Earlier tonight I saw an ad for WCW/nWo: Revenge on Tumblr and got hit with a nostalgia bomb. A couple minutes later, a second one dropped when I started thinking about its predecessor.

The reason I knew I wanted Revenge was because of WCW vs. the World.

June, 1998. I was 15. My dad died on the last day of school. I had that numb feeling that comes from being swept up into something surreal that you have no control over. His funeral was something you’d expect from Royal Tenenbaums — his girlfriend (my parents divorced when I was 5) had a wailing breakdown in the funeral home while dad’s high school/college fuckup friend (who had borrowed one of my dad’s suits to wear to his mother’s funeral and still had it to wear to dad’s 20 years later) was trying to hit on her. The obituary that the funeral home had printed up as a souvenir (perfect size to use as a bookmark) mistakenly listed him as having three kids instead of two, making me wonder who the hell Sam Sims was. Everyone was doing their best to comfort my sister, and with good reason as she was sobbing and pregnant, but because she lived in Ohio and I was down from South Carolina after a 10-hour car ride where we heard a jingle for Father’s Day every time we turned on the radio, nobody know who I was, so nobody came over to talk.

At one point, I mistook a distant relative for my grandmother. I thought she was looking pretty rough compared to the last time I saw her, but I was into the hug before I caught my mother’s eye and realized the mistake. Later, my actual grandmother would shriek from her hospital bed that I’d be the next one to die. No joke.

So after the funeral, we went back to the house that my sister and her husband had shared with my dad, and I didn’t want to be around anyone, so I ended up going into their bedroom, where David had his PlayStation set up. And there was WCW vs. the World. So I popped it in and started playing, figuring out the controls and pitting Ultimo Dragon against the characters that had had their names changed for the American release due to copyright issues.

About an hour later, my brother-in-law opened the door and asked if I wanted anything to eat. I told him no thanks.