mascot did look like a bee, but I could also be thinking of. another game. That’s the strange part, because I would assume a well known publisher would make this game. And I don’t think publishers like Takara or Koei made this game either.
The game was brand new in shrink wrap. I swear Argonaut Games maybe had something to do with it, especially the FX chip. They made Starfox and that game’s graphics alone was ahead of it’s time. I saw Starfox being played on the TVs at FuncoLand. Where Tommi’s Way was on the fourth shelf near the “A-rated” games. Was the game meant for adults? Was it pixelated pornography? I don’t know.
Looking at the back of the box, I saw a red demon girl and and puzzle maze in the screenshot of the game. Yes, there is some hentai page out there of these characters and some fanboys have been aroused by their image over and over again. Like the unreleased Starfox 2 that came out in 2017, it should of came out in 1996, but failed to do so. We feel mentally retarded because this could of been the legacy of sexy animal girls that nerds could of bonded over. Now they are adults and have to simulate, as if, they fell in love with Miyu the Lynx and Fay the Dog. Tommi’s Way had the same sexual arousal like in Lunar: Eternal Blue. Tommi’s Way wasn’t Americanized whatsoever.
This peculiar FuncoLand was based out of a shopping center in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, which now stands a Chinese restaurant or shoe store. I recall going back to that store and watching TVs of Conker’s Bad Fur Day at the Rock Solid level. I thought it was cool you could pee on people. Even more strange is that the game was Rated “M,” and even my brother begged my mom to buy the game and give it to him on his 18th birthday. As for Tommi’s Way, it just stood there, isolated and neglected with no potential buyer and as a byproduct of it’s time.
Everyone who contributed to the world of Slobbovia knows what I am talking about when I refer to Tommi’s Way. Slobbovia started out as a postal variant of Diplomacy and soon turned into it’s own role-playing game, even before Cosmic Encounter or Dungeons & Dragons ever conceived of the role-play design. Every area has it’s own rules, made up culture, politics between some guy in Winnipeg and Milwaukee. The medium of sending mail became a game and a new world.
I am following the same cliche found in Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel. What is “the glass bead game” and how does one play it? What is Tommi’s Way and how does one play it? I fooled myself thinking it could ever be a game. The internet didn’t even discovered it yet. Call it “lost media,” another “creepypasta,” or some perverted joke that I cry in agony about. Tommi’s Way was just another game at FuncoLand.
It is a recent fallacy within creative writing that objects dominate words and ideas. Instead of explaining something in detail, a simple mention of a cartoon is good enough. This fallacy likely came from John Updike in his work Rabbit, Run or A&P, and exploded in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Add that with the frenzy of searching for images on Google, Instagram stories, and looking at a random Twitter feed, creative writing emulates this technological fad of short attention spans, dopamine hits, and ugly nostalgia for object-oriented materialism. Distraction becomes apart of creative writing and collage art becomes the norm. Words become objects to stop sophistication. Ideology is not questioned in the object itself. For example, we may know that the word “hentai” must mean anime and pornography, but the ideology of the word mentioned in Western interest could mean many things to the speaker in his own context.
A description of the text being like music or visual art is another fallacy rooted in synesthesia. Synesthesia implies that the writer is somehow something other than a writer knowing well the medium of creative writing is obsolete to the higher mediums of music, performance, visual art, and so on. There is no equivalent to someone who speaks a poem to the talented guitarist because the former lacks music theory and the understanding of music itself. The arts are not the same because music has a superior power over people than minimal words that can never supply pitch or dance. “Sound poetry” or “song” tries to make use of poetry that it becomes music, yet fails because words are not the same as a guitar note.
Cartoons and pornography also have power over words because they create an instant form of ideology over than what could be read. This is besides music, as the art school student makes the same fallacy that drawling forms is “therapeutic” to their self or that expression is reached through mimicry and projection. Often the mold of clay does not become the body of Adonis, but takes the form of pornography, of simple pleasures, that the cartoon can become. This is a reflection of the artist that stops sophistication, and writing, from building out to greater things.
I say this because I don’t want to describe Tommi’s Way as some nostalgic trip in the past to celebrate a certain zeitgeist. That’s not the ideology of the video game or what I am trying to write. I believe writing is superior to the visual arts because it happens before art is even constructed. But I would never replace music over writing, or cartoons over writing, because this is a fallacy, a technological error, because it assumes all art is the same. Writing requires a higher intellect and discipline in order to achieve it’s artistic goals. A musician may be a talented sitar player, but as well be illiterate with regards to writing; or of logic comprehension. This isn’t to say that one needs the other, as I am putting bluntly here that writing is the only thing that happens before the sitar is being played or the cartoon is being drawn. The visual arts cannot reduce writing down to aesethics, as writing conceived of that thought and ideology before the concept of art began.
This account of Tommi’s Way isn’t another “alt-lit” aesthetic clone of Sam Pink or Gary J. Shipley. The problem of alt-lit (and “Bizarro fiction”) is that it cares more about what is on the front cover of the book than the text, because the text is just as visual and as shallow as the artsy and hip front cover. Travis Jeppesen, with his nepotistic connections with Dennis Cooper and Peter Sotos since 2006, has tried to create an ugly “object oriented writing” ripped from Timothy Morton and injected this as a new fad of creative writing. The point is to emphasize objects over humanity and to displace writing as nothing more than some objected oriented fad that Christopher Willard is doing. The book becomes an art objects, and that creative writing should only be judged as an object itself than anything to do with logic or what could be written. Nothing matters, and “art” like this is meant for hipsters and the illiterate.
Yes, this account of Tommi’s Way has an attractive and artsy front cover because I am quite aware that this is art project. But what is art if it’s just subjective and pretty? I write this because it’s more than a front cover and more than bullshit “aesthetics.” Pure Data and Max looks pretty as a programming language because it uses objects on a white canvas, but most of these “patcher” users are as shallow as the language itself because the users want to sound intellectual and sophisticated as an authentic C++ programmer without doing the hard work. If you can’t write it in the language, then you can’t think of it. The same thing happens in writing and the arts.
I will not succumb to describing events as express, or “hyperlink,” objects. This fallacy assumes that FuncoLand is not a video game store, but “FuncoLand” as an ideology and aesthetic. I write this because “Tommi’s Way” is not what you are actually thinking about. It’s not Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy (as I compare the game to them), because these are mere descriptions of similarities and not truths. When I saw Tommi’s Way, I saw other objects in the store. I don’t mean to confuse you with Conker’s Bad Fur Day or Starfox being in the same room as this would make you think Tommi’s Way is one of the same in that era. After that moment, the game was gone forever.
I assumed Tommi’s Way another JRPG without context. It was another Secret of Mana multiplayer novelty game with above average hentai. I can use objects here to describe what it is, but it still this does not do justice. If someone is to really get to the point, they would have to describe everything in their own words without resulting to other mediums or ideologies to speak of. I don’t mean to describe my account of Tommi’s Way as being an electric, kaleidoscope mess of throwing objects on the white canvas until the reader finds something they like.
Again, to even talk about this in Western terms doesn’t do this justice because I am ranting about how I think about how Japanese act and think. I started to think about this game about when I kept having dreams about it a decade later. The game-play happened in my dreams which I thought was the game. But it gets even more strange after when I realized it has something to do about my passionate interest in game design.
I’ve written about board games I liked, designs that break the robot, and interactivity between people, not computers. A video game is just that. It fails to have interactivity with humans, unless the video game becomes an interface between two or more people in that virtual reality. Jesper Juul often called this conundrum a “half-real” condition, where video games are a new reality plus a game. Too many people get confused about the reality part and lose touch to what is a game, and that is why there is an obsession over “story” or “graphics” then there even was with line of code or design of games. It is the design of the game that does not need a computer. Board and card games (while the snobbish say “tabletop games”) have existed since humans started creating and playing games. Still, this medium is neglected in favor of ideological black lesbians and American liberalism that demands why a computer should say. This is why Japanese games are pure and without Americanism because they can focus on game design because liberalism is not an issue with the Japanese.
Tommi’s Way likely did come with a family-friendly manual with comic panels and some elves with big tits. Probably also had an insert for Nintendo Power magazine and some disclaimer sheet about getting a seizure. And from what I saw in my sleep, the cart was blue. Call it something out of Japan for a saturated American market.
I write this first experience both in real-life experience and dreamlike fiction. Some of you look at a book and read the sad disclaimer at the beginning of the book, that “Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner.” That would be the joy-kill that Tommi’s Way is, indeed, fake, and a figment of my imagination. Why would you care from here on out that I should tell you more about something lodged in the back of my mind?
Here is the caveat; I didn’t add that disclaimer! Tommi’s Way is real, and I am willing to take any libel or offense that someone may read from my account to find the video game.
The Myst series of computer games did a great job of concealing information and creating an environmental puzzle for the player. I remember playing Riven and not ever understanding what I was doing or why these recorded glyphs I discovered matter. I am also not assuming that my account of Tommi’s Way is a Riven puzzle either or that there is a final solution to this. I guess there is a certain amount of pleasure to read about something that can never be solved like Bigfoot or the Zodiac Killer. I will be completely honest and write that I have no idea why I had to audacity to write about the video game until now.
I do enjoy puzzles. And yet, puzzles are not games. There is a level of leisure in solving and understanding puzzles, like, how logic works. Some call it “recreational math,” while some say they are riddles. It’s a misnomer to call code-breaking a game, as play is an important aspect of reading. All that time “reading” Finnigans Wake or The Book of The New Sun is rather a form of play. Studying pays off. And to talk about hardcore concepts from these works is enjoyable as meeting someone else in the same book club around it. And yet, they can’t be “books,” but rather, puzzles with written instructions in English.
I tell you this now because that fogged memory of Tommi’s Way is coming back to me. Dreams kept coming back to reveal greater truths about philosophy, art, and self-discovery. But it gets crazier, because a high school friend of mind had a copy of the game.
…That actual video game was Wetrix+ for the Sega Dreamcast.
Wait, the Dreamcast? I’ve just said it was for Super Nintendo!
I’ll explain why Wetrix fits back into the moment I saw Tommi’s Way at FuncoLand.
…To be continued…
