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"There's this guy, right, called Major Nelson." This was my friend Stu talking, back in the early days of the Xbox 360, which was also, I think, the early days of podcasts. Stu was more technologically advanced than me, so he would download podcasts and then - I cringe at this - burn them onto CD for me so that I could hear them too. (This is a bit like getting someone to do you an oil painting of a newspaper.) Whatever. I remember listening to Gaming Steve with a growing sense that I was listening in to the future. And I remember listening to Major Nelson Radio with - well, some kind of fascination that was harder to pin down.Stu had a theory about Major Nelson, or rather he had a theory about what Major Nelson looked like. Major Nelson was a big fat guy with long red hair and a wild beard. He was a real gaming guy, a basement gamer type, who had been hired in a canny move by Microsoft and had then been dropped into a complimentary bunker at Redmond with all the video games and Hot Pockets he could ever want, and a microphone and a sound engineer. He was one of us, in other words - he was just one of us who got lucky.
In truth - and you have probably seen a picture of Major Nelson by now - this is not an entirely accurate portrait of the man. If I had to quickly describe the real Major Nelson to you with any precision, I would probably say that he resembles a 1980s CIA operative posing undercover as a low-level businessman from Cleveland. He's posing as a man who sells sofas, perhaps, and he's visiting a sofa salesman convention in Hawaii. Major Nelson often wears the sort of crisp, anonymising business-casual suit that just aches for someone to drop a lei around the shoulders at hotel check-in. I have seen him in the flesh a few times, and on each occasion I sensed a flickering in the air playing over his body, a temporal rift, as if wherever fate might lead, some part of him was forever truly located in the downstairs bar at a Marriott.
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