The Powerful Emotional Pull of Old Video Games
Lately I’ve been hearing a kind of spectral music in the background of my daily life. It’s a syncopated, repeating MIDI ditty that conjures a feeling of excitement and invigorating challenge. I recently recognized it, and in the process experienced an intense wave of nostalgia.
It’s the battle theme from the game Pokemon for Gameboy, circa 1996.
Nostalgia is: It could be induced in Swiss mercenaries far from home by traditional dishes and folk songs from their homelands ( for that reason), but “doctors believed that opium, leeches and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms.” Sadly, or fortunately—it’s very hard to say which—nostalgia has not been that easy to cure, to the extent that today nostalgia connoisseurs can be found searching out the glorious past or the long-lost homeland in just about every area of discourse.
