My morning began yesterday with a walk from my hotel on Powell Street to a place called The Box SF on Howard Street. It was a long walk–much longer than I’d anticipated–through some of San Francisco’s less than scenic neighborhoods. I kept thinking, Is this right? Am I going in the right direction? A man in a wheelchair with no legs rolled past me on the sidewalk. The sun was brighter and warmer than it normally is in San Francisco. Ten in the morning and already I had a lather going. I checked and double-checked my map. Yes, it seemed I was moving in the right direction…

Finally, I arrived at a pale blue door. I thought, This can’t be right. This can’t be my destination. I turned around and headed back towards the Moscone Center, towards something familiar. Then I stopped myself. I looked at the door more closely and spotted a single button on the wall next to the door’s frame. I pressed it. And I waited.

A few seconds later, a buzzing sound came from the door–bzzzt–and I pushed it open. In front of me was a long wooden staircase ascending into darkness. I took off my sunglasses and began to climb, looking for a sign of some kind–a familiar face or voice, a placard with a publisher’s name on it, anything, really, to banish the menace and ambiguity of this moment.

At the top of the stairs I found what I was looking for: rows of HD TV’s, game consoles, and several PR people milling about. I was relieved. “Jesus,” I said, “you guys really need to put a sign out front or something.”

A few minutes later I was playing a game called Quantum Conundrum. What kind of B.S. is this? I wondered. Who names a game ‘Quantum Conundrum’? Then I realized that Kim Swift, one of the creators of Portal, names a game “Quantum Conundrum.” A few minutes after that I was doing an interview with Kim Swift, who was telling me how the Companion Cube came about. “I was bored one day so I drew a heart on the side of the cube,” she said, laughing.

After the interview, I drank a complimentary smoothie, then the cameraman, who also had trouble finding the place but eventually arrived, and I headed back down to the street and the bright San Francisco morning sun.

That’s how these convention days play out: we constantly move between indoors and outdoors, between the dark and the light. We move from hotel to hotel, suite to suite, lobby to lobby. Sometimes we play games. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes people give us candy and snacks. Sometimes they don’t. I spent about half an hour with Tony Hawk in a tiny hotel room yesterday. I talked to an extremely reluctant Ed Logg, creator of Asteroids, Gauntlet, and Centipede, and told him how glad I was to meet him. When I referred to Ed as a “legend” on camera, he winced. Sorry, Ed.

While all of this is going on, between appointments, I kept running into people who I’ve known for years. We’d hug, say hello, catch up for a few minutes, promise to stay in better touch with one another, then move on.

It’s so warm and familiar and foreign, all at once. And it’s dream-like, surreal. In fact, after a day like yesterday, I sometimes can’t always be sure if everything actually happened, or if I dreamed all of it. I love that feeling, the not being able to tell. I fell asleep last night in my hotel room bed, feeling the kind of tired I feel after putting in a good day’s work. I listened to the saxophone player down on Powell Street who apparently knows only one song (the Godfather theme). I wondered, very briefly, if this hotel room is haunted. Then I laughed at myself and went to sleep.

Time to discuss stage 7-3, people. Yes, it’s yet another melodramatic showdown between Mario and Donkey Kong. Today’s custom death-dealing device, courtesy of D.K. himself, is spread across two–yes, two–full screens of gameplay. Donkey Kong is at the very top of the stage, standing between the two things he loves most in the world: Pauline and a switch (more on the switch in a minute). At the very bottom of the stage is Mario. In between these two is a trio of elevators which move at staggered rates in various directions and a pair of always-dangerous rising-falling monoliths. Let’s begin.

Climb the series of ladders and small platforms on the lefthand side of the stage until you can climb no higher. What you’re about to do is relatively tricky. Within the next eight seconds you will either be quaffing heartily from the chalice of victory, or you will be dead. No, this stage does not f*** around, people. I admire that about this stage.

Remember that switch I mentioned earlier? D.K. will pull the switch every few seconds, causing the trio elevators to move in different directions. Don’t fret much about this. Since this whole thing will be decided in a matter of seconds, D.K.’s switch-pulls likely won’t impact your glory-run much.

Jump to the first elevator platform. Move to the right just enough to trigger the (in this case) falling monolith. Remember, you can always use the rising-falling monoliths as makeshift elevators. Jump onto the back of the monolith as it’s falling or rising, your choice (Pro Tip: It falls much more quickly than it rises), and use it to jump to elevator number two.

Don’t get comfortable, because you’re not going to be here for long. And what happens next requires some fairly advanced Donkey Kong skills. What you need to do is this: jump to the third elevator, then quickly do an about-face and jump back to the second elevator. This jump-forward-jump-back move triggers the second rising-falling monolith. Monolith two falls exactly in the path of elevator three. Once it has reached its destination at the bottom of the stage–thud–and begins its slow rise back to the top, jump onto it, and ride it all the way to glory.

Enjoy quaffing from the chalice of victory. Get a quick glimpse of Pauline before an irate D.K. grabs her and hauls her off to the next stage. Totals for this stretch of the game:

7-1: 51 seconds

7-2: 86 seconds

7-3: 91 seconds

7-4: 128 seconds

Total: 356 seconds. Number of Marios remaining in the Mario tank: 37.