Drew Nellins Smith Quotes

“It bothered me that we behaved differently when other people were at the arcade. It bothered me that we had to be different at different times. I wished we could always be ourselves.”

“My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key.”

“I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.”

“Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.”

“To me the arcade experience is the ultimate gaming experience.”

“I've been accustomed to being famous and having a certain level of attention for 14 years, but in the last few months, it's changed. It's like on the arcade game, I've gone up to the next level.”

“I was raised by a single dad. Dad's idea of hanging out with your kid or day care was give her $20 in quarters, drop her at the arcade, and tell her not to talk to strangers.”

“The scraps of information she’d gathered knocked against each other, like balls in a pinball machine in one of the arcades on the front. Secrets drew her in every time – the unsaid.”

“Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.”

“I've always loved video games. I played 'Ms. Pac-man' with my dad, and I Ioved 'Galaga' and 'Tempest' and grew up on the standing arcade games. Even to this day, my dad will call me if he's playing 'Ms. Pac-man' and hold the phone up to the game.”