THE RICKSHAW BOY (THE KONAMI YEARS) - PART 2

Sandy Denny once sang "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", and I'm sort of ashamed to admit that I know only too well where many hours were frittered away as myself and the Rickshaw Boy spent endless nights engaged in battles with our favourite football computer game ISS (International Superstar Soccer) 2000 on the iconic Nintendo 64 console.

This was even after the ruination of my "academic career" when I definitely should have known better. God forgive me.

But if I now had to justify the wasteful Konami Years, I might make the case that Rickshaw and I were no more guilty than those guys you used to see playing chess, checkers or dominoes on city street corners while putting the world to rights.

Back in the 1990's there was a distinct cultural divide between those of our generation who swore by the more famous Fifa football computer game franchise and individuals like myself and Rickshaw who found our home with what we believed was the more refined ISS. If such a thing as a football computer game snob exists then it was surely us.

While the rest of our peers were growing out of their childhood, myself and Rickshaw were growing back into ours, developing an obsession with Nintendo's Konami masterpiece that quite simply took over our lives. So integrated did our bodies and minds become with ISS there might have even been the very real fear we would disappear into the game forever and never return, like Jeff Bridges in Tron. I can remember vividly staring at the freshly cut, forest green coloured 64 bit pitches as we both very nearly completely dissolved into emptiness. If it hadn't been for the volaitility and reactiveness (at least on my side) we might have actually compared it to a meditation at times. But alas, tempers flared too often (for me at least) to make that lofty case for our excessive time wasting.

We'd actually cut out teeth on the Super Nintendo football game Striker (1992) before evolving to the first iteration of the ISS series (1993) on the same console a little later on. Further to that, we then graduated to ISS 64 on the N64 console which, I believe, we more or less mastered (courtesy of the curve ball hack) that exposed a useful, if tyrannous, flaw in the game which did help me finally secure my first ISS trophy, winning a two year league between myself and Rickshaw during the years 1998-2000.

By the year 2000 we'd both moved away from typically choosing the usual suspect international teams such as Italy, Brazil, France and Spain as our go tos. We were becoming more nuanced in our relationship with the teams we selected now and looked for squads that aligned with our emotional sensibility. For some reason, Rickshaw tended to almost always be Czech Republic (compact, skillful and organised) as I alternated between Russia (defiant, insane and destined for failure) or Italy, depending on how badly I was being beaten by my opponent. Italy was my hail mary team in times of prolonged despair as it became increasingly obvious that Rickshaw was leapfrogging over me in terms of strategy and acumen on the pitch.

I played with monkey mind, kind of knee jerk, whereas The Rickshaw was far more composed and tactical like a chess master. He'd even learnt some "sneaky beaky" tricks which I begged him to teach me but he, much like a wily, reluctant monk, would give me only the occasional clue but never the full picture of how to copy his magic skills. In this sense there were tropes from all those Asian martial arts films he'd absorbed throughout his young life emerging in his personality, with him as the ISS Kung Fu master and me as the apprentice sweeping the temple steps and carrying buckets of water from the well at the bottom of the mountain all the way to the summit.

As the 'Curve Ball" hack had seemingly been eliminated in ISS 2000, I no longer had a way to gain dominance over my Hong Kong British friend and so what, you may ask, did I ultimately gain from this possibly fruitless excercise in mostly sustained defeats?

Well, the game was only one part of our groove when it came to ISS. Talking for hours each night about life, dreams, hopes, fears we covered a broad range of mind expanding and occasionally mind reducing subjects. We mapped out our ambitions and how we would take over Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema with our own unique hybrid brand of cross cultural genius, all whilst I continued getting my ass kicked by Rickshaw with his unique 4 4 2 formation.

Often sitting like two old men in an Ozu movie in the basement of his parents' house, which was as nocturnal a venue as a casino in Las Vegas, Rickshaw would play endless soundtracks of movies (most notably from Wong Kar Wai films especially Ashes Of Time, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger and Tsi Hark's Once Upon A Time In China) so that I felt my assimilation into Asian culture was increasing night by night.

With the occasional smell of funky durians lurking in the fridge and cups of iced grass jelly to drink, I almost believed that I was living in Hong Kong on hot summer nights as various aunties of Rickshaw's would appear sleeping in store cupboards under the stairs like Harry Potter. One might have even thought we were living in Chungking Mansions.

Of course, we did eventually grow out of our ISS induced arrested development (well Rickshaw did) and put away "childish things" (sort of) but I now look back on those endless nights of ISS, grass jelly and movie soundtracks as a time which possessed a special kind of magic atmosphere and one that would eventually inspire us to write something born from its vital essence: a screenplay entitled "Rickshaw", which to this day has yet to see the light of day.

Who knows, perhaps one day, the great dream of our shared "Ang Lee meets Mike Leigh" masterpiece might find its way onto the screen and justify all those endless hours of our precious human lives wasted on tapping our joy pads and talking bullshit long into the hot, summer nights.

For, to quote an ancient Chinese proverb : Patience is power; with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.