by Brig. Lieut. Dr. Byron Clavicle, PhD & TAPOAFOM 

The year was 1984 and worldwide tensions were tense worldwide. Canada’s new prime minister Brian Mulroney pledged to establish a subcommittee by 1986 to summarize a study on trends in the trade of beige rubber-coated paperclips. Here in North America, meanwhile, the CIA introduced crack cocaine to relieve the expense of normal cocaine. A team of Nicaraguan Sandinistas, funded by the Pentagon and led by Ayatollah Khomeini, began designing the arcade classic “Contra.” 

Little did the Contra team know that the video arcade would almost nearly be sort of a thing of the not-too-distant future past, just 29 years later, all because of a little five-hundred year old megacorporation transitioning into consumer electronics from their original line of business (chocolate-covered panties). Their new product: the Limendo Entertainment System. 

The original L.E.S. came with two games sharing one cartridge. The first was called Super Mario Brothers and allowed the player to live the life of a struggling Italian plumber who gets mixed up in a regional drug war and ends up strung out in the metaphorical castle of his own decaying psyche, reliving a bad trip until his body succumbs to mushroom abuse. The game didn’t fare too well with kids; its outdated countercultural themes in the tie-and-blazer Reagan era doomed its audience to paranoid HAM radio operators and literature professors. 

But the other game, Lime-Toss, proved so popular that entire families starved rather than tear themselves from the screen. Taking the ancient tradition of “Old Timey Lime-Toss” and transferring it into the digital era, players manipulated an electrified lime to control a retriever tasked with catching limes. Points were scored for style (not for actually catching the lime), as is traditional, so players were rewarded for spastic hand motions. Crushed limes and juice-squirted faces were familiar throughout America’s rec rooms, and trillions were spent on replacement controllers from neighborhood fruit stands. 

1984 advertisement unearthed by Zardoz K. Norristrophy

The runaway success of 8-bit Lime-Toss changed the face of America for all eternity. Children would never leave their homes again, and their fingers would never smell the same. It also led to a decline in participation for the original, non-digital game, until its chance rediscovery at a retoxification retreat for degenerate middle-aged teenagers in Maryland [1]. This quickly led to the founding of the NLTA and the NLTAPA which licenses the likeness of Lime-Toss superstars in modern video game adaptations such as Lime-Tosser 2 Turbo Champion Edition and Matt Workman’s Lime-Toss!!. 

What does the future hold for video Lime-Toss? Scientists speculate that by 2014 we will be driving “virtual limes” down the “information superhighway”, operating these vehicles through direct electrocortical stimulation of neurocitric phlogisthon waves. Nobody can say for sure, but one thing’s for certain: the future is bright for the electric lime!