You May Kiss the Royal Hand

As I think of it, the title of this post may be a bit misleading: my Dr. Mario prowess doesn't exactly make me royalty, just the champion of the world.

Those who know me never seem startled enough when they learn that they are in the midst of the greatest Dr. Mario player in the world. Rather, my accolades usually meet with scorn and derision (perhaps the astute among you are noticing a pattern of disrespect). I am, however, the Dr. Mario world champion--and I defy anyone to prove me wrong in head to head competition.

Now, to win a Dr. Mario match one needs to win 3 games. Each game consists of stacking pills of various colors on viruses of matching colors in rows or columns of four. If you get two or more rows or columns at a time, then the game dumps garbage (extra virus pieces) onto the opponents screen, the amount of garbage increasing with the size of the combo. The first player to eliminate all of his/her viruses, or the last player to get "stacked up" (fill the screen so the pills have no where to go) wins the game.

There isn't much to my history with the game. In the months before my mission I used to go to a friend's house to play with her and her family. My first evening with the game (the original Nintendo version) her family smoked me. In her mother's attempt to console me afterward she said "That's ok, Aaron. Some people just aren't spacially gifted." Those words rang in my ears when I drove home that night, and were with me the rest of the week. I returned to their home the next weekend determined, and anxious to play the game. Apparently in less than a week I'd developed a spacial gift, because no one could keep up.

Fast forward to my senior year of college. Dr. Mario 64 came out for the Nintendo 64, and it quickly became popular 4 player fare for Michelle and I and our friends. Friends would always boast either of themselves or of someone they knew as being without equal. None of these claims, though, ever survived a visit to the Clark home at 100 Wymount Terrace.

The summer before law school started was when it all came together. A friend of ours boasted of his father, a doctor laying low at the Texas Tech med school in Lubbock, TX whose only desire after coming home from work was to play Dr. Mario. He played every night, and to hear tell he was the best there was.

Fortunately, we were headed to Lubbock that summer for our friend's wedding, so I challenged the good doctor for a shot at the Championship of the World at the end of July. He seemed delighted and told me "Bring it on."

So, I spent the summer practicing all the different modes into the late hours of the night, spurred by the prospects of facing a near perfect player. A few times I get calls from my friend as he watched his father put up record numbers on his own machine. My task often felt hopelessly daunting, but I played on.

When the time finally came to play Dr. Dalley, there were no crowds of onlookers (any who would've watched were either napping or quite recently married). Before I'd hardly had time to catch my breath, Dr. Dalley was up on me 2-0. One more game and he'd win the match. It was at this point that he tried hard to hold back a grin. He lost control for a moment and let some boastful remark slip, telling me "I promised my son I wouldn't gloat." He then caught himself in a laugh that conveyed complete confidence and control.

He may just as well have said "It's ok Aaron. Some people just aren't spacially gifted."

I snuck by with the third game, and caught him off guard a little bit. I blew him away in the fourth game, and he was reeling. "My scouting report was wrong," he said. Indeed, his son had told him that my aim was only speed--but I'd instead found that the more effective approach is to crisply create opportunities for combinations, and multiple combinations, with a resultant firestorm of garbage raining over the screen of my opponent.

You can already guess how the fifth game went. At the end of it, Dr. Dalley buried his face in his hands and I sat back in my chair contented as the new Dr. Mario World Champion. He asked for a rematch, which I gave him, though the results were the same.

To this day I've retained the Title (notice the capitalization). In the years that have followed, despite numerous challengers, I've never lost a head to head matchup. Instead, most of the time I have to bump myself up 6 or 7 levels (giving me between 20 and 3o more viruses to vanquish than my opponent) just to give him or her a chance.

So, if you happen to read this and see me anytime in the near future, I will not be embarrased, nor should you be, if you feel in the inclination to kneel at my feet and beg me to sign your copy of Dr. Mario 64. Hey, that's what champions are for. If other people point and laugh while you kneel, just tell them who I am and what I've accomplished. They'll probably want to join you.

If you think you may have what it takes to take a shot at the best, bring it on. I'm not going anywhere--and neither is my title.