SXSW 2009: A lifetime of gaming in a single booth

by JC Fletcher on Mar 14th 2009 5:30AM

It is not my intention to shill for a beverage, but Mountain Dew's installation in SXSW's ScreenBurn Arcade was too cool for me not to share. As I walked by, I noticed a cozy little setup with a couch, a vintage TV, an NES, an Atari 2600, and a pile of games; a booth employee was playing some Super Mario Bros. I looked around a bit and found that Mountain Dew's expansive booth featured separate areas dedicated to discrete eras of gaming.

In addition to the early-mid '80s corner, the booth featured an SNES/Genesis shrine, a setup with a PlayStation, N64, and Xbox, and, of course, modern installations, one of which featured Wii Sports and the other Rock Band. The whole effect was more than nostalgic, it was soothing -- I can definitely imagine getting away from the stress and crowds by whiling away time in 1985. And more than that, it was like seeing my own life in distinct little pieces. That PlayStation/Xbox room might as well have been my dorm room -- except for the nice furniture and TV.

As great as the booth was, it didn't necessarily make me crave any Mountain Dew, though the booth staff gave me some anyway. Kudos to the Dew for abandoning the "extreme" for a bit and doing something incredibly sweet.

Mountain Dew ScreenBurn booth

Tags: retro, screenburn, screenburn-arcade, sxsw, sxsw-2009

Reader Comments (51)

FIRST of all, that with the Super Nintendo didn't look anything like my bedroom at the time...

Back to the drawing board; 'stiqers are a clever lot and it will take more than that to not get voted down for doing what you did. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.

that does make me nostalgic, except the carpet in our house when i played the NES was brown.

:'( all the memories...

I could see myself camping out in the Nintendo 64 section for days on end, finishing games i played hardcore when i was a teenager.

LOL, you took the words right out of my mouth.

that's a really cool idea, I like it

Whoa. The first time I ever played Super Mario Bros, it was on a console TV almost EXACTLY like that one (at my grandmother's house, but hers had some really overwrought woodwork on the sides, and no remote control). The Atari was hooked up to an itty-bitty black-and-white TV for Christmas morning (though it was a 7800, not a 2600)...

GOD DAMMIT I FEEL OLD.

The period-correct furniture is what really makes this work.

Is it sad that I look at this gallery and see decorating ideas? The NES/2600 one looks like Cinemassacre/AVGN's gaming room.

they all have something familiar to them. i remember the days of only having one television to play on.

Everybody games on one TV, the one and ONLY TV in your home. Having more than one is a sign of decadence, and decadence is almost always the twin sister of emptiness.

Bowser Rogozhin: Telling people to accept his ideals and lifestyle or fuck off since 2008

i don't think i got a tv in my room till high school. i think back to the days when my video game time was limited by certain factors but i still played alot.

what are you, a mormon?

ha! i'm not a mormon. it's just back then there weren't that many channels so we all watched the same stuff.

i still have and use a "vintage" tv like that in my basement. i had to get an adapter to play my games that need vga cables.

I used to play on my granny's old TV just like that (which used to be brand new and expensive, once upon a time), and still do. I went through the Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, N64, Sega Saturn (I rented it, okay?), Playstation, Dreamcast, Xbox, Playstation 2, and GameCube on that thing. And one day, I'll play one of those newfangled HD consoles on it. Because playing a game on any other TV is sacrilege.

!

Period correct furniture my @$$. I had the NES-setup couch 6 years ago and it was brand new!

Not that I really care. The concept of this is awesome. 10 years from now, giant SDTVs will make a comeback.

The evenly spaced posters from era-specific popular films and musical groups is kind of creepy, isn't it?

I don't know anyone who hung posters with such care. And why "skater's unite" in the Wii room? Do skateboarding teens play Wii most of all, or is it just that skateboarding is EXTREME like Mountain Dew(tm)?

Can anyone explain why they put the playstation, N64, and Xbox all in the same era? Xbox didn't come out until the next gen.

Also, why didnt the wii in with that lot as well? Certainly closer to the XBOX1 than the 360/PS3

Hey samik, welcome back from 2007. Care for some duct tape?

Really creative and nostalgic, I would have loved to check the place out. One detail threw me off though: the RHCP photo hanging on the wall in the N64 era was taken for the 2006 album Stadium Arcadium. http://00.img.v4.skyrock.net/009/coco-x-astiko/pics/1257133692.jpg

Fuck, it makes me nostalgic and I wasn't even alive in the 80's

Strangely, me too.

I remember we used to have a large wooden Zenith floor television that was about the size of a medium dresser. One day it stopped working, so my mother went out and purchased a newer model. I then wheeled (yes, TV's were so large they had wheels) the Zenith into my small bedroom where it took up one whole wall.

I took off the back board, poked around and discovered a bad wire. I took it off and walked down to Radio Shack with it; they sold me a replacement for about a dollar. I then went home, attached the new wire, and the TV started working again. I became the first of my friends to have a color television in their bedroom just for playing Nintendo. Good memories.

I like our lightweight and flat TVs, but sometimes I get nostalgic for that small table with a screen. The flat top was perfect to put the NES, extra controllers, all my games, gaming magazines, and whatever snacks my friends and I were consuming.

Where was the Dreamcast!?

The what?

Somewhat different for me, because i was working with a huge Zenith 1986 set from 2000 until Christmas 2006, then got an LCD.

I had a Hitachi from ~1984 for all gaming until 2004. But that 90's TV is SO the kind of TV they were selling in the 90's. Man I wanted a nice quality TV with black casing like that.

Big problem with the 90's pic, that shitty old radio. People were really getting into CD players. Should have had an old model CD player there.

There's so many mistakes, like why is there a cassette boombox in the SNES pic? It was 1991, those radios died out in 85. There's a movie poster of stripes too. A movie from 82, wtf?

Maybe they didn't get around to remodeling? I have a Beatles poster up from their 1969 album Abbey Road, right above my 360 and Wii, nothing wrong with that. It's certainly a smaller "mistake" than the 2006 picture of the Red Hot Chili Peppers hanging up in the N64/PS era room.

Right, but this is a setup meant to represent each era

I think this is sweet. And, do people take pleasure in being the guy that points a greasy finger snorts from behind his thick frames, "Hey, guysh, that's like totally not the right era, DUH" ?

There are few things more annoying than people waving their nerd-penises around in some kind of sausagefest brawl. I'm proud of my nerdiness, too, but I don't feel the need to show it off at every opportunity.

But you do feel the need to show off your supposed superiority for not waving a "nerd-penis" every chance you get, don't you? The only time I ever see you post here is to criticize some other comment.

I think the idea is really neat and they pulled it off well, but there are a few details they should have worked on. What's wrong with pointing that out? I didn't do so in a flaming, troll way. But here comes Saria the Cat, the great criticizer, ready to hurl a few derogatory comments and retreat to lurking in search of another victim.

@vidGuy: If you didn't critique the booth in a trolling, flaming way, why be offended or assume my comment is directed towards yours?

And, I find it unlikely that after nearly 1000 comments, you can accurately claim all I do is criticize other peoples' comments. I think most commenters will point out their own disagreements when they see them, and I don't see anything different about my actions.

You can't call someone a lurker if they have 990+ comments.

You can if you have over 7100 comments :)

But i would really just like to say that let's please not start another "holier than thou" contest. It would break the peace that we've bought by driving Sprinkles off...

I should also say that I actually appreciated your comments and didn't feel like you were being douchey. My criticism was directed against those who completely put down the booth because of era contradictions and proceeded to list all they could spot. Maybe I should have been more specific.

@Mr Khan: Wow, that's impressive. I can't even excuse myself since we both started around the same time. It just proves I need to step up my game. ;)

Ok then, I'll call truce to that. @ Mr Khan, I bow to you at my 4204 comments, especially since I've been here more than a year longer than you.

Fun factoid for me: you have to go back 419 pages on my profile page to see my first comment.

I can't believe i've barely made 1000 comments in 3 years. Thats a bit slack.

HOLY SHIT! I had that EXACT VHS holder that the Genesis is sitting on top of.

that girl has nice legs!

Amen to that dude, finally someone noticed something really interesting on the pictures. She is very sexy in that outfit hehe, a real hardcore gamer. :D Kisses from Portugal cutie! xD

I guess I lived in an alternate universe because my system was a Sega Master System. The 2600 and NES booth were really two eras.

Ioda, the independent music marketing and distribution company, is providing the SXSW Opening Day Bash Sampler 2009 as a free MP3 download. You can find a link to the album here.

http://dealdogs.net/?p=14718

Hahahaha, I went to this and spent 30 minutes or so beating Bowser in Super Mario World. Pepsi even interviewed me...and a bunch of people got pictures...

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SXSW 2009: A lifetime of gaming in a single booth

Mountain Dew ScreenBurn booth

Reader Comments (51)

Posted: Mar 14th 2009 5:40AM SocialDefect said

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Posted: Mar 14th 2009 3:53PM Saria the Cat said

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Posted: Mar 14th 2009 5:02PM Saria the Cat said

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Posted: Mar 14th 2009 5:12PM Saria the Cat said

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