DETROIT — A $400 gaming monitor was successfully tweaked to resemble a local gamer’s parents’ old, fritzy Zenith, sources have confirmed.
“Oh wow, that looks like shit,” said Howie Spears, observing his latest modifications while playing a ROM of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Game Boy Adventure: A Bogus Journey! on the recently purchased monitor. “That means we’re almost there. I threw some CRT filters on the emulators I was playing, but it looked too artificial, not like the real thing at all. So I played around with some different shaders, and there was one that made it look exactly like a shitty VHS tape with tracking lines all over the screen. That was dope, but this isn’t one of my cinema appreciation nights so I went a different direction. I’ve monkeyed with these settings long enough that the games are really starting to look like shit. I’m so excited.”
Family members of Spears’ reported confusion as to why he was intent on capturing a bygone experience that had been surpassed by modern technology.
“So let me get this straight,” said Hugh Spears, Howie’s father. “15 years ago he said we were fools if we were watching the Tigers games in anything less than high definition, and made us promise to get rid of our old living room TV. Now he’s buying accessories and studying how to recreate the look of that exact same television set? I can’t keep up with him. This is those vinyl records all over again.”
Spears has confirmed that his project is merely intended as a placeholder until he can procure an authentic vintage CRT television set to enjoy retro games on.
“I can’t wait for that guy to stop coming in here and bothering all of us,” said Marie McCarthy, a manager of a local Goodwill store. “He shows up right when we open every day and is always asking if we got any new TV’s or monitors in. And even though every single day I tell him, ‘No dude, just more sacks of giant pants and stinky books,’ he still comes back without fail. He’s a pain in the ass, but I do admire his dedication to getting old video games to look neat.”
As of press time, Spears had purchased a scanline generator on Amazon and was on YouTube researching how to successfully burn the Super Mario World title screen image into his 4K monitor.
