A miner after gold, a muncher in a maze, an attack coming from Mars. The names alone did half the work, a kid read the label and the whole afternoon was already decided. Worlds the size of one word. The comics next to them belonged to the same weekend, gone soft from rereading, and then somebody slotted a cartridge in and that was Saturday. A ritual, basically. Press start, the little loading music before anything even happened. Blue and remembering keep ending up in the same sentence. Far, cool, the bittersweet kind. Childhood gets recalled in roughly that key anyway, fuzzy at the corners, brighter than it really was, half rebuilt from rumor by now or something. Saved forever, that old on-screen promise. Funny words to find on a machine. But people did keep some of it, the falling, the restart, the muscle memory of where the start button was. Plenty of that decade is still inside people who only half grew up.

This is a mixed media content made starting from a photo edited in Photoshop (color grading), then animated. Music made with AI.