Harry Nordlinger’s Laser Quest, My Backrooms
A few months ago, at the great Partners and Son here in Philly, I saw a solicitation flyer for a comic called Laser Quest, by an artist named Harry Nordlinger. I don’t have a copy of that flyer, but it was, if I remember correctly, a small black and white version of the book’s cover:
I grew up going to Laser Quest. That was a real chain. I had at least one middle school birthday party there. I had to order this thing.
The book was released on July 29, I picked it up yesterday and I’m going to dig into it here. It hit me on a pretty profound, bizarrely personal level and the plot in these 36 pages is minimal, so I can’t talk about this thing in any real way without spoiling everything that happens. If an unsettling comic you could slot into the liminal horror genre sounds at all interesting to you, just buy it. Floating World, the book's publisher, has ordering info here and, again, my copy came from Partners and Son, which has the copies on its shelves and in their online store.
There’s going to be some rambling here, but I promise it’s all in service of a larger point. Stick with me a minute.
From the other side of the spoiler disclaimer, a one-paragraph plot of the book:
In 2000, a kid named Johnathon has a birthday party at Laser Quest following his mother’s death in the recent past. Laser Quest was a laser tag place, where you grabbed a chunky plastic body armor pack with sensors and a gun and ran around a blacklight maze zapping other kids for 20 minutes or so. Johnathon Laser Quests it up a little before wandering deep into the maze, down unlit, empty halls, where the ghost of his grandmother beckons him out a back door, into an open field. Johnathon can’t return to Laser Quest, his grandma and the door are both gone. Smash cut to a news story about a missing kid and the accused kidnapper. Smash cut to the kid, having been recovered, insisting he’s been gone for a negligible amount of time while adults indicate he‘d vanished for months. Smash cut to 2010, Johnathon is a druggy asshole outside the same now-abandoned Laser Quest from earlier. He walks away from his friends/acquaintances, breaks into the Laser Quest, follows the maze to the place he’d initially disappeared and goes with his passed relatives to some other place.
The comic’s cover gave me what I wanted and a couple things to be wary of. I am, for better and for worse, a deeply nostalgic person, and if somebody was going to draw an old Laser Quest in some way, I’d pay to watch them do it. I’ll even do that if the cover raises the possibility this is a cheap Five Nights At Freddy’s-type horror piece, if I’m going to buy the book and find out it’s about the WARPED and TWISTED things a kid could imagine happening if a part of their childhood was made a little darker.
Laser Quest was international. It looks like there are still operational locations in England. From 1993 to the COVID-19 pandemic, Laser Quest had spots all over the US and Canada, to the point they were able to hold the North American Challenge, a team-based laser tag tournament, from 1995 to 2012. Even at the end, Laser Quest was big enough that their 2012 championship had them flying teams from Toronto, Denver, North Richmond Hills, TX and Mesa, AZ to Las Vegas.
I’m in Philly, but I grew up in Redwood City and Menlo Park, in the Bay Area. I only ever Laser Quested at the Mountain View location. Years after I’d last gone inside, I’d come across the big logo and facade due to its proximity to the, let’s say, third-best movie theater in the South Bay peninsula. The theater’s had upgrades since then, though. Google’s main campus is nearby and those dorks seem to head over all the time. I’ll see a movie with my family when I’m home and half the concessions line will be people in Google clothes, supporting the arts. Not that those fuckers could keep nearby Lee’s Comics or Rasputin Music alive. Maybe it isn’t their fault all these well-paid tech guys flocked to the movie theater but didn’t spend any money at physical retail, maybe they don't like movies and comics at all, maybe this is a self-preservation thing and they're only hitting the theater because if you don’t have the latest MCU popcorn bucket displayed on your desk, Google castrates you.
Anyway, that Laser Quest is gone.
My first twinge of recognition in Nordlinger’s book was this page, specifically the bottom-left panel, where a kid plays the arcade game Dark Silhouette: Silent Scope 2.
My Laser Quest also had DS:SS2. Silent Scope was one of those games you were drawn to for its novelty. The machine had two screens. There was the big, standard one, and then a smaller screen in the gun peripheral’s lens. You’d look at the big screen to find terrorists’ general location and then look through the scope, which offered a zoomed-in view, to make a precise shot.
I remember playing Silent Scope 2 at my local Laser Quest because I remember realizing I could hit more targets, and thus play for a longer amount of time, if I didn't utilize the game's gimmick at all and just aimed and shot on the big screen. Headshots were a timesuck and didn't pay off well enough to matter. And then on a subsequent visit, I realized I was paying extra quarters (Silent Scope cost 75 cents, maybe even a dollar) to play the scope game where I disregarded the scope and had less fun in order to get a higher score. What if instead of three rounds of Area 51 with a friend, I could play a single half-interesting round of Silent Scope alone? It was humbling!
My second twinge of recognition was more intense. The comic's news story, a splash page, identifies that Laser Quest as being in Mountain View (subsequent dialogue notes the nearby theater), and that Johnathon was 10 in 2000. I was born in 1989. I was 10 in 2000.
When I'd finished the book, I reached out to its author on Instagram to ask about this. I assumed he was either going on memory or had picked Mountain View out at random, but he grew up in Los Altos and Palo Alto, and that was his local Laser Quest as well.
There's the kind of specificity where you relate to a small thing in a narrative, like the characters use one of those cassette tapes with a wire that plugs into an iPod so they can play music through their car stereos, and you think "Hey, my friend John had one of those, I remember what that is!" and you run into that a few times a month, at least (this is a small degree less notable than the Repo Man cosmic consciousness "shrimp" thing).
And then there's the specificity where you're watching a movie and you see a location you're familiar with, where Nic Cage scrambles across a landmark 200 feet from your work or two characters in Actual People walk down a block in your neighborhood, and I run into that a half-dozen times every year. If my 4-year-old and I watch a movie set in San Francisco and I say "That building is only a few blocks from where I used to get lunch with my grandma," he does not give a shit, though I still think it's fun. The Game is a movie you should only watch once (after you know how it ends, there are five nonsense plot holes in every scene (movie's still fun as hell, though!)) but I've gone through it a few times, staring at the screen like I'm trying to commit to memory the nth moment of Michael Douglas sneering at a random person and sniffing "I'm a business man and I do business, man." It was shot in the Bay Area, so that movie could be some 2010s Renny Harlin bullshit and it'd still hold some interest for me.
And then there's the specificity where a character your age has a birthday party in the exact suburban place you had a birthday party and they move through an environment you know, doing things you did, and that happens once or twice a life. Maybe you were involved in a high-stakes tennis love triangle or your Black Hawk went down, and you saw yourself in those things. I've lived a good but not incredibly dramatic life, so my version is Harry Nordlinger's Laser Quest.
As I said, the book caught my eye for its potential as a nostalgia piece. Even if everything veered into Five Nights At Freddy's spoooookiness, which it doesn't, the comic would probably have a few scenes in and around a Laser Quest, and that would be worth it for me.
When the comic ended and its main character retreated into the backrooms of his past, I recognized this as a story criticizing the kind of person who would buy a comic to relive their past. Or if it wasn't criticizing it, the comic was interrogating it. On a basic level, it follows a person who can't shake their childhood trauma and succumbs to it. Whatever trauma I have in my life is pretty far removed from the trauma in Laser Quest. But I do return to these places. It's not that I can't shake my trauma, it's that I can't shake anything. In this newsletter, I've mentioned rereading the John Christopher Tripod quadrilogy from my youth. I've remembered seeing a bastard Drifters perform at my high school and my experience getting involved in the production of a documentary about a town where somebody filmed a Disney Channel Original Movie and the mystique I put on The Road Warrior. I started and may one day complete an essay about the crummy movies studios like Full Moon would crank out, knowing the 90s VHS market was robust enough they'd immediately make all their money back wholesaling tapes to Blockbuster. This shit is all I think about.
Some of that is okay. I'm never going to stop thinking about the art I've already taken in. As Laser Quest shows, though, too much of that is ultimately a dead end. When Johnathon returns to the Mountain View location in 2010, it's long-since shut down. He throws a rock through a window and no alarms go off. The shattering glass doesn't attract any notice because there isn't anybody around to care. Nordlinger draws the Laser Quest lobby full of kids playing functional games and then, on the same page, from the same angle, he draws a corner of the building where two broken arcade cabinets sit, still plugged in, too busted for anybody to even bother stealing. Nordlinger draws the Laser Quest maze in the middle of a battle, a cluster of shooters hiding in a little turret, a few tweens running up a ramp, and then he draws it empty, with the lights on, a 20-year-old Johnathon staring blankly. It's gone. It's not coming back.
My sadness around that is complicated. I have no desire, at 37-years-old, to charge into a laser tag arena and prove my worth. At Laser Quest, each player provided a nickname that showed up on your scorecard at the end of the match. My nickname used to be "Evil Santa." That's how long ago I played laser tag: I thought "Evil Santa" was a cool, funny handle. That's terrible. After college, I moved back to the Bay Area for a few years. Going by Yelp reviews, the Mountain View Laser Quest was open during that time. I could have gone if I'd wanted.
But maybe I want my son to be able to go when he's older (this is a huge difference between myself and Laser Quest's protagonist, in that I have a child who could still potentially get something out of these things I used to enjoy; I'm living in the past but with the slight redemptive note that I'm sometimes doing so in order to find something to bring back to him). Maybe I want kids to have access to the physical spaces I had as it's all either closing or turned into a more expensive, boutique, knowing version of the same thing. My son went to a Build-A-Bear Factory last weekend for a friend's birthday. I loved being in that place. I took a dozen pictures.
There's a theme park in Santa Clara called California's Great America. When I was a kid, it was "Paramount's Great America." I only went a handful of times– twice with a summer camp, twice for concerts at the park's amphitheater, maybe once with my seventh grade Hebrew School class, once for a rich friend's birthday. You really need to have a rich friend when you're a child.
In June 2022, a real estate company with the "bad guys in a sci-fi movie" name Prologis bought the land Great America's on, and in May 2025, the park's current owner announced they did not intend to renew their lease under Prologis' new terms. Nothing's been confirmed, but it's likely Great America will shut down after its 2027 season, and then it'll be bulldozed and turned into condos. Wherever my family is living next year, I hope to get us to Great America before it's gone.
I'm not going to be 10 again, though. The 90s Paramount movie posters at the gates are long gone. It looks like the Top Gun-themed roller coaster is called "Flight Deck" now, its old theming stripped away. "Weird Al" isn't dropping by to perform his 1999 set. I love that world, but it's going and soon it'll be gone. I'm trying to find a way to hold onto that while not wandering so deep into the maze I get lost. Because Laser Quest is great, but I was ready to spend $7 to see somebody else draw a laser tag chain I loved as a kid. I already got my money's worth before the comic actually got good, because I saw one panel with an arcade game I enjoyed 25 years ago. I was happy to settle for so little. I'm following the nostalgia Instagram accounts, I've got a bootleg Bucky O'Hare shirt in my dresser, my son is playing with the (great) Power Rangers Happy Meal toys my wife got when she was his age. By the end of August I will almost certainly have written about some other nonsense from my past. But those kids aren't playing laser tag in Mountain View anymore. More importantly, I'm not one of those kids. I've got to keep them in my heart while continuing to move forward. You've tripped over your own feet the second you break into that Laser Quest.