As years past and I faded into obscurity, my obsession with gaming took a dark, inward turn. The "Golden Age" of classic gaming was a bygone era and in the post-apocalyptic landscape, abandoned arcades died out due to the popularity of home systems. With the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System's mind-blowing 8 bit graphics, the line between reality and video games was rendered completely indiscernible to me. I retreated into a fantasy world in which Link, Mike Tyson, ROB the Nintendo Robot and the two fellows from Double Dragon became the only friends I thought I'd ever need. My mental stability and physical condition went into a simultaneous free-fall, as my only nutritional intake involved whatever my foster parents could slip under my locked bedroom door into my grasping, claw-like fingers, which typically meant box after box of luke-warm Totino’s Pizza Rolls...which even in small doses have been scientifically proven to exact a devastating toll upon the human central nervous system.

My downward spiral finally reached its nadir when a shocking first round TKO by Glass Joe precipitated an epic nervous breakdown. I barricaded myself in my bedroom, taking the family cat hostage and holding a SWAT team at bay for several days in a tense standoff, until they realized the relatively minor amount of bodily harm that could be inflicted by the gun from Duck Hunt. The injuries sustained from being manhandled by the authorities during my ordeal were nothing compared to the insult of Nintendo Power magazine's subsequent publishing of humiliating gaming papazarri photos in August of 1990 which chronicled my being pulled kicking and screaming from our apartment...naked, bloodied, bruised and wearing only a Nintendo Power Glove.

While I spent the following several years painfully weaning myself from dependence at the video game addiction rehabilitation facility Extra Lives in San Diego, Billy continued to dominate in the classic arcade gaming arena, notching up one World Record after another while his top challengers were dropping like flies under bizarre and mysterious circumstances.