Jumpman Rising

Lyrics

[Intro]
Two thousand dead screens in the warehouse.
Radar Scope, a ghost in the wires.
He said, make them new.
Make them want to drop a coin again.

[Verse 1]
The Tokyo air in 1981 was thick with solder fumes and failure.
We gutted the boards, one by one.
Gunpei Yokoi drew a line in the dust on a cabinet.
He said, "Miyamoto, fill the space."
And I had a pencil, and a pad of graph paper.
And a story about a gorilla, and a girl, and a construction site.
It wasn't a story. It was a problem to be solved with a single button.

[Chorus]
And you were just a block on that paper.
A red hat, so the head would stand out.
Blue overalls, because it was simple to draw.
A line for a mustache, because a mouth was too hard to see.
You had no name. You just had a job.
I called you Jumpman.

[Verse 2]
The girders are uneven because I drew them at 2 a.m.
The barrels roll because it's what barrels do.
The ape is angry because... he just is.
There's no grand design here.
Just a man, a task, a hammer if he's lucky.
Not Mr. Video. Not some hero of the machine.
Just a working man, with a long climb ahead.

[Chorus]
You were just a block on that paper.
A red hat, so the head would stand out.
Blue overalls, because it was simple to draw.
A line for a mustache, because a mouth was too hard to see.
You had no name. You just had a job.
I called you Jumpman.

[Bridge]
All you could do was go up.
One pixel at a time, toward the top of the screen.
From the ashes of a forgotten space war...
An everyman, with gravity as his only real enemy.
That's enough. That's everything.

[Outro]
Now, go.
Out of the paper, into the light of the cathode ray.
They'll give you a new name soon.
They'll build a kingdom for you.
But here, in this room, with the cigarette smoke and the clicking pencil...
You were just my Jumpman.