8-Bit Cafe is a weekly Retronauts column looking back at the life and times of the 8-bit era. Its name comes from an excellent retrogaming bar in Tokyo that perfectly embodies the timeless, nostalgic appeal of gaming's most distinctive era.
Back to the Future was a great, great movie.
Back to the Future Part II...not so much. As a second installment, it was a damn sight better as a follow-up than, say,
The Matrix Reloaded was. But other sequels have done the "darker, more complex" thing far better than the
BttF series did --
The Empire Strikes Back,
The Godfather Part II -- and in comparison to those classics, the second
BttF seems pretty limp. Contrived at times, forced at others, even the clever bits (in which we see footage from the first film from new angles) tend to suffer from obviously having been shot around the absence of Crispin Glover.
And then there's the movie's vision of 2015. Admittedly, we have another six years before we finally catch up with Robert Zemeckis's rendition of the future, but it's a safe bet that even then the real world won't resemble
BttFII's 2015. Not only in the big things, like the flying cars and large-scale holographic projectors, but the little things, too: acetate receipts and fashion that appears to be the late-'80s neon surfwear obsession taken to an unhealthy extreme. The movie's glimpse of the future seemed pretty dopey even at the time, and it's only gotten worse with age.
And yet, it's interesting to note a few of the things
BttFII got right. These are likely an inevitable random coincidence, given
BttFII's scattershot approach to futurism. I mean, take a broad enough swing and eventually you'll hit something, right? For instance! At one point some sports statistics are rattled off, and a Miami baseball team is mentioned -- at the time the film was made, no such thing existed. But a few years later, the Marlins set up camp in Florida, and I recently read that they'll be moving to Miami soon. How eerily prescient! Or... not.
The McFly family's home life isn't entirely unrealistic, either: we actually do have jumbo wall-sized televisions, real-time videoconferencing, and split-screen TV. We don't, however, have extensive home fax networks. (It's always interesting to see how Hollywood -- even those made as late as the end of the '90s -- failed to grasp how pervasive and ubiquitous computers would become.) And weirdly enough, Marty Jr.'s hideous color-shifting ball cap came into vogue shortly after
BttFII debuted in the form of those infamous
Hypercolor shirts.
Of course, the real highlight of
BttFII, at least for awesome videogame nerds like us, is the random
Wild Gunman cameo in the Cafe '80s sequence. I say "random" because, seriously, Wild Gunman? Of all the light gun games to pick, they had to go with one that never actually had a dedicated arcade cabinet? I guess it was meant to be a tie-in with the Old West theme of
Back to the Future Part III, but still, not the most obvious choice.
What makes the Wild Gunman scene so interesting is that (1) one of the kids who talks trash to Marty would
grow up to become Frodo Baggins, and (2) it's actually predictive, but in a way that's only recently come to light. The scene plays out like this: Marty sees some kids get a Wild Gunman cabinet running and swaggers up to the machine, determined to impress the kids with his smooth '80s arcade skills. He picks up the light gun, puts down some bad guys in rapid succession, and waits for the resultant adulation. The kids then proceed to cuckold him by expressing disappointment that Wild Gunman is a game played with your hands. "That's like a baby's toy!" they sneer, then run off to, I dunno, hoverboard into traffic or something.
Various inventors, designers and developers have been trying for years to create hands-free gaming, beginning way back with the
Mindlink, a headband that was supposed to enable gamers to play Atari VCS games with the power of their brains alone. (I don't think it worked out so well.) But aside from a few interesting failures, game interfaces have remained stubbornly manual in nature -- not only requiring the use of both hands, but actually increasing the complexity and intricacy of what your hands are supposed to do. Or at least, that was the case until last spring, when Nintendo launched
Wii Fit, a game built around an input device that can be used for completely hands-free gaming.
Of course, hardcore gamers wrote off Wii Fit and the Balance Board as novel non-games, although this argument sounds even more shrill and hollow now that Wii Fit has handily outsold this generation's ultra-blockbuster,
Halo 3. Plus, more and more games are beginning to include Balance Board support, including the upcoming
Punch-Out!! remake. Admittedly, I'm sure the script writers for
BttFII had some other form of alternate controls in mind for the games of 2015 (probably something dopey like the Mindlink, given their other attempts to predict the future), but as is so often the case, sometimes a joke has a much longer lifespan if you don't over-explain it.
And you know, it's sort of ironic that it's Nintendo -- the creators of that "baby's toy" Wild Gunman -- who actually managed to break the mass acceptance barrier for hands-free gaming. Although it does make a fellow wonder why the hell Wild Gunman and all those other NES light gun games haven't shown up on Virtual Console yet. Maybe Nintendo's still smarting from young Elijah Wood's cruel mockery?
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