And you know what? That should be more than enough. You got your sacking, you got your pillaging, you got your big-ass helmets with horns and your god of thunder named Chris Hemsworth. Bro, you even got Golden Axe, one of the coolest classic arcade games ever!

We’re talking sixteen bits of side-scrolling hand-to-hand combat. We’re talking broadswords and battle-axes and an angry magical dwarf called Gilius Thunderhead. We’re talking gaming history, gaming lore, that never would’ve existed without the Vikings.

And you know who developed Golden Axe for Sega? A dude named Makoto Uchida. One guess where he’s from, and if you say Finland, I’m smiting your ass like Thor.

So I’m sorry—hahaha, no, I’m not—but the Nords were not put on this earth to make flip phones. They were put here to have big shaggy beards and to have cool names like Bjorn Irönside and Eric Bloodaxe.

And that brings us to…

Ericsson

Nords, come on, learn to quit while you’re ahead! Fuck!

These dudes are Swedish.II And at one point, they’d actually made more flip phones than anyone else in the world.

And I know, because as the greatest international gamer of all time, I’ve been to every single country on the globe, no matter how mysterious, no matter how insular—just so I could say that I dominated there. Djibouti. Nauru. Kyrgyzstan. Texas. I’d touch down on some deserted field in my Kamov Ka-27 attack chopper, hop out with my Super Nintendo, find some local champ to destroy in Mortal Kombat, and fly away again. It was awesome.

Awesome, that is, except for one thing. Every human being in every one of these little cutthroat badass countries owned the exact same Ericsson flip phone, the T28. No joke. There are millions of them still floating around out there in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s truly the people’s phone, the ultimate equalizer. Cheap enough to be bought by anyone, anytime, anywhere.

WHO THE HELL wants a phone that literally everyone on the planet already has??

The purpose of a champion’s life is to be special. It’s to be different. It’s to be superior.

It is not to have a knobby antenna and storage for 250 contacts.

Seriously, you can own a Nokia flip phone, and we can get along, all right? You can buy an old LG or a Samsung or even a fucking Alcatel flip phone—none of them remotely interesting enough for me to write about here—and I’ll still have a tiny bit of respect for you. Like minuscule.

But if you own an Ericsson flip phone? Dude, you’re not even dead to me. It’s like you never even existed. Unless you find out my phone number, because to be fair, Ericssons do work pretty well and your calls will go through with no problem at all.