Put your pen and paper away.  There’s no passwords to memorize here.  Not only was the first Legend of Zelda a pioneer in the open world adventure genre, but it also provided gamers with a tiny amount of built-in memory to save their hours upon hours of progress.  If the shiny gold NES cartridge wasn’t enough, this game was a feat of Nintendo’s technological superiority to all other mere mortals.  Fear the Nintendo.

Thank you Superman.  I thank you and geeks around the world thank you.  You have given us decades of joy.  Maybe not from your comics (they sucked from 1960-1986 and then again through the 1990s), but for something more important.  You started the super hero genre.  Yes, you Mr. Modest.  Thanks to you, we have thousands of spandex-clad heroes to idolize and emulate.  From the pleasure of reading our monthly comics to safety pinning a towel as a cape, you have changed our lives.  So thank you for that.  Oh, and for saving the world all those times.  That was nice.

Batman wasn’t always dark and scary.  There was a time when the Dark Knight was more a cuddly, hides in open daytime and a black convertible.  The guilty pleasure of the 1960s featured Adam West and Burt Ward as the unrightfully spandex wearing dynamic duo.  In every episode, Commissioner Gordon reported a major crime on the Bat-phone.  West and Ward sprang into action, sliding down their not-at-all homoerotic Bat-poles, instantly changing from suits to spandex.  And then the heroics begin.

The popular series became the standard reference for everything comic books from Bat-named everything to corny sound effects during fight scenes.  Batman comics even copied the campy show to capitalize on the show’s success.

The show ended and Batman comics (thankful) returned to their dark, morbid roots, but the Adam West Batman remains an embarrassment and guilty pleasure of geeks all around.  It’s embarrassing cause newspapers can’t write an article about comic books without Bam, Zip, Kerpow in the headline.  And it’s a guilty pleasure cause, well, of Bat-shark repellent. Yes, Bat-shark repellent. It’s awesome.

It sure sucked to be Buffy.  Not only was she in trouble at school for saving the world, but her vampire boyfriend lost his soul and turned evil and kept trying to kill her.  Sucks, right.  At the end of Season 2, Angel opened a portal to a hell dimension to destroy the world.  In Buffy’s most defining moment, the Slayer plunged a sword through the love of her life, sending him to the hell dimension, saving the world.  The challenge was, the evil Angel had turned good again at the last second.  And Buffy still sacrificed him to save the world.  That sucks.

Contra is arguably the hardest video game ever.  It takes amazing thumb skills mixed with insane memorization to map all the levels and avoid the swarm of tiny dots that can kill you.  The Konami code actually first appeared in Gradius but Contra made it famous.  Kazuhisa Hashimoto created the code for Gradius when he found the game was too challenging to play in one sit through.  He ended up leaving the code in the final release of the game.  In Contra, the code gave you 30 lives, making the game less insulting to the average player (and some advanced gamers still needed to rely on it).  Konami ended up including the same code in dozens of games.

Officially launched on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has ballooned into a massive online encyclopedia with millions of free articles in dozens of languages editable by anyone.  The resulting open source experiment has attracted geeks from all over the world to fill in the history of obscure kings and random Star Wars trivia, giving far more attention to the latter.  Wikipedia allows geeks to share their knowledge, no matter what topic, and the only editors are other geeks - people who share the same passion.  If you want to write 2,000 words about Númenor, then be Wikipedia’s guest.  Just don’t expect to launch your career in academia.

Mother stopped telling me to be a doctor and started getting me programming lessons.  From 1993 to 2006, Bill Gates topped the Forbes 400 as the richest man around, at one time having assets worth over $100 billion.  His company, Microsoft, has depreciated significantly after the dot com bubble burst, but Gates is no less a power house representing the epitome of geek revenge - success.  Gates has a dream job building a monster company from the ground up.  He was so wrapped up in building Microsoft, he took an multi-decade leave of absence from Harvard.  His billion dollar company, however controversial, is a geek playground from operating systems to online software to video game consoles and expanding.  Bill Gates is the geek we all hope to become.  His wife’s hot too.

The catch phrase that ignited playgrounds around America. He-Man, the furry underwear wearing homoerotic fantasy of the 80s (yes, that one) features the soon-to-be muscle bound Prince Adam as Eternia’s most powerful protector. In classic child hood fashion, the “frail” and innocent Prince Adam turned into the rock hard abbed He-Man when he raised his sword above his head and screamed “By the Power of Greyskull, I have the power.” His scream echoed until his chest size expanded about 35 inches. Children tried to replicate this transformation with everything from plastic swords to broom sticks, but mostly we still looked and sounded like She-Ra.

The Star Wars movies were something special. Instead of an opening credits, the first moments of Star Wars features scrolling text flying through space setting up the saga. The text even revealed this was not some futuristic epic. It happened a long time ago in a place we don’t know: not Earth, not now. This gave the story even more fantasy. When Lucas started the Empire Strikes Back with the scrolling text and not the credits, the Writers and Directors Guilds fined him $250,000. Lucas eventually dropped out of the organizations to keep the integrity of his films…no irony intended.