The latest doomsday craze is about to come to fruition, that of the end of the Mayan Calendar. Of course it’s really an arbitrary date based on a calendar system that is itself, arbitrary. The whole thing is a mess and misunderstood, but regardless, people love to theorize about the end of the world, and many movies have been made about life after society is destroyed. This past year though, preparing for the apocalypse has become pop culture fodder with shows such as Doomsday Preppers on the National Geographic Channel.

So with the end of the world coming, we know that many folks are stacking water and canned vegetables in their basements, expecting scenarios from Waterworld to Road Warrior yet the most likely scenario is they wake up on Saturday morning wondering why they just spent the last year stockpiling gas masks and bottled water, the currency of the apocalyptic future. Regardless, we can’t see into the future, no matter how possibly grim it might be. Perhaps the Mayans were somehow right and everything ends on Friday.

For a moment, let’s assume you are a gamer and a doomsday prepper. What is in your bunker? How are you preparing for the end of the world and what may come after? Well, there are a couple key things that you are going to need if you are to survive the end of days with your gaming system intact. Because, why survive the end of the world if you don’t get a chance to finish Skyrim? Here’s what you’ll need to survive and keep gaming.

Power

You are going to need a power supply in order to keep gaming until the surface is clear of radiation and/or zombie infestation. Setting up solar panels on the surface is a good idea, but those might be obstructed by nuclear winter or destroyed by the aforementioned zombies. So you are going to need plenty of gas, a generator and either a built in exhaust or gas masks. Such is the price of gaming after the apocalypse. Either that, or a whole ton of battery powered generators.

The best solution though is to get one of those battery powered generators and rig it to recharge from a manual treadmill. So not only will you be charging your battery generator to keep on gaming until the aliens discover you in your bunker, but you’ll be able to keep in shape as well so you can outrun them when they try to enslave you.

Sustenance

Gamers stereotypically survive on a diet of Mountain Dew, pizza and Cheetos. Or is that stoners? Either way, only one of those is a viable food item to stockpile in your shelter. That would be Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew can not only provide you with all the sugars and Yellow #5 your body needs, but it can help you with cooking as well. After all, Mountain Dew can dissolve mouse corpses, so you can easily make rat puree without having to use the energy of a blender or the smoke of a fire.

Aside from Dew, be sure to stock up on water, beef jerky and canned peaches. All this stuff will be currency in the wasteland of the future, unless the world is flooded and we’re floating around on man-made islands. In that case, be sure to stock up on cigarettes too. Those seem to be the currency of the water deluged future. If you have a keen green thumb, then it might be possible to build an underground greenhouse, but who are we kidding? You’ll be too busy trying to beat Battletoads for the 2,000th time to maintain a garden. I mean, if you can get past that freaking hoverboard level.

Back to the Basics

Look, the sad fact for many of you is that if you are trapped underground, separated from society, you are going to have to give up online gaming. There will be no more World of Warcraft when our alien overlords take over next week. That’s just the sad truth. You won’t have the power to run a LAN party, so you’ll have to exit the online world and go solo. That means no more pwning n00bs in Call of Duty either. Your best course of action is to forget the newer consoles and go retro. Pull in the Atari, the SNES, a few Gameboy units and perhaps a Sega Genesis if you want to get your Altered Beast fix.

I suggest getting an old school Pac-Man game cabinet and running a bunch of emulators and roms in through the computer. Limit your power consumption to the one unit. Plus, you could then wire the console table to the treadmill, mount the controls and screen on the treadmill and power it directly with a system of gears and transistors you’ve set up. Of course, you’ve only got a couple of days to get all this worked out, so you better get started.

The truth is, if there is any group laughing about the end of the world prophecies, it’s gamers. We know damn well that the world isn’t going to end, video games have delightfully desensitized us to that end. However, fortune favors the prepared mind. So it’s better to be prepared for the gaming apocalypse and have that ultimate gaming bunker ready to go, just in case we wake up on the 21st to a zombie filled radiation wasteland where Kevin Costner is delivering mail.

h/t to lillybolt for the muse on this post.