Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 minutes, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game.
Games are the Punk’s life, and thoughts of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri-a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Fans recognize him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not just an expert on Nintendo but a public face for anyone who grew up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros. For a decade, Contri has played a character called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 viewers on YouTube. The wall was both a shrine to his life’s hobby and the backdrop for his work. He read from the spines of gray plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter, with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987 Jaws, which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two later Zelda II, a game he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it took forever to arrive. He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever released the wall, floor to ceiling, was amazing to behold, Contri as small as Ahab in front of his whale. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, black hair wet from the shower and curling above his eyes. It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach.
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