Article 31—TETRIS SNACK CRACKERS BOX
(1990)
I enjoy eating food about as much as I
enjoy playing video games, so I always felt obligated to sample
products that combined these two addictions. Yeah, I ate
Pac-Man
cereal, Donkey Kong cereal and the
hilariously named Nintendo Cereal System. Yes, I played most of
the food-based games, including Kool-Aid
Man, Yo!
Noid and McDonald’s
Monogatari. My kitchen cabinets are
known to have been stocked with Franco-American Sonic the
Hedgehog Pasta, Kraft Pokémon Macaroni and Cheese and
Lipton’s Adventure of Link Fruit Snacks.
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I’m sure that lots of video-game fans
have enjoyed these same foods. But I doubt that many of them
were compelled to flatten an emptied box of Salerno’s
Tetris Snack Crackers and keep it in storage for 21 years, as I
was. Seriously, who would bother? It’s a question that
continues to be asked as I uncover more ephemera for this Web
site. Every time I reach into my files and pull out an item to
scan, I ask myself, “What were you thinking?” Some
of the articles in my collection were saved because I thought
they were historically significant. Others I may have kept
because I thought that they might be worth money in the future.
I can even think of a few items that remain in my collection
for aesthetic reasons; I squirreled them away because I just
like to look at them. But this one defies all logic. I mean, I
enjoy Tetris as much as the next guy, but it’s not like I was
planning to build a Tetris shrine in a china
cabinet in my living room. (That honor has
since been reserved for my collection of licensed No One Can Stop Mr. Domino merchandise.) So why did I save this?
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More importantly, was Tetris creator Alexey
Pajitnov aware that this product existed? He was an employee of
the Soviet government when he designed the game, and did not
even benefit financially from the licensing of Tetris to Nintendo.
Pajitnov was known to have been bewildered and greatly amused
by the excess of American culture and the privileges that we
take for granted. I’ll never forget the first time I met
him at a Consumer Electronics Show in the early 1990s. He was
signing autographs and greeting fans at the Bullet-Proof
Software booth, smiling and shaking hands...while wearing bright
yellow Faceball 2000 pajama pants. Tetris Snack Crackers may
still have been on store shelves when he relocated to the
United States in 1991; I can imagine him scratching his beard
in disbelief after seeing them for the first time!
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© 2011 Chris Bieniek. Certain video
game images, characters and logos on this Web site are
copyrighted or trademarked by their respective publishers.