The Secret History of Me and My Video Games: WHERE DO YOU WANT TO FART

Video games have always been a part of my life. When I look back, they were present at many seminal moments in my life. This is one of them.

In Grade 6, everyone had the option to join Choir 56. This was Gander Academy’s award winning choir, and it was a pretty big deal. They traveled everywhere, hung out together. Picture Glee, except with 100 12-year olds.

I wasn’t in Choir 56. As I was in French Immersion, my homeroom was filled with keeners, and out of 30 students in my class, only 5 of us didn’t join the choir. I was never much of a singer, and I was always shy, so I opted out.

Not that we got a free period. Since so many of the class were in the choir, Ms. Fulton decided that we should pursue our own interests and whatever we would come up with would be graded.

Myself and a friend, Jonathan, decided we would make our own computer program on the classroom’s Commodore 64.

Every video game needs inspiration, and we wanted to put Gino, a classmate who moved away after Grade 2, into digital form. Gino was known for the herculean, but ultimately unsuccessful, effort to bottle his own farts.

Problem was, with the little we knew about programming (pretty much a Farenheit to Celcius program that was printed in a reference manual), we couldn’t figure out how to do it. With farts on the brain, we went back to the drawing board.

Eventually, we had uncovered a story from the grade above us. When they were in Ms. Fulton’s class, one of the students had ran across the classroom, jumped up, farted in Ms. Fulton’s face and yelled “Je besoin pendre un merde!” which loosely translates as “I need to take a shit.”

This was gold, and perfect for our computer program. I've been able to find the reference guide on the internet, I will attempt to recreate the code for our video game, as I remember it:

1 REM FART IN FACE PROGRAM
5 PRINT "CLR/HOME"
10 PRINT "WHERE DO YOU WANT TO FART (FULTONS FACE/PANTS)": INPUT A$
20 IF A$ = "" THEN 20
30 IF A$ = "FULTONS FACE" THEN 100
40 IF A$ (> "PANTS" THEN 10
50 INPUT "HOW MANY TIMES: ";C
60 F = C
70 PRINT "YOU FARTED ";F;" TIMES IN FULTONS FACE"
80 PRINT
90 GOTO 10
100 INPUT "HOW MANY TIMES: ";F
110 C = F
120 PRINT "YOU FARTED ";C;" TIMES IN PANTS AND POOPED"
130 PRINT
140 GOTO 10

I’m not sure if it actually would have worked as we were caught as we were typing it in. Ms. Fulton gave us a stern talking to, and we changed our focus. We ended up getting off the computer and doing a research project on hobbits and orcs instead.

(As an aside, my obsession with Lord of the Rings made it into my schoolwork a number of times, the final being a Grade 11 science fair experiment about catapults called “The Siege Engines of Mordor,” for which I received a D.)

While I was doing all this, Choir 56 was preparing for the Christmas Concert, which I attended -- many of my friends were choir members. As I sat through their set of five songs, I found it very pleasant. Since then, I always regretted not joining the choir.

Part 1: My Father and the Warp Pipes

Part 2: Doomed

Part 3: Tony Gwynn Gets His, to the Delight of All

Part 4: Bonk's Late Night Adventure

Part 5: Hockey Fight in Canada

Part 6: Ambush!

Part 7: I Have a Dream...cast

Part 8: You're Not From Around Here

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