A Rivalry Is Born

GameSpot acquired SportsGamer in May of 2007. Most of the SportsGamer guys live in the Cincinnati area and they stayed there once they became a part of the CNET family. Everyone but Shanker Srinivasin, that is. The reasons for Shanker moving out to California are unknown. Perhaps he missed his parents, who still lived in the bay area. Perhaps he caught an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and thought he could head out west and make a mint on oil. Maybe he was the reason for Bengals players always getting arrested and he had to get out of town. Or, it just might have been destiny. Whatever the reason for moving, Shanker started working out of our San Francisco office in mid-August and as fate would have it he was sitting right behind me.

While our office is generally pretty quiet—Justin sits next to me and he'll go weeks without saying anything to me unless he thinks I stole something—Shanker and I were quick to strike up a conversation since we're both into sports and sports video games. I still haven't quite figured out what his job is, but he does a lot of videos that cover specific strategies in sports games. He was always talking about how great they were so I'd go over to his desk and see what he was up to. I learned two things rather quickly: Shanker has an unhealthy obsession with Kobe Bryant (check out this video) and he has no problem cheesing the CPU by exploiting glitches and money plays. Now to be fair, Shanker does come up with some what I'd consider "legitimate" strategies and he does have an amazing ability to find weaknesses in the computer's play, but I'd stand there and chastise him for having to resort to cheap tactics to beat a machine. Hey, I never claimed that I wasn't obnoxious. His response was always "Dude, let's play right now! Let's play a game of insert sports game here and I'll take you down!" or something to that effect. One day, he got his wish.

I keep a Nintendo Entertainment System and a handful of my favorite NES games on my desk so that on those days where I'm really feeling down about games (like when another uninspired WWII FPS comes out) I can play something fun that reminds me of how much I love playing games. One of the games in my collection is R.B.I. Baseball. Tired of pounding on the CPU I asked Shanker if he wanted to play. I was the NL team and at first was going to be Houston or something until I told him he should be the AL because my dudes were awesome. You see? I was being fair. I then explained the buttons and we started the game. The first four innings were close—I was only able to bring one run across the plate. But then things exploded in the 5th inning when I dropped a big fat 9-spot on Shanker. I then shut him down in the bottom of the 5th and the game ended because of the 10-run rule. But that's not the worst of it. If you look at the box score you'll notice that I pitched a perfect game (the error you see in the box score was on him, even though you see it in my part of the box score) cementing my place in R.B.I. Baseball immortality.

Even with Shanker trying to grab the camera out of my hand I snapped a picture to preserve the moment. This is when I learned that Shanker is a poor loser. "Dude, you didn't tell me what the buttons were!" he whined, referencing when he didn't know how to take out his tired pitcher and I immediately paused the game so he could do so. Justin had my back on this one, chiming in with "I heard Aaron tell you the buttons. Both of them." Then he started whining about how the game was old and stupid and blah blah blah.

The next time we played was a few weeks later in NFL Tour. It was a warm-up game for my showdown with Shawne Merriman. I had played one practice game already and asked Shanker if he wanted to play me so that I could practice against a real person. He accepted, and he beat me by a touchdown. Sure it's a lousy game and the winner is always the person that gets the ball last, but he did beat me. I even admitted publicly that I lost to him.

Evidently Shanker didn't witness my domination of Sean Coonce in Button Mashing last year because our third meeting came courtesy Tecmo Super Bowl. I was the Raiders and he was the Bills. I was the winner and he was the loser. Final score: 37-7. As expected, the excuses came fast and furious: he didn't know the buttons, Bo Jackson is cheap, the game clock moves too fast, I tried an onsides kick on him…it was a never-ending onslaught of pitiful reasons for losing. I pointed out that if we totally erased Bo Jackson's performance from the game that I still would have beaten him 16-7. I also explained to him that the clock went just as fast for me as it did for him, and that my onsides kick was an accident (I was trying for a full-power kick) and that he was a beneficiary of me making the same mistake later in the game when a botched kick resulted in his only points of the game.

By now it should be obvious that reason doesn't work with Shanker. His demands for rematches became more frequent and more obnoxious. It just so happened that during this time we were trying to come up with ideas for Super Bowl coverage. The solution was obvious: Let me destroy Shanker once and for all in front of a worldwide audience. Best of all I'd be beating him in one of the "modern games" he's always clamoring for: Madden 08. He foolishly agreed and now I'm just counting down the days until I shut his yap for good.

It's on.