Now, thirty years later, rumours of an evil force have swept into the Pentagon's front office, and tales from frightened villagers of a hideous being with an army of alien henchmen are sending chills down the spines of top military brass.
Unwilling to upset current political stability, an all-out assault on the region has been overruled, and instead, two of America's most cunning, courageous and ruthless soldiers from the Special Forces elite commando squad have been selected to seek out and destroy these alien intruders.
Congratulations, pal, you're one of the chosen. But before you take pride in being the best, be warned.
You're about to come face to face against Red Falcon, the cruellest life-form in the galaxy. He arrived on Earth thirty years ago (that's six months time in an alien's life) to establish a foothold from which he will attempt to conquer our world and then use it as a stepping stone toward his ultimate fiendish goal: domination of the entire universe. Needless to say, playing hero won't be easy. But you have no choice -- you must be a hero. Because if you fail, life as we know it will cease to exist, and the vile Red Falcon will rule forever. If you succeed, well...it doesn't matter, because I doubt you will.
If you haven’t yet guessed which game this is then you are definitely not a part of what is being referred to as the Nintendo Generation by social scientists and anthropologists. Contra was released for the NES by Konami way back in 1988. This game soon became a classic side-scrolling shooter, with a variety of weapons, challenging game-play, and 1 and 2 player-simultaneous modes.
If your age is between 15 and 25, and even if you haven’t played Contra (shame on you for that), you are a member of this Nintendo Generation. We as a generation are unique, especially in India, since we are a part of the ongoing technological and cultural revolution. Most of us can remember a pre-cable-television, pre-western-fast-food-joint (McDonald, etc.) India. Cable TV came in 1993 and Mc only came much later. Heck none of us had an email account six years back and yet we saw Yahoo and Hotmail become billion dollar enterprises offering 4 Mb storage space. And today I have a Gmail account which gives me a 1000 Mb of storage space. Talk about revolution. We saw the rise of IT, the dot com crash and we saw the revival of tech stocks.
We grew up playing our own video games (or even renting them). We were the generation who stopped going to the theatres and preferred watching movies at home on a VCR. And still we saw the revival of the movie theatre experience and the rise of the multiplex. Computers and cars became a necessity while we were growing up. Our generation saw the entire country undergo a change. Children born in the last few years are not a part of this generation. Their generation was born in a tech savvy environment and they learned to say ‘Digital’ before ‘Dada’ and McDonalds’ before ‘Mama’. We on the other hand saw the old traditional India in our childhoods, but still accepted the modern with open arms. As the years roll on, our place in society will become exceedingly important because we are the connecting link between the traditional and the ultra-modern. India as a country and Indians as people have virtues which the western world doesn’t and I am not trying to be patriotic or jingoistic here, but that is the truth. The onus is now on us to prevent the moral degradation of our society similar to what happened to the west. That can only be done by accepting the modern and retaining the traditional and finding the right balance between the two. For now I must get back to playing Contra.
