It Was 1980-Somethin'...

I'm in a bit of a nostalgia kick lately, so I thought I'd bring all none of you readers along, kicking and screaming, for another trip down the cracked pavement and poorly-marked, weed-choked byways of Memory Lane.

My sister actually started this one by searching for old Commodore games on the Internet. We grew up Commodore kids. It was, by all reports, the computer with the most games made for it ever (barring game consoles.) Many a person my age grew up with a C64 joystick in their hands. Perhaps it was our age, perhaps it's the mist of nostalgia, but the old games seemed to have more imagination than most of today's dime-a-dozen titles. Unfortunately, we had terrible luck keeping magnetic media working for long, so several of our favorites went belly-up before we finished them. That didn't diminish our devotion, and over the years we've never totally shaken our love for the games that got us hooked on computers to begin with. Anyway, my sister's search that led her to a large community of gamers. There are even user-made emulators enabling one to play Commodore games on PCs. Most of our favorites were listed on the sites, and my sister likes tinkering with files anyway... long story short, I now have a C64 emulator and most of my favorite oldies on my computer. Some run better than others; the main problem is people who couldn't leave well enough alone and had to hack to things to heck and gone. I've still got to work out creating "save disks" (the emulator refers to a directory for its "disks," and creating "save disk" files can be tricky for some games) and a few other quirks, but so far I'm liking it. I'm surprised how much I remembered of the old games, down to the theme song and control quirks. That said, I thought I'd mention my old favorites here, with some memories.

Adventure Construction Set (EA Games) - EA Games has been my hero since my earliest gaming days. ACS is one of the chief reasons why. With a simple navigation tree and object/monster classes, one could use this program to custom-build an RPG, or play one of its premade adventures. It could also build one for you, a process that took 55 minutes by my recollection (my sister and I spent many an hour watching the onscreen countdown.) You got some weird results from the computer logic - tables in the middle of "meadows," the chance to play as a chair - and we usually cheated by going in and tweaking stats (gold always weighed 0, and by a strange coincidence we managed to boost our stats to the max early on with a few item-tweaks), but we loved it. I went through at least two disks of it as they wore out and died from use. Somewhere in the back of my mind, ACS forms the basis for most of my current creative endeavors; I still visualize the ACS menu trees when I work on Skyhaven. I downloaded it for the emulator not only because of my fond memories, but because it included a game that I never got to play before the disk died, and I've been wondering about it ever since. I've always hoped that someone would revive ACS or something similar for the PC; with today's processors and graphics capabilities, there's no telling what it could create. Sadly, such creation-based games - indeed, construction modules themselves, once fairly common in games - seem to have gone the way of the Commodore itself.

Forbidden Forest/Beyond The Forbidden Forest (Cosmi) - BTFF was the first game we ever purchased for our Commodore. How old was it? When we bought it, it came with a disk and a cassette tape. I played that sucker into the ground. Later, we found a cheap copy of FF, which was fun but never quite as absorbing. Not that long ago, I found a 3D version by the original creators, which kept the feel of the originals but was too intense for my limited 3D gaming skills (I would've fared better with Sidewinder or a joystick, I believe.) I remember the thrill of finally getting to the underworld in the second part, the frustration of fighting monsters that popped up randomly out of the ground, the increasing challenge as the forest grew darker and darker as the game progressed, the heart-pounding intensity of facing the final challenges against a four-headed, fire-breathing hydra and the great Demogorgon who spat acidic goo from his eyes. I remember laughing when the little guy did his victory dance in FF. Today, BTFF continues to challenge me, though I just played FF through the "Innocent" level in about 5 minutes flat. But they're still fun, and I'm glad to be able to revisit them.

Windham Classics titles (?) - We had all but one of these (Treasure Island), and we loved them. WC based their games on classic books. Some were essentially retellings (though never exact), and some were sequels, some text-based and some joystick, but all were fascinating, displaying a level of imagination and ingenuity rarely seen in today's games. It didn't even matter if you'd read or liked the books they were based on.
My sister loved Below the Root, based on a trilogy of sci-fantasy books about a "lost colony" of humans on a world where half the people lived in giant trees and the other half lived belowground. It was a very early RPG, allowing you to play the game through as different characters, male or female, from the tree-dwelling "Kindar" or underground "Erdling" races, with pros and cons to everyone. Even today, it has many devoted followers who remember it fondly. Her disk gave up the ghost when she was on the very verge of victory, but via her emulator she hopes to have a second chance.
I played Alice in Wonderland more times than I can count. As Alice, you wandered through Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land, trying to become a Queen so you could escape before the Red King woke up and everything - including, presumably, you - disappeared. You had different dialog options to interact with the many creatures and people you encountered, provoking responses positive and negative, and the game was very reliant on in-game clocks for gameplay. There were always several things that puzzled me about the game, especially one area in particular that always made my computer crash out (but which wasn't necessary to victory.) So, once again, I'm exploring Wonderland, enjoying it more for having actually read the books.
Swiss Family Robinson was the only game I remember Mom playing with any consistency on the Commodore. A text-based game with primitive pictures (every time you killed something - and, like the book, you killed a lot of things - it just flipped the graphic upside-down, which was the height of hilarity for my sister and I), it recounted a version of the shipwrecked family's survival. Mom found a few different ways to be rescued, but there were things about the game that always eluded her explorations, and eventually she gave up. I can still remember the huge sheet of paper she mapped out the island on, and how the whole family would gather around to offer advice and help her navigate.
DragonWorld and The Wizard of Oz were "my " games, played countless times. I never finished DragonWorld before the disks died, but I was enchanted with the wonderful world it created, a world of jewelled trees and magic and dragons. (I wasn't nearly so enchanted when I read the book many years later, and am just as glad that my memories of the game were never tainted by having read it.) TWoO was fun, too, and I found a few different happy endings in it as well - one time, I partied with the Munchkins and decided to live there, and another time I stayed behind instead of going back to Kansas with my ruby slippers, triggering a new section of the game that I never got to explore before its disks, too, up and died on us. It fascinated me then, and still does now, that the programmers hid so many quirks in the system. How many people would think to join in the party with the Munchkins? How many would go against Hollywood and L. Frank Baum and have Dorothy live on in Oz? If ever I had a game based on anything I wrote, I'd want that much thought to go into it, regardless of whether anyone found out about it or not.

Demon Stalkers (EA Games) - One of my favorite games, it is also one I never finished. Not for the disk dying, but for my own lack of nerves. I was so wrapped up in the intensity that I just couldn't bring myself to finish the last of the 100 levels; my pulse rose every time I thought about it. Yes, I know - I fought my way through 99 levels and chickened out at the very end, with victory in my very grasp. So sue me - I'm an utter coward. I also remember enjoying the construction aspect of the game. Never mind that I had nobody to play the things I built; I just loved building dungeons.

Ultimate Wizard (EA Games) - Aside from the fun, relatively stress-free premise (a wizard runs around screen-sized dungeons collecting treasure, triggering traps, and finding the Key to fit the Lock that let him escape), what I loved about this one was the surprisingly complex construction mode. The ability to set up "matrixes" to trigger events - floors disappearing, ladders appearing, treasure vanishing or multiplying -, stumbling across secret ways to add bizarre sprite item, coming up with new, ingenious ways to torture the nonexistent players... I spent hours fooling with those things, again knowing that nobody would actually play them. If I could harness half that power for something to build puzzles with for Skyhaven, I'd never leave my room again.

Mail-Order Monsters (EA Games) - A precursor to many of today's battle games, MOM let you build up a stable of "morphs," custom-built animals based on one of several body types. You could spend points on extras like photosynthesis (to regenerate electricity), hands (to handle various weapons), and gills (to enable it to move/breathe underwater), boost stats, gather weapons, and send it into various world-maps for various fights: battles to the death, battles to surrender, battles against a computer-operated "horde", and capture-the-flag games. My sister and I loved it, taking turns as the "winner" and "loser" to build up our morph stats before heading out against the horde. What was so great about it was not just the versatility of the game, to play as anything from a humanoid to an ameoba, but the fact that it wasn't just about beating up the other guy. You could play as a team, or just to capture a flag. No blood, no guts, no need to be an insecure adolescent male with violent tendencies. Just a stable of improbable creatures to tweak at will.

Maniac Mansion (Lucasfilm Games) - A classic multicharacter game, where the character combos affected gameplay, with three teenagers investigating the obligatory haunted mansion with its spooky inabitants (including a mad scientist, his weird son and nurse-uniformed wife, and of course some disembodied talking tentacles), trying to keep the world from blowing up. Using a combination of joystick controls and character action prompts, there were so many things to do and ways to play it was impossible to explore them all. We eventually broke down and ordered the game cheat book, and even then we could never get certain solutions to take, though we did win it once or twice. I've always kinda wanted to try it again, to see if I could ever get any of the alternate methods of victory to work.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (?) - My mom bought this one for unknown reasons, and for equally unknown reasons I was the only one who played it. It was only about a PG-rated game (unlike the movie), but still... The player - either Brad or Janet - ran around trying to find the pieces for the machine that would de-petrify their companion (the character not being played) so you could escape. The characters from the movie wandered about aimlessly, and if you ran into them they would either kill you or simply quote lines from the movie's songs and steal your clothes (causing you to run around covering up yourself, unable to collect any more machine parts until you found your clothes again.) I actually won it a few times, though what I most remember is the incessant loop of "Time Warp" in the background.

Movie Monsters (?) - Godzilla, Mothra, and other movie monsters - even the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man - get their due in a game that's all about the monster. You choose the monster, the famous city, and the mission, from finding your lost child to escaping to simply grabbing lunch. Unfortunately, our disk suffered an accident fairly early on, so most of the combos wouldn't play right. Those that did play were very fun. I've searched in vain for a similar concept among PC games, but can't seem to find anything comparable.

Equestrian Showjumper and World Games (?) - My sister, the horse nut, had ES, and we often played together; I'd take 3 horses, she'd take three horses. It's almost ridiculously simplistic on the surface. All you do is ride your horse around the marked course (following the map at the bottom of the screen) and jump. You can even design your own courses. Actually doing well at it was another thing altogether. WG was another one we usually played together. Our favorite was the diving competition; if you sprung too far, your diver flew off the screen and you heard an ominous dull thump instead of a splash, though often you got good marks anyway.

Railroad Works (?) - This was the first game I remember playing for 3+ hours straight. It's just a model-train type situation. You build tracks. You build stations to load and unload various cargo, along with background stuff. If you actually wanted to play, you operated your train, hooking up various cars and loading/unloading cargo in a timely manner for points. We rarely played for points, preferring just to lay track and play with the trains.

Frightmare and Starquake - These I played not necessarily to win, but just because they were kinda fun to run around in. The first one is about a nightmare, essentially - you go through rooms full of various monsters, some (temporarily) killable and some not, gathering points and treasures and ammo in an attempt to make it through the night until morning. The second features a little blob who runs around collecting pieces to a fragmented star core. They were timekillers, to the Commodore what Spider Solitaire is to the PC.

Master of Magic (?) - You are pulled into a cavern by a dying king of the underworld and can't go home until you find his orb of immortality. So, with nothing but a little magic and your bare hands, you fight your way through caverns of things trying to kill you. Aside from the impossibly catchy soundtrack, which has haunted me at various times for nearly 15 years since I first heard it, I remember getting my tail whipped by the awkward gameplay. I had hoped that, since I've become competent at far more advanced games on the PC, I'd be able to get my own back if I downloaded it to play again. No such luck - so far, I just keep getting my tail whipped. And I've got the soundtrack stuck in my head again.

In looking back, and in playing some of these titles today, enjoying them as much as I did when I was younger, what strikes me is that a good game isn't about graphics or soundtracks or expansion packs or any of the other things that today's makers seem so hung up on. A good game is about a fun and versatile concept, easy-to-learn controls, engaging the mind and evoking the imagination. When all that happens, the other stuff is just a happy bonus. It is roughly on that philosophy that I've based my websites, keeping things low-tech while attempting to engage the imagination, not relying on overblown gimmicks or graphics to make things come alive. So, if you want to know why I don't have Java applet menus or animated backgrounds or 3D real-time critters in Skyhaven, blame the Commodore. It's as good a thing to blame as anything else... ;-)