but that’s within the games’ own conception of themselves as exciting blockbuster product - taking them as failures of one kind or another as it’s become standard to do converts bubsy’s actorliness from that of the starring attraction to a sort of jobbing z-movie shlub, mired in one contractual dispute after another and forced through a variety of ill-concieved ventures. the bubsy games themselves play with the idea of bubsy as either an actor seperable from the gameworlds he inhabits (“bubsy the bobcat in claws encounters of the furred kind”) or as at least possessing a kind of bugs-bunny-ish awareness of an audience (who are all those quips addressed to?). Interestingly very few of the bubsy fangames try to replicate the protagonist’s canon personality at face value, very likely because it’s unbearable. do his unseeing eyes still register a sense of potential alterity in the artwork he consumes, or just the frozen parody of same? bubsy is trapped inside his temporary emblem, inside a world he never made, drifting around haplessly and at last thrust towards that final refuge of the doomed, which is the effort to at least be Cultured. so it’s a real shock to find our credit rescinded and be told, no, this is what you have. we don’t really think those material expressions have anything to say about their spirits, obviously mario isn’t “really” as chunky and polygonal as he is in mario 64, just as videogames as a form can easily be distinguished from any of the various rather sad attempts to embody that form. I think that it’s so easy (and so profitable!!) to fall into a sort of idealist conception of videogame history as one of various platonic bogeys (truth! gameplay! mario!) temporarily given shape in base matter before disintegrating to appear in some new form.
once it is re-expressed within the conditions of this mangled polygonal plain…. bubsy can explore any kind of content, go on any kind of adventure.
bubsy looks at us from the depths of a bubsy 3d that NEVER ENDED, that rather than being a temporary and ignoble home for the hovering bubsy spirit (as expressed in various promotional materials) has somehow become the final determining limit for where that spirit can go. I love bubsy bobcat’s ghastly, staring eyes, which look past everything around him, as if he were the dead theologian mentioned in swedenborg - who upon death simply moves without knowing into a new eternal house shaped exactly like his own, but which over time begins to grow dimmer, more transparent, he finds rooms he’s never seen before, populated by dead and faceless men, themfurniture and writings fade, until we can only imagine some final increment of ghostliness leads to the awful truth that - aaah!!īut of course the distance in bubsy’s stare comes from a different location, not so much the gulf between the living and the dead as that between the living and the 90s.
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