My Dearest Wormwood,

I note with great displeasure that your patient has started playing Super Spike V-Ball. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation.

Super Spike V-Ball may delight our Enemy, but NES Volleyball is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet gaming pleasures but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of gameplay so feeble that the man is only half aware of it, in drumming of D-pad and clicking of buttons, in ear-piercing tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of sprites that have not even form or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them humping the air randomly, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is how you will waste his life playing NES Volleyball rather than any other game ever published by Nintendo.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. You must zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to video game duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright. Only then can you convince him to give over those hours with which you can bore him to tears playing NES Volleyball.

And do not be confused. Though I share the name, I do not share even a quantum of NES Volleyball's true evil power. For I am but one devil, but NES Volleyball has been duplicated and duplicated since 1986, growing in power with each year as it appears on buyback store shelves and in the illicit ROM collections of unsuspecting, innocent video game pirates. For now, do what you must to confuse your patient. Help him to forget the name Super Spike V-Ball. Trick him into thinking all volleyball games on the NES must be the same, in the end. Make him believe that Nintendo could never have published a game so horrifying. It is then you can strike. It is then you can put NES Volleyball into his hand. And then you will have him.

Your affectionate uncle,
NES Volleyball

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