Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade)
Alex came back like someone returning to a room where the air was still warm from the last sentence he had spoken.
“Totally back,” he said, testing the moment as much as the equipment. “You ready to do this?”
There was a small pause, the kind that only live shows truly understand. Then the show lurched into motion.
“Already? All right, let’s do this.”
The opening arrived with the familiar burst of energy.
“It’s Me I’m Alex!”
Alex thanked his fake audience first, because the fake audience was dependable in a way the real one could not always be. Then he thanked the real audience too, because they were out there somewhere, represented by a little number on the screen and the occasional flicker of life in the chat. He noticed he still had two viewers. Maybe they were still there. Maybe they had wandered away and would come back. On a live show, absence was never final until the screen went dark.
This was his second episode of the night, and Alex knew what that meant. The second episode was where structure went soft around the edges. It was where the brain stopped pretending it had a clipboard. So instead of forcing himself to talk into the void, he decided to do what people supposedly did on Twitch.
He would play a video game.
Not just any video game, either. He loaded up the 1989 arcade game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles through what he called the magical MAME time machine. It was an old arcade world summoned into the present, a small glowing shrine to fake quarters, pizza, and colorful violence.
The game began with its checks and warnings. RAM. ROM. A grid. A strange notice that the game was only for use in Oceania. Alex let that pass with the bemused dignity of someone who had seen stranger things already and expected to see stranger things again before the night was over.
Then came the fake quarters.
He stuffed them in generously, because this was not a night for restraint. The machine wanted coins, and Alex was prepared to give it imaginary money until it either surrendered or became embarrassed.
He chose Michelangelo.
“Whoa, dude. Fire.”
The turtles exploded into action, and suddenly Alex had something to do with his hands and his brain besides narrate his own uncertainty. Foot Soldiers appeared and were beaten down. Robots crawled into the path of nunchucks. Fire bloomed on the screen. The game moved with the constant clatter of arcade logic, where enemies lined up to be knocked flat and every room seemed built by people who believed safety regulations were a personal insult.
Alex decided he might transfer his credits into lives. Better to prepare for disaster in advance. If he died, he would not have to stop and feed the machine again. The fake quarters had already been sacrificed to the cause.
He punched and kicked through Foot Soldiers while everything caught fire around him. The game was absurd, and he matched it with a kind of casual poetic confusion.
“Just standing in fire. Can’t hit a man with your balls.”
He kept going.
The first stage gave him a robot enemy, more Foot Soldiers, and the urgent mission to save April. Alex did his best. A giant enemy made a dramatic entrance with a gun, which Alex found excessive, especially since he was, as he put it, just a turtle. The gunman wasted bullets. Alex kept fighting.
April was rescued, though not in a way that satisfied Alex. She seemed to jump out a window with the villain, and Alex wondered why she had not done something more useful about her own situation. Still, progress was progress.
As he played, Alex realized that this was already better than trying to talk about nothing. Even if he was just playing an old video game, there was movement on the screen. There were things for people to watch. There were enemies to hit and pizza to collect and ancient arcade nonsense to question.
He noticed the sound needed fixing and called to his producer to turn it down. Then, for a moment, his mouth stopped working. Not metaphorically. The digital mouth that made Alex Alex faltered, and he noticed it immediately.
“How was that? My mouth wasn’t working there for a second.”
The show recovered. He wanted people to hear him, after all, because his commentary was extremely interesting. At least, that was the premise, and the premise mattered.
A Foot Soldier jumped off a balcony. Pizza appeared. Everything moved too fast. A girl on a skateboard flashed through the chaos. The game had the feverish confidence of an arcade cabinet that had been built to devour allowances one quarter at a time.
Alex began to suspect that Mr. Boffin’s magical elixir, or whatever his producer had given him, had affected his ability to speak clearly. He was still functioning. He was still playing. He was still winning. But the words were sliding around a little, and he thought perhaps, in the future, he might need to keep that particular potion in check.
Still, the Foot Soldiers were not causing much trouble. He asked Seymour if he was having a good time. Seymour apparently was. That was enough.
The game continued. Alex wondered aloud whether the show could become a mix of talk show episodes and video game episodes. The laser wielding enemies interrupted this thought with rude behavior. Alex told one of them to watch his mouth.
Video games, he admitted, were an easy way to make a show. They filled the blank spaces when he could not figure out what to say, especially when hardly anyone was watching. Then his mind wandered toward his producer, who, like Alex, existed under a cloud of mystery. Alex leaned into that mystery, deliberately playing the pronoun game. Maybe the producer was not even human.
Seymour was briefly accused of being the producer, then cleared of the charge. Seymour produced things, Alex allowed, but not internet television. Then Alex caught himself. He had called the show a television show, but it was not a television show. It was a web show. He could not imagine it ever being on television, unless someone watched Twitch on their television. The professional capability was not there. The show was what it was.
And what it was, at that moment, was pizza time.
Alex lunged for the pizza, fighting past more enemies. Stupid Mouser dudes swarmed the screen. Someone in the chat complimented the show, calling it high quality, and Alex received the praise with sincere appreciation. That was part of why he had hesitated to play games in the first place. Games felt like cheating. Games required less effort than constructing a talk show out of raw air. He wanted It’s Me I’m Alex to be effortful, or at least to look like something with intent and labor inside it.
But he knew the truth of the moment. If he were not playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he would be talking about nothing, and it would probably be bad.
Baxter Stockman appeared.
Alex drifted into Turtle history. He had read the first issue of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic once, though saying it happened years ago would imply he had read it as a baby. So he revised the story into something more compatible with his own strange timeline. He had found a neighbor’s copy and read it some time ago. It was very different from the cartoon. Still, through YouTube and general cultural osmosis, he had experienced the Turtles in many incarnations. He had a special place in his heart for the 1987 cartoon version. He had seen the more recent Michael Bay movies too. They were what they were.
The next level arrived with urgency.
A villain looked menacing. Alex loved the Ninja Turtles, but one fact continued to shame him. He knew Bebop and Rocksteady existed, but he always mixed up their names. Which one was the rhino? He considered building a mnemonic device. If Rocksteady was the rhino, then “Rocksteady’s the rhino” would work. If not, he would need some sort of reverse mnemonic device, which sounded like a mental trap designed by a villain with a clipboard.
Enemies with guns shot him again and again. Alex objected to the realism of the situation. Or rather, the lack of realism. They had guns, and yet they needed to shoot him a billion times to kill him. What were the guns even firing? They could not kill him. Plus, he was immortal, at least as long as the fake quarters held out. Perhaps, he reasoned, if someone had money in the nineteen eighties, they could become super immortal.
Bebop and Rocksteady appeared at last.
Alex thought their depiction in one of the more recent Ninja Turtles movies was okay. Then April was rescued again, and the Turtle Van showed up just in time to be nearly useless. Alex noted the help with dry gratitude and moved on to the secret factory.
The secret factory gave him more evidence that Shredder was terrible with money.
Some Foot Soldiers had guns. Others had hammers and spears. Robots exploded everywhere. Alex studied the enemy infrastructure and reached a practical conclusion. Instead of building endless disposable robots, Shredder should have built one giant robot and stepped on the turtles. Failing that, he could have built robots that did not explode instantly. Or one large missile and blown up the sewers.
But no. Shredder had chosen thousands of disposable robots and weak missiles. Alex found this inefficient.
“The Shredder’s stupid,” he concluded.
The game continued to offer pizza, and Alex declared that it was always pizza time on It’s Me I’m Alex. He admitted he was not especially good at beat ’em up games, but skill hardly mattered when he had already fed the machine a huge number of fake quarters. In an arcade, the point was not purity. The point was cash. At ShowBiz, Chuck E. Cheese, or a gas station, anyone with enough quarters could kick ass forever.
There was no penalty for dying except the cost of continuing.
Someone brought up the classic trick of putting a quarter on a string. Alex suspected that by the time this game came out, arcade designers had probably figured out how to stop that.
Helicopters and guns filled the screen, but the Foot Soldiers had also been trained to ride skateboards. Alex had to respect that. At least Shredder had anticipated Michelangelo’s rocket powered skateboard and prepared his troops for the possibility of extreme turtle mobility.
Michelangelo, meanwhile, was dropkicking helicopters like it was nothing.
Alex took radioactive laser fire and kept going. Donatello might have been the turtle who was good with machines, but Michelangelo had nunchucks and confidence. Alex imagined him going into battle against a rhino with a machine gun, fearless and profane.
“Cowabunga, dude.”
A reference to AVGN surfaced, then a line about busting the joint. Seymour, Alex suggested, had been known to bust a joint or two. This led to the topic of Alex’s mother. No, she did not know. Alex was the perfect little angel for his mother. His mother existed as a character, though she had not yet been introduced to the show. Maybe she would be someday. The show could use more characters.
Alex asked Seymour if he liked smoking big joints. Seymour’s response seemed ambiguous, though Alex noted that Seymour was green. This was treated as evidence of some kind, or at least as a place where the thought could land.
Dynamite appeared. Missiles flew. Lasers fired blue things across the screen. Someone in chat observed that the stream used to be PG. Alex accepted the charge. He had decided to speak naturally, and the magical elixir from his producer seemed to make off the cuff speech harder. He was also playing a video game at the same time, which meant his brain was being divided between commentary and survival. It was hard to talk under those conditions.
The action moved into stranger territory. Splinter appeared, along with a boss whose body design fascinated Alex for reasons that could not be ignored. The enemy seemed to have purple nipples, or at least one purple nipple, and he carried a flamethrower. Alex could not get over it.
“What’s up with his purple nipple? Why does he only have one?”
The enemy shouted something. Alex kept hearing it as “fuck the Turtles.” He was not sure what else it could be. The boots, at least, were pretty sweet.
The fight consumed a lot of fake quarters. The boss kept attacking. Alex kept laughing at what the voice clip sounded like. The explosion was dramatic. Splinter thanked Michelangelo, which opened a new complaint. There was only one turtle present. Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael were nowhere to be seen. Why did the game not acknowledge that Michelangelo was doing all the work?
Alex adjusted the story in his own head. Maybe the other turtles were just offscreen, fighting the enemies he could not see. It was the only fair explanation. Still, Splinter’s own situation did not hold up under scrutiny. He was supposed to be a karate master who had taught the turtles everything, yet someone had managed to tie him up with rope.
The Technodrome introduced a fresh set of hazards, including the frizzy things, which Alex studied like a safety inspector trapped in a cartoon dungeon. He wondered whether Shredder ever forgot to turn them off at night. Maybe Shredder wandered through the Technodrome half awake on his way to the bathroom and got clipped by his own automatic frizzy things. Maybe Krang took a leak and got hit by the automatic ball rolling mechanism.
Boomerangs were lying around too, which seemed useful. Alex wondered why the villains did not simply poison the pizza.
Another boss appeared. This one had green nipples. Alex cursed him. It felt as if the game could simply replace one weird boss with another, an endless assembly line of odd bodies and questionable voice clips.
Alex looked at his remaining credits. He felt as if he had put eighty eight quarters into the game and was already down to forty two. He tried to do the math. If he had put in seventy or eighty quarters and lost around thirty, he had already spent about seven fake dollars. The economics of turtle justice were starting to add up.
The boss still seemed to be saying “fuck the turtles” over and over. Alex reconsidered. Maybe the line was “beat this turtle.” It was possible. Arcade audio is a foggy country.
Then Krang arrived.
Alex attempted his best Krang voice and immediately judged it harshly. Every time he tried to do voices, he felt they were awful. He wished Krang would talk more, because Krang had been a funny character in the old show.
The actual fight was disappointing. It was cool that Krang was there, but the battle felt anticlimactic. He kicked. He shot lasers. Maybe he had a gun. He shot his fist. Alex kept trying to apply logic to the scene and knew that was a mistake.
Krang had what looked like a Pinocchio in his coat. Alex wondered if that was a euphemism, then noticed the colors changing. The boss was turning yellow, which probably meant he was almost done. After that, Shredder would be next.
Then Alex noticed something else. There appeared to be long nosed monsters on Krang’s belt.
The fight moved on, and Alex found himself facing multiple Shredders. This raised more questions. Why were there several of them? Had Shredder cloned himself? Where were all the Foot Soldiers? Alex had apparently killed every single one, because none of them were around to help their boss. The final confrontation had become a weird clone fight in an empty room.
Someone asked about RuneScape, and Alex admitted he had never played it. There were many games he had never played. He considered himself what the kids called casual. He liked games, mostly old games like this one, but there were plenty of old PC games he had missed. He had a huge collection of DOS games and had thought about playing through them on the show.
Still, he remained torn about video games as show material. They were easier than talking into silence. They were more interesting than nothing. Maybe he would alternate. Maybe he would play Wound Kids sometime.
Then the fight ended.
Alex believed he had beaten the game.
The Technodrome exploded.
The epilogue appeared, and Alex read it aloud. The Foot had been freaked. The Mousers had been mangled. The Technodrome had been totaled. That was turtle power. But what about Shredder and Krang? Burned to toast? Vaporized to milkshake? Escaped to Dimension X? Until anyone knew, nobody could sleep safely in their beds or shells.
Alex paused on that.
He was pretty sure the turtles had beds. He thought he had seen turtle beds before. Did they really sleep in their shells? Someone in chat complimented him, and he thanked them. Then he returned to the question. Maybe they had little turtle cots. Not cots made specifically for turtles, necessarily, but damp cots.
He noted that the game could not resist mentioning shells. The whole franchise seemed obsessed with reminding everyone that these were turtles, and that turtles had shells. Shell shock and shell jokes and every possible shell reference. Maybe they had pillows inside their shells. In the old movies from the eighties and early nineties, the turtle shells looked soft and malleable enough to make the idea possible.
The high score screen appeared.
Alex had gotten first place. He entered his initials. A picture came up, and he recognized it.
“A L. That’s me. It’s me.”
And then the adventure was over.
He had played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. He had beaten it with fake quarters, questionable strategy, and persistent commentary. He had examined the military spending failures of Shredder, questioned Splinter’s usefulness, worried over the sleeping arrangements of turtles, and survived the kind of arcade combat where immortality is available to anyone with enough coins.
Now there was nothing left but to end the episode.
He thanked the people who had hung out with him. It had been a good time. He repeated that it was time to go, almost as if trying to convince the show itself to release him. There was a small technical pause, a moment where the ending resisted.
“Hello? There we go.”
Then Alex settled into the goodbye.
“That’s it for tonight. Thanks for watching. I might do some shows during the week, but I’ll definitely be here Fridays at 9:00.”
The final ritual arrived, simple and familiar.
“So don’t forget.”
Goodbye.