I wish they made one of those classic mini consoles stuffed with games that aren't classics

Joseph Heller once said that the difficult thing with students on literature courses is that they never read anything that isn't a classic. It's an odd kind of problem, but I think I know what Heller was on about. I don't know if you've seen or read anything by John Webster, a Jacobean playwright who overlapped with Shakespeare a bit. I read Webster's The Duchess of Malfi at school, and it made me appreciate Shakespeare all the more. Stuff Shakespeare seems to do without any effort Webster really struggles with. And then Webster is so gloriously weird, too, so sadistic and over-the-top. Is The Duchess of Malfi a classic? It's survived long enough to suggest it is, but encountering the text still felt like going off-road a little, and leaving the major part of the canon behind. I think Heller would have just about approved.

All of which is a really long-winded way of saying: I really want to play that Die Hard they made for the NES. I have a memory of this game as something strange and complex, a film tie-in that focused on the architectural fixations of Die Hard. You had to think about what floor you were on, I think. You had to worry about broken glass. You had to worry about where everyone else was. It wasn't a straightforward film-to-side-scroller adaptation - it was an adaptation based on a bit of serious thinking about the film.

And it wasn't a classic. I'm pretty sure of that anyway. And because it's not a classic, it shines a little brighter in my imagination - a game that got away at the time, that was weird and difficult, and which would be a major pain to track down and render playable today.

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