From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Shadowgate - What I Expected Didn't Happen (Part 2)
I entered Castle Shadowgate a pitiful buffoon and exited a seasoned adventurer.

"The light grows faint, the path winds round. Where life is lost, wisdom is found."

As if.

So after a long layoff period, I returned to Shadowgate with the intention of facing it down and conquering it.

What sparked my return was my obtention of information pertaining to the flame-filled room and the action that you had to take to safely occupy it and subsequently advance past it. I came to possess such knowledge after I resorted to just flat-out asking someone (either James or one of his friends; I don't remember which) how to do it. And the person in question told me that you had to equip the cloak that you took from the Wraith room (well, in my case, the cloak I failed to take from the Wraith room).

It was a cowardly move, I admit, but, really, I didn't know what else to do. Right before I resumed the adventure, though, I promised myself that henceforth I would refrain from asking for help. "From now on," I told myself, "I'm going to figure it all out on my own!"

So with the cloak equipped, I was able to safely occupy the flame-filled room. Once I was in there, it didn't take me long to deduce that you could extinguish the flames by tossing the icy sphere onto them. I was happy that the flames' extinguishment caused the Drake to evacuate. That nasty little thing had caused me so much torment, and I was glad to finally be rid of it.

While experimenting in this room, I discovered two more fun/horrifying deaths. You could throw yourself into the oil-filled pits, which were still hot enough to set you on fire; and you could use your torch to reignite the flames and thus set yourself and burn yourself "to the bone."

How lovely!

So I finally got to see what was waiting for me beyond that flame-filled room. It was a "deep, dark" chasm whose northern doorway appeared to lead out to the castle's exterior. When I attempted to cross over the bridge and travel through said doorway, though, I was met by a suddenly-appearing troll!

Now, in general, I really liked Shadowgate's artwork, but I just couldn't help but scrunch my face a bit when I was first saw this guy. It wasn't immediately obvious to me what the artists were going for when they settled on this design. "Why is he missing his lower extremities?" I wondered. "Is he one of those rare 'floating' trolls? Or is it that the artists just couldn't be bothered to draw the rest of him?"

It was and still is a mystery to me.

So I did what you always do when you come across a new enemy creature in a point-and-click adventure game: attack it with every weapon in your inventory until you discover its actual weakness. The troll's weakness was the spear; when I tossed it at him, he "fell silently to the ground." Though, because the narrator made sure to note that there was no accompanying crashing sound, I knew that I was probably going to have to deal with this troll again in the future.

When I reencountered this troll later on, I immediately knew what I needed to do: use a spell to sneak by him. "He'll probably catch any weapon that I throw at him," I thought, "so I need to change tactics and instead use an invisibility- or blinding-type magic spell." The Humana spell (the second one on my Spell list) did that job for me; it rendered me invisible and instantly carried me over to the next screen.

On occasion, because I was convinced that such a thing could be done, I'd attempt to find a way to buy off the troll with gold coins (and not the brass slugs, which I knew he hated). My hope was that I'd be able to do legitimate business and establish some type of rapport with him. Though, no matter how accommodating I was, he'd always reject my offers and behave belligerently.

"He's a big jerk," I thought.

After I dispatched the troll, I headed north and entered into the castle's courtyard.

As the courtyard's environment came into view and its newly introduced musical theme met my ear, I was overcome with a feeling of euphoria. To finally hear a brand-new tune after having failed to make progress for months was an appropriate reward for what felt like a major gaming victory. I'd reached a new milestone. I was here in what I sensed was the start of Shadowgate's second half. "I made it," I said to myself.

Before interacting with any of the courtyard's objects, I took some time to listen to its newly introduced tune and soak it in. I was enchanted by this tune because it had such powerfully curious character to it. It was soft and heavenly-sounding but still somehow deceptive in its message. Its tone was a weird mix of calm and uneasy. And as I listened to it, I was forced me to juggle conflicting feelings of comfort and trepidation.

All I could do was wonder about this scene and think about how I'd feel if I was actually there. "Would its atmosphere be as uneasily calm as I imagine?" I wondered. My visualization was guided by the narrator's wondrously captivating description of the scene. He said, "The moon casts a brilliant shadow over the grounds of the courtyard." That description and the room's music worked together to entrance me and fill my head with such rich imagery.

I was so deeply entranced by the tune, in fact, that I was momentarily distracted from the battle-ready cyclops that was menacingly standing there!

I was distracted, also, by the word courtyard. I'd never heard it before, and I wasn't sure what it meant. The game wasn't clear about it, either. When I returned here later on, the narrator said, "The castle Shadowgate looms before you." And then I was really confused because I didn't know where I was. "If I'm not in the castle," I wondered, "then where the hell am I?! And if the building to the north is 'Shadowgate,' then where was I stuck for the past five or six months?! What was all of that back there?!"

I figured it out eventually.

But then there was the cyclops.

The cyclops threat delivered me into a state of worried contemplation. "What if this is another situation in which I don't have the items I need?" I nervously wondered. "What if I get stuck again?" (Clearly I was suffering from Post-Flame Room Stress Disorder.)

And because none of my weapons appeared to work, it seemed as though I was right to worry. Apparently I didn't have the means to deal with the cyclops. As a lover of mythology, I knew that the best way to take down a cyclops was with a slingshot and stone, but I didn't possess the former; all I had was a couple of stones. I hadn't yet figured out how to open the foyer's closest, which contained the sling, so once again I was in a situation in which it was impossible for me to advance.

It was only after I thoroughly re-investigated the castle's early portion that I discovered that you could "open" the L-shaped hall's tome and subsequently obtain Key 2, which unlocked the closet. That re-investigation lasted a couple of days.

So once I acquired the sling, I returned to the courtyard and did what I was certain the game wanted me to do: I placed a stone into the sling's pocket and then used the sling on the cyclops. And immediately I knew that it was the correct solution because the first line of the narrator's description of the event didn't start with the words "A battle cry dies in your throat" (which, I'd become painfully aware, served to confirm your imminent death). Rather, he said, "You cry out, 'Death to the Philistine!' and release the stone. Bull's-eye!"

"Death to the Philistine!" instantly became one of my favorite video-game quotes. I made sure to repeat it hundreds of times in the future--even in instances in which its use made no sense, like when I was trying to get the ice cream man to stop his truck.

It wasn't until around a year later that I became aware of the fact that you could kill the downed cyclops by stabbing him with the sword (which, probably not coincidentally, was hidden alongside the sling). My friend Dominick informed me that you could do this (he and his family had since become interested in the game, and while playing it, they made some cool discoveries). Up until that point, I dealt with the cyclops' persistent threat by making sure not to engage in an excessive amount of backtracking. I had to make sure that my routing didn't entail passing through the courtyard more than five times, since the game only provided you five stones. (Well, actually, you can get away with using up all five stones. If you use them all up, they'll simply respawn, en masse, in their original positions. Though, I didn't become aware of this until years later).

And once again, the game's loosely defined terms caused me to miss an important item. After examining the well's bucket (which I raised by turning the well's crank), I determined that there was nothing special about. It was just an empty bucket, I thought. If there was anything inside of it, then the game would have told me right away, since my examining of it, I was sure, had to entail looking inside of it. That's to say that I didn't think to "open" the bucket.

When, much later on, I discovered that you could "open" the bucket, I was pretty pissed about it. "How the hell do you 'open' a bucket that has no top?!" I wondered while angrily shaking my head. "That's so unintuitive!"

Such was Shadowgate.

So after I downed the cyclops, I passed through the courtyard's northern doorway and entered Castle Shadowgate (for the first time, apparently).

The castle's first room was a "long, drafty" hallway that contained three doors (and a rug that I hastily and enthusiastically burned to ashes!). I started with the lower-left door. It led into a small library.

The library's newly introduced musical theme was another "curiously strange" piece. It was maddingly abrasive but at the same time very inquisitive-sounding. Its message seemed to be, "You can investigate this place if you want, but before you do, be warned: Something is watching you, and if you pry too deeply, it's gonna pop out and get you!" So I remained cautiously alert as I examined the library's objects.

Surprisingly, there were a lot of important items packed into this small room: I found two spell-granting scrolls, a pair of special glasses (which allowed me to read the spell-granting book's previously indecipherable text), and Key 5. So my time here was very fruitful.

This library became one of my favorite rooms for another reason: its intriguing texts! Years later, I discovered that you could read most of the books that were placed on the bookshelf's left side. Each of them, I learned, had something compelling to say about either Shadowgate's world or its inhabitants. Every so often, I'd return to this room and intently read about the subjects they covered. I'd read informative books like The Circle of Twelve, which talked about an "ancient organization of wizards" whose members included Lakmir, our master, and Talimar, who abruptly broke away from the group and took a new name: The Warlock Lord! Then there was The History of War, which talked about the Warlock Lord's first attempted power grab and how his schemes were foiled by the other Circle of Twelve members.

There was also Castle Shadowgate, which described the castle's size and structure. It explained, too, that the impenetrable mountains that encircled the castle were called "the Gatekeeper," and apparently they did a great job of cutting off access to the castle (which explained why it was uninhabited by humans); whenever I'd read this passage, I'd eagerly put my imagination to work and visualize an enormous castle being guarded on all sides by tall, spooky mountains (like the ones that were on display in the later rooms!). The book also contained another captivating line. It said, "The walls of the castle are quite alive." That line, I thought, did so much to intensify the castle's bizarre and mysterious character.

The other books talked about gods, dragons and the nature of war. They weren't quite as interesting as others, no, but still they, too, helped me to form ever-more-vivid visualizations of Shadowgate's world and its characters. These books represented another one of the game's great world-building elements. It was if they contained secret knowledge that could only be discovered to those who had the most inquisitive eyes. (I was working under the assumption that most people would consider the books to be merely decoratory and consequently ignore them.)

The room's back wall had another one of those conspicuous wall holes, which could only mean one thing: It was time to use my final gem (by this point the game, I'd already seen this same puzzle two separate times, so its solution was now stupidly obvious). When I placed the red gem in the hole, the bookshelf's right half slid aside and revealed a secret passage.

The secret passage led into a study whose dominating visual was a large a fireplace that was "set in a red brick wall."

This room had only a single puzzle, and it wasn't a terribly difficult one. Once the narrator made it clear that the globe had a clear seam along the equator, I knew what I had to do: break it open! From there, it was a simple matter of using all of my items on the globe and chanting all of my spells and doing so until something worked. What wound up working was the Terrakk spell (which made sense to me because the spell's description said something about this spell being "the key to the world"); it caused a crack to form around the globe's equator, and that allowed me to pop the globe open. There were two items inside of it: Key 6 and Bottle 5. I was certain that only the former would be useful to me (I thought as much because every other bottle's content, save for Bottle 2's, had killed me).

There were two things in this room that really interested me: the starry window on the room's back wall and the narrator's description of it. What was most curious to me was his referring to the window as a "portal." I'd never heard anyone use that particular word to describe a window. Before then, I associated the word portal chiefly with teleportation devices. Now, I was learning, it was also a synonym for window! And once again, Shadowgate had taught me something interesting about my language.

I loved the narrator's full description of the portal. He said of it, "Through this portal you can see the moon hovering over the darkened mountains." It was one of those lines that helped me to form a strong, imagination-stirring visualization of the scene that was occurring outside the castle.

And I burned the rug, yes.

After I cleaned out the library and its secret study, I returned to the drafty hallway and proceeded to enter its upper-left door. That door led into a laboratory.

The lab gave me a lot of new toys to play with. The most intriguing of them was an oddly shaped green pot that was said to contain a "strange, poisonous-looking liquid." Naturally I wasted no time in drinking from it. And that's when I learned that the liquid was actually a body-altering formula. Drinking it caused blue hair to grow on the hero's hands. "Interesting," I thought. "I wonder what I'll turn into if I keep drinking this liquid!"

Unfortunately, though, the game had no interest in indulging my curiosity. When I tried to drink more of the liquid, the hero resisted because he was afraid of what might happen next. "Too bad," I thought.

I was very curious, also, about the room's wall cage. The narrator said of it, "This steel mesh cage rattles constantly." So I had just had to know what was in there! I found that out when I opened the cage's latch: It was a mutated dog! Immediately it pounced on me and ripped me apart (bonus).

In both this play-through and subsequent ones, I kept opening this cage not because I wanted to be ripped apart, no, but because I wanted to enter into its interior. I was convinced that the cage door was an entrance to a secret area (my theory was that the cage's interior was connected to the "Epor" room's adjacent space and that the animal "concealed" by the room's barred portals was this very same mutated dog). "If I can somehow tame this dog," I thought, "he'll leave me alone, and I'll have the opportunity to squeeze myself into the cage's interior!"

Eventually I gave up on that effort and accepted that the cage was just that: a simple cage.

What I remember most about this room, though, is its floor-handle puzzle and how annoyed I was by its solution. Here we had the most glaring example of the game's commands being defined too loosely.

See: The floor's white-colored stone tile could be manipulated in some way. This was immediately obvious. Though, I couldn't figure out what, exactly, to do with it! I tried opening the tile, hitting it, taking it, and forcing it open with all of my weapons. None of it worked. And this turned out to be a major problem because the tile, apparently, contained an important item (the item I needed to advance had to be concealed this tile, I thought, because I had nowhere else to look). But because I couldn't successfully manipulate the tile and thus obtain the important item, I couldn't advance. So I was both frustrated and completely stuck.

I eventually discovered the answer, of course, but only after exhausting every option. What you had to do, again, was "use" the tile. Not open it by pulling on its handle, no. "Use" it. Doing so caused the tile to rise up and reveal a compartment that contained the important item. It was the holy water I needed to dispatch a certain creature.

I put some of the blame on myself because, by that point, I should have known better. This was, after all, the same game that wanted me to "open" a topless bucket. "Considering everything I've seen to this point, I should have been smart enough to try every command, including those whose use made no sense," I thought to myself. Still, though, I wasn't prepared to let Shadowgate off the hook; its illogical use of commands, I maintained, was a pretty annoying flaw.

So after I was done playing around in this room, I headed down its descending stairway.

The stairway, surprisingly, led to a small garden. "Why is a garden next to a laboratory?" I immediately began to wonder.

The garden (or the "fountain room," as I called it) used the courtyard's uneasily calm musical theme, which worked better here, I thought, because the garden's environments were more mysterious and thus more worthy of its powerful augmentation.

"But where is this place?" I continued to wonder. The presence of a tree and a couple of evergreens suggested that I was standing in one of the castle's exterior portions, though I wasn't sure that such was the case. Something about the garden's atmosphere was telling me otherwise; it was telling me that this was an "indoor garden" (if such a thing existed). And then I started to wonder, "Is it possible to grow a mini-forest inside of a castle? And is that one of the things they're doing in the laboratory, to which this room is connected?"

I preferred not to know the answers to those questions. I liked for there to be plenty of of unsolved mysteries. It helped to heighten the game's mystique.

Whenever I was in this room, my eyes would always be drawn to the evergreens in the back. There was something extra-mysterious about them, and I couldn't help but intently examine them and wonder about why they were there and what was hiding behind them. It had to be something very interesting, I thought. "What could be lurking behind those evergreens?" I'd wonder. "Is there someone watching me from behind there? Is there a pack of miscreants (like the Fratellis) camping back there? Or are these trees concealing unimaginable treasures?"

It was fun to think about.

Because I hadn't yet figured out that you could "open" the well's bucket, I didn't possess the item necessary to remove the flute from the fountain's grasp. I couldn't do it with just my hands because the fountain's jetting water, I learned, was acidic and would burn you (I guess I didn't believe the narrator when he warned me of such). So I wasn't able to take possession of the flute until days later, when I discovered that you could "open" the bucket and find a useful item: an equippable gauntlet. It protected you from the fountain's acidic water and allowed you to safely remove the flute.

I also wasn't prepared for the unpleasant fate that befell me when I drank the fountain's acidic water. When I did this, the narrator said, "You can't even scream because you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx!" That, right there, might've been the most horrifying line I'd ever read. It was one of those that gave me a lot to think about in the following days.

I thought it was rather clever how they designed it to where you had to use the flute in the very room you obtained it. "Most people wouldn't think to use an item in the room in which they found it!" I thought. I played the flute right away not because I deduced that doing so would reveal a secret but because my compulsion was to immediately test out newly obtained items (you know--find out right away whether or not a bottle's contents would melt my innards). So I merely stumbled into the solution. Playing the flute forced open a hole in the tree and revealed a ring.

I remember how mind-blowing it was to me when I returned to Shadowgate after playing through Deja Vu and suddenly realized that the flute's six-note melody was a perfect match for the opening six notes of Ace Harding's theme. Deja Vu's was a simple little nod, yeah, but at the time, I thought of it as the century's most amazing crossover event!

I needed to get out more, yes.

So after I obtained the ring, I headed back to the drafty hallway and traveled through its northern door. It led to a banquet hall that contained three more doors. All of them were locked.

The only significant object here was the rug. I quickly discovered that you could burn away its middle portion and reveal a hidden item: Key 4. I was quick to discover this not for of the usual reason--that as a rug-hating pyromaniac, I was obligated to promptly put the torch to any rug I came across--but because of the game's sloppy layer-rendering. Because it drew the back layers first, you would, upon entering a room, get a quick glimpse of concealed items, which were usually hidden beneath front-layer objects.

I wasn't bothered by this rendering issue because it didn't reveal solutions that weren't already immediately obvious. Though, I couldn't deny that it looked really bad.

But now I had all of the keys I needed to unlock this room's three doors.

I decided to try the top-right door first.

That door led into a tower whose bottom floor was occupied by a sphinx.

The sphinx, behaving as a sphinx would, blocked my attempt to ascend to the next floor and said that he'd only let me advance if I could correctly answer a riddle. I had to do this by giving him the item to which his cryptic description was referring. And if I didn't have that item, I'd have to go find it.

Fortunately, though, no amount of searching was necessary because I already possessed every obtainable item. Because I was also a compulsive hoarder (and now, thanks to the Sphinx, I could justify being one!). Neither in that first play-through nor in any future play-through did I have a problem coming up with the correct solution. None of the riddles were that difficult. In fact, most of them were insultingly easy. Take the horseshoe riddle, for instance. Its closing words were "...then stepped on by long-faced animals." After reading that riddle, I started to sense that the writing had, for some unknown reason, been dumbed-down a bit.

For years, I never noticed that there markings on side of the room's stairs. I didn't realize that they were there until someone in an AOL chat pointed them out to me. Those markings, I now knew, represented a clue that could help you (read: save you a whole lot of time) in one of the upcoming rooms. If only I'd noticed them during my first play-through!

After I correctly answered the riddle (I don't remember which one I got in the first play-through), I headed upstairs to the observatory.

The observatory had only one puzzle, and it revolved around a dual-purpose object: the star chart that was hanging on the left side of the room's back wall. The chart depicted what looked like a man holding a giant star.

It turned out, though, that the star was not a depiction but instead a physical marker that could be taken. I discovered this when I tried to take the star chart. I got the star instead. I tried to take the chart, too, but the game wouldn't let me.

The narrator's description of the chart suggested that it was loosely attached to the wall. And since I was now well aware of how Shadowgate liked to operate, I sensed that the chart held an addition secret and that I could discover what it was by "opening" the chart. It worked. When I selected to open the chart, it "opened" (or, rather, slid downward). There was a lightning rod hiding behind it.

"You weren't gonna fool me this time, Shadowgate!" I said while pointing at the TV screen.

Afterwards, I climbed the ladder. It carried me up to tower's top room.

As I read the above description, I figured that one of two things had happened: Either the woman's beauty hadn't been fully captured because she was poorly drawn, or our hero had been hitting the bottle. (I don't mean to be shallow, but come on.)

My first instinct was to rescue the maiden, so that's what I tried to do. I tried to "take" her. Though, my doing this led to a startling discovery: She wasn't a maiden at all; she was actually a bloodthirsty wolf in disguise!

The narrator's description of the woman gave no indication--or even the slightest hint--that such was the case, so there was no way I could have known that she was suddenly going to transform into a wolf and kill me. I didn't think that was fair. I mean, yeah--when I tried to speak to her, the narrator did say, "It doesn't seem to understand what you say," but I saw that more as the narrator merely repeating a standard response. "The programmer was probably too lazy to create separate lines that began with he or she," I thought. Also, she could have been a non-English-speaker or mute for all I knew!

Thankfully Shadowgate didn't punish players too harshly for mistakes (it simply sent you back one room). So, basically, I had carte blanche to stab away at her with every sharp object in my inventory and do so until I found out which of them was her weakness. It turned out to be the arrow. When it plunged into her, she transformed into the wolf and instantly died.

This was questionable character-development, I thought. Plunging an arrow into a woman on a mere guess didn't seem like a very heroic thing to do. I could understand taking such an action if there was actually some evidence that she was a bloodthirsty beast in disguise, but in this case, there was none. The hero, as far as I knew, had no such suspicion because he was too busy being "captivated."

"What if we were wrong?" I wondered. "Would we just have said 'oops' and moved on?"

When I was done thinking about this matter, I headed back to the banquet hall and traveled through one of its other doors. I don't remember which one I traveled through first, though, so I'll start with the top-left one. Just because.

The top-left door led into a small circular room (the turret's base, I surmised).

There was only one item of interest here: a horn. It was simply laying there, and thus it was ripe for the taking! That's what I thought until I tried to take it and I was repelled by the blinding flash of an unwelcoming flame-blast. Moments later, those same flames morphed into a vicious-looking hellhound!

After thinking about it for a moment, I concluded that the best way to deal with this menace was to douse it with water. Though, I didn't have any water-type items in my possession, and, apparently, I also lacked the means for transporting water. I tried filling all of my bottles and test tubes with water from the fountain and the subterranean waterfall, but that wouldn't work. Nothing would. None of the weapons or items in my inventory could help me. I simply had no answers.

I was, like I said earlier, frustrated and stuck.

I was so frustrated, in fact, that I had to take a week-long break to recover mentally. And when I came back to Shadowgate, I could only think to do one thing: resort to visiting every room and trying every command on every possible object. That, ultimately, was how I discovered that you could "use" the laboratory's white-colored stone and thus procure the holy water--the item that allowed you to dispatch the hellhound.

On an aside: I felt a little embarrassed as I read the narrator's description of the room's torches because he referred to them as "braziers." I was embarrassed because that word, I was certain, was the one that was usually reserved for old-woman undergarments. (It wasn't. The word I was thinking of was brassiere.)

After I dispatched the hellhound, I traveled up the room's ladder. It carried me up to the castle's turret (which, the dictionary told me, was a "small tower" and not a "gun base," like I thought it was). I was met there, alarmingly, by a large blue dragon. It was so big that it filled 75% of the view box!

The blue dragon, the narrator told me, was actually a "wyvern." I'd never heard of such a creature. And because I misread the rest of the description, I came away with the false impression of what the wyvern actually was. I thought that the narrator referred to it as "a baby dragon" (as opposed to a "distant cousin of a dragon"). And I made sure to spread this misinformation any chance I got. Whenever one of my friends would encounter a wyvern in an RPG, I, the big expert, would be quick to point out that the creature in question was "a baby dragon."

Hopefully no one was listening to me.

I knew that it was dangerous to interact with a room's objects when there was a monster present, so the first thing I did was focus on eliminating the threat. "I'll focus on looting this place after I take out this blue terror," I thought.

It didn't take me long to figure out that the wyvern was weak to the star because there weren't many striking-type weapons in my inventory (and I was pretty sure that the wyvern wasn't weak to bottles, skeletal remains or brooms). It was probably the second or third item that I tried. The star's crashing into the wyvern resulted in another mentally scarring death description. The narrator said of the event, "It strikes the wyvern and it explodes into a million pieces." I mean, ouch.

I have to be honest, though: Because the line's phrasing was kinda vague-sounding, I wasn't sure which of the two objects had actually exploded. "Did the wyvern explode after getting hit by the star?" I wondered. "Or did the wyvern die of a million shrapnel wounds after the star exploded while in proximity to him?"

I assumed that it was the former because, well, this was Shadowgate, and that meant that the more-gruesome-sounding death was probably the one that actually occurred.

I was fond of the turret's depictions because of the ways in which they caused my imagination to stir. While examining them, I could visualize what it would be like to stand atop a castle tower and look into the night sky and thus track the movements of an encircling dragon--one that was waiting for an opportunity to strike. My visualization was enriched by the narrator's observation that "The sky foretells of the coming of a great storm." It made the imagined scene feel so much more ominous and foreboding.

That's what Shadowgate was apt to do. At every turn, it filled my head with powerful imagery.

So after I procured the turret's lone item--the talisman--I headed back to the banquet hall and traveled through the only remaining door.

The banquet hall's bottom door led into a stone corridor.

Visually there was nothing special about this corridor; it was just your basic stone hallway. Though, still, there was something very significant and very exceptional about this corridor: its newly introduced musical theme, which was one of the most stirring, most wonderfully invigorating tunes I'd ever heard. It struck a chord with me because it perfectly expressed how I was feeling at the time. It spoke of how thrilling it was to access new spaces and make real progress.

This was another instance in which I was so entranced by a tune that I couldn't help but set the controller down and just listen for a few minutes. I spent that time soaking its inspiriting energy and thinking about its message, which, I was sure, was "You're almost there, kid! So keep at it!" Quickly it became my new favorite area theme, and I didn't want to stop hearing it; I didn't want engage in any action that might interrupt it, so I just stood still and listened.

In my future play-throughs, I'd always get sad when it was time to exit this area because the surrounding rooms' tunes just didn't have the same energy. They were comparatively deflating. (Though, I made sure to record this tune on my tape recorder so I could have access to it anytime I wanted!)

This "Irish-sounding music," as I called it, continued to play as I headed westward, out onto a balcony. And I was thankful that it did because its inspiriting energy made the view box's depictions feel so much more majestic and awe-inspiring.

The balcony had one of my favorite depictions: a moonlit mountainscape. It provided me a strong reference point for how high up I was and how far away I was from the surrounding mountains ("The Gatekeeper," as one of the library's books referred to them). Like the narrator said: They helped to give me an idea of the castle's size and strength. Also, they helped me to form another strong visualization--an image of castle being guarded on all sides by oppressive, impenetrable mountains whose only visible features were their moonlit peaks. My visualization was greatly enhanced by the inspiriting music, which helped to make it feel all the more breathtaking.

The balcony's puzzle was an easy one: put the lightning rod in the "flagpole mount." When I did this, lightning struck the rod, and resultantly a skeletal hand (which at first glance looked like a fork) rose up from a newly formed hole in the ground. The skeletal hand was holding a magic wand. After I removed the wand from its grasp, it descended back into the ground. "Well that whole sequence was creepy," I thought.

The stairs to the left led down to a lookout point. This ledge, too, offered an awe-inspiring mountain view. And the narrator's description of it made it feel so much more wondrous. He said, "Lightning lights up the countryside as you stand on a lookout point." That line, too, inspired strong visualizations.

The lookout point also had another memorable line: When I tried to take the pot of gold, part of the ledge collapsed and I fell to my death, and the narrator said of the event, "As you move the pot, you realize that you have fallen for the oldest trick in the book." The lookout point's was a trap; it was "fool's gold," the narrator said. At that moment, "fool's gold" became one of my new favorite terms, and from then on, I used it to describe bait-type items like the 1up in Cut Man's stage and the pizza in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's compacting-spike-wall room.

I suspected that the pot was a trap, of course, and that my attempting to take it would result in death. I only tried to take it because I was curious to see how hellish the narrator's death description would be. It was pretty awful. If you foolishly tried to take the gold pot, you'd fall into the castle's moat and get eaten by alligators.

So I took the bag instead. It contained gold coins.

Afterwards, I headed back to the stone corridor and took the eastward entrance.

That entrance led into the castle's throne room.

The throne room was occupied by a kingly-looking skeleton and what I assumed to be the castle's former ruler. I already knew that I had to place the scepter in the skeleton's hand because someone (my brother, I think) spoiled this puzzle for me. Though, I was fine with that because it wasn't a difficult puzzle, and I was certain that I would have figured it out on my own pretty quickly, anyway (because obviously a king would need a scepter).

What bugged me was the game's handing of the resulting event: It described the sliding panel's concealed hole as "ring-shaped" and thus made the next puzzle's solution completely obvious! It was unwelcoming hand-holding from a game that had never given me anything (save for the "Some things have more than one use!" tip) and trusted me to figure things out on my own. "Why is the game trying to hold my hand now, at such a late stage?" I wondered.

There was one thing about the throne room that puzzled me, though: the narrator's description of the king. When I examined the king prior to giving him the scepter, the narrator said, "There seems to be something in his hand." I had no idea what this meant. "Is he referring to the clearly visible axe that the king is holding in his right hand?" I wondered while in a confused state. "Or is he hinting that I should put something in the king's empty hand?"

I assumed that the former was true and tried to find ways to pry open the king's left hand. I was convinced that he was clasping onto an important item--maybe a gem or another ring. (There was nothing in his hand. The game's programmer simply mistyped the line. It should have been "There doesn't appear to be anything in his left hand.)

So after I placed the ring in the panel's ring-shaped hole, the king's throne slid backwards and revealed a secret passage. This one led down to another stone corridor.

The corridor, which was said to made from large granite slabs, contained two entryways. The one to the left, I learned almost immediately, was a trap; the moment I entered the room beyond, the ceiling collapsed on me and crushed every bone in my body. "Well, that was unfair," I thought. (I guess the room's walls being constructed of granite slabs and the entrance's being "very dark" were supposed to be my hints that entering the passage could have fatal consequences. I just didn't see either as a strong enough warning.)

The corridor's northern passage led into a "dark and gloomy" cavern. This one, also, contained two entranceways. I decided to travel through the left one first.

And once again, my simply attempting to pass through an entranceway immediately got me killed. It caused the stone gargoyle's to spring to life. They swiftly pounced on me. So, it seemed, the left path was inaccessible (for the moment, at least).

If anything, the killed-by-the-gargoyles death description added a lot of fuel to my suspicion that Shadowgate's writers were a bunch of psychopaths. I mean, seriously--would well-adjusted people come up with disturbingly gruesome death descriptions like "The gargoyles rip you to pieces!" and then say of the aftermath, "There's not enough left of you to even feed the birds"? Of course not.

After reading lines like that, all I could do was imagine that the game's writers were a clique of young, black-shirt-wearing Jack Nicholsons, each of whom would type up the most horrific-sounding death description he could think of and then proceed to rub his hands together and at the same time nod his head while bearing a sinister grin.

They're sick, sick people, I tell you. And, well, that's why I love 'em.

I figured out how to get past the gargoyles (you had to chant the Illumina spell and thus blind them with a nova burst), though I couldn't do anything in the adjacent room, so I returned to the gloomy cavern and took its unguarded eastward entranceway. It led into a lava-filled room.

The lava-filled room recycled the Wraith room's abrasive, tormenting musical theme, and thus it hinted that I was somehow in extreme danger. Though, aside from the boiling-hot lava, there didn't seem to be any immediate threats. There was only a statue of a devil holding onto a basin filled with smoldering coals. Still, I kept suspecting that some vicious creature was hiding here, somewhere (maybe in the center gap's dark spaces).

The puzzle surrounding the statue wasn't difficult to solve. To remove the statue as an obstacle, all you had to do was chant Motari (the first part of my standard procedure for dealing with hostile creatures and obstructions entailed chanting all of my spells, so naturally I discovered the solution in a flash). After the statue descended into the gap, a stone platform rose out from the lava and created a bridge to the room's northern exit. As far as I could tell, there weren't any real threats here, so I decided to refrain from dawdling and hurry to the next room.

I have to mention, though, that the lava room has one of the game's most hilarious lines. If you decide to senselessly dive into the lava pool, the narrator says, "You are brave, warrior, but stupid! Your body explodes as you plunge into the lava." Whenever I think about that line, I wonder about how much of a deranged idiot one would have to be to think that it's a good idea to dive into a fiery pit and do so while screaming triumphantly--as if that were a logical solution to getting around an obstruction.

The lava room's northern exit led into a "dark and eerie" cavern.

This room was a huge pain. I knew that I had to manipulate its side panel's levers in a certain way, but I had no clue as to what sequence I was intended to execute (at the time, I didn't know that the sphinx room's stairway had the correct combination etched into its side). So the only thing I could do was try every possible permutation and thus luck into the correct solution.

For some reason, though, none of the combinations yielded results. So all I could think was that I was doing something wrong--that maybe I had to something else in addition to manipulating the levers or that maybe the panel was broken and I had to fix it first. Though, none of my spells or items seemed to have any effect on the panel or its levers. There didn't seem to be any solution. So I was stuck again. And I remained stuck until James informed me that I could also raise a lever that had been previously lowered (until then, I assumed that raising just one lever would simply reset the entire panel).

So I exhausted every possibility and eventually stumbled upon the correct combination. When I did so, the room's metal cylinder (or the "white tire stack," as I originally identified it) rose up and revealed an item: an orb. I took it and then ran from this room.

It wasn't until much later that I became aware that you could attempt to enter into the room's dark pit. Doing this, I learned, awakened its unseen inhabitant: the weirdly named "winged yeti." The only real surprise, though, was the writer's rather restrained description of the resulting death. Instead of tearing you apart or slicing you into pieces, the yeti merely decided to "eat you for breakfast."

It was one of the weaker death descriptions, I thought. My assumption was that the writers were having an off day when they came up with it.

In following, I returned to the room that rested beyond the gloomy cavern's left entranceway. On the way there, I got torn up by the gargoyle's again because I didn't realize that they were capable of recovering from the nova burst. So I had to chant Illumina again (and every other time I moved between these two rooms).

So now I was in the well room--the only place left to go.

When I first entered this room, I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do. There was an obvious order of operations, I thought: crank open the well, toss in a coin, and then enter into the passage that appeared when the back wall resultantly rotated (that rectangular outline, I was sure, was signaling the presence of a rotating wall). Though, it didn't work as I expected: The game wouldn't let me throw a coin into the well (for whatever reason, I never thought to throw the Big Coin in). So I left.

I still didn't know what to do here, no, and I wound up focusing on the wrong thing: the door on the left. I was sure that I needed to open it to progress. Even after I discovered that you could throw the Big Coin into the well and thus magically turn it into a transport that sent you to the game's endgame portion, I continued to think that there was something important beyond that door. "There has to be something big hiding back there," I was convinced.

I can't tell you how much time I wasted trying to find a way to open this door. I spent hours repeatedly poring over this room and scouring the entire castle in search of a super-secret switch or button or any mechanism that looked like it might pop open the well-room door. I was sure that such a trigger existed somewhere.

I theorized, also, that there was an alternate way to access the beyond space. My thinking was that I could otherwise get there via the room's "rotating wall," which I still believed to be a thing. It didn't work. I couldn't find a way to make the wall rotate.

I wasn't ready to give up, though, no. And after thinking about it for a moment, I had an epiphany. "This is an old game," I remembered, "so that must mean that the solution to this puzzle is well-known and thus probably well-documented." So I decided to go back and skim through all of my issues of Nintendo Power (including those that I'd recently back-ordered) and find the answer. My hope was that one of the magazine's Classified Information or Counselor's Corner sections had addressed the issue.

Unfortunately none of them did. But still, I held onto my hope and kept eagerly checking the Classified Information and Counselor's Corner sections of newly arriving Nintendo Power issues, thinking that one day one of them was sure to reveal the answer.

What lied beyond that door, I imagined, was nothing less than a breathtaking lost world that held the secrets of life.

Sadly, there wasn't anything beyond that door. It was impossible to open. It was just another of Shadowgate's red-herrings. And I was very disappointed by that.

There was something memorable in this room, though--something that resonated with me: the narrator's description of the well's transformation. He said, "As soon as you throw the coin into the well, a huge wind erupts from within it. I reminds you of the small 'dust devils' you see in the autumn months."

I was the unlearned sort, so I didn't know what a "dust devil" was. Though, judging from the narrator's description, it had to be something magical, I thought. I hoped to see one in action one day--preferably during autumn, my favorite season. "It'll be magnificent!" I thought. (I was wrong about that. A "dust devil" is merely a small whirlwind that contains dust and debris.)

So after the well transformed into a transport, I jumped into it. Its swirling winds carried me down into a cavern that contained "a beach that looked down upon a river."

By now, Shadowgate was already high up on my list of all-time-favorite video games, but what occurred after I jumped into the well helped to elevate it to the highest tier and earn it a place in my pantheon of favorites. The well had transported me to the shores of the River Styx--the river that had been spoken of in many of my favorite mythological stories. The River Styx was something I obsessed over; I was always wondering about how it functioned--how it was possible for a river to connect two separate realms--and what it would be like to cross it.

Shadowgate hadn't been short on mythological references, no, but this was the first time it was introducing something with which I was intimately familiar. This was the river of death I'd read so much about. This was the river that many brave heroes had crossed--heroes like Perseus, who traveled its waters in Clash of the Titans, which I'd seen very recently (it quickly became one of my favorite movies). And suddenly Shadowgate's scope had expanded far beyond what it was originally.

So I knew exactly what I needed to do here: strike the gong and thus summon Charon--Hades' skeletal ferryman. At first, of course, I bumbled around and tried hitting the gong with the war hammer and the sword, but eventually, after employing some basic observational skill, I noticed what should have been immediately obvious to me: There was a mallet hanging right next to the gong!

The answer to your question, reader, is "yes." And those paint chips were delicious, so leave me alone.

And after I struck the gong with the mallet, the ghostly ferryman appeared. As expected, he was clad in a tattered cloak, and he was holding an oar; and he was holding open his free hand.

In this moment, everything had lined up perfectly. The invigorating "Irish-sounding" music was echoing throughout my room. The ferryman of legend was standing before me, awaiting his fare. And an air of finality was permeating the space around me. After all of those months of struggle, I was finally approaching the endgame. And I was excited to be doing so.

So I paid my gold coin and hastily boarded the ferryman's raft.

The ferryman transported me over to the opposite bank and into a stone chamber.

I'll never forget what the narrator said when I arrived here. He described my state of mind as feeling as though I was "standing on sacred ground." That line perfectly encapsulated the thoughts that were flowing through my mind. And from that point forward, I'd always use the phrase "standing on sacred ground" to describe how I was feeling whenever I worked my way over to a space that I never thought I'd be smart or skillful enough to access.

The only downer was that the entire endgame sequence had been spoiled for me. (Everything in the game's final two rooms except for the talisman puzzle. I had to figure that one out of my own. Though, admittedly, it wasn't exactly a brain-busting puzzle, since each of the stone slab's niches had an unmistakable shape.)

You see: Back during one of my week-long layoffs, I allowed James and his friends to borrow my NES. They borrowed it because they were intent on finishing Shadowgate. And for whatever reason (boredom, probably), I decided to hang around and watch them do it. So I knew how to beat the game. And consequently I'd robbed myself of the satisfaction that I would have felt had I figured it all out on my own.

Though, I didn't consider my advanced knowledge to be a complete roadblock to fulfillment because I still had the chance to figure out one of the game's major puzzles on my own. That is, I still had the chance to figure out how to construct the Staff of Ages (luckily I missed the part where James and his friends constructed it). It was going to be difficult, I thought, because the how-to scroll's language was really kinda vague-sounding.

Unfortunately, though, I didn't get the chance to do it on my own because James made sure to drop by my room and quickly blurt out the particulars of the staff's construction. He did this with the intention of ruining the endgame for me. And he succeeded in that mission.

He could be mean at times.

So with my spirits having been lowered, I backtracked my way to the dual-bridge room and used the levitation-granting Bottle 2 to access its eastern entranceway. (I already knew that you could use Bottle 2 to access this room. I figured that out months before. It's just that I didn't know what to do when I was in here. Now I did, obviously.)

Then I did what James told me to do: use the wand on the snake. When I did this, the snake transformed into the Staff of Ages. "How was I supposed to know that you could do that?!" I wondered, since none of the scrolls ever said anything about wands or snakes. (As an aside: I didn't know until years later that the snake was actually a statue. For the longest time, I was afraid to examine the snake because I assumed that doing so would incite it. So I, just like the hero, was amused when I discovered that it wasn't real.)

After I obtained the staff, I attached the blade and the orb to it and thus transformed it into the mighty Staff of Ages!

And now only one final task remained!

Of course, I already knew how to defeat the Behemoth, so as I watched him rise up from the depths, there was no sense of drama (his rising made for a cool visual, though). Rather, there was only a sense of duty. In order to complete one of the most challenging, most mentally demanding games I'd ever played, I had to take one single action. I had to take hold of the Staff of Ages and use it on the Behemoth. And when I did this, the staff pulsated with power and blasted the Behemoth with an explosive beam of light! In his rage, the Behemoth grabbed hold of the evil Warlock Lord and descended into the depths forever.

It was, despite everything, a satisfying victory. I was so happy to have beaten my first point-and-click adventure game.

As an aside: The Behemoth instantly became one of favorite video-game bosses, and in the future, I made sure to include him (and his handler--the Warlock Lord) in all of my monster-based art projects (like my "Masters of Evil" card series and my many monster-battle drawings). And because he was one of my favorites, I'd always give him preferential treatment (I'd give him exaggerated "Power" attributes and such). I rigged it to where he was always a top-5 finisher in my monster-battle tournaments.

What wasn't among my favorite things, though, was the game's ending and particularly its closing visual. "What the hell am I looking at?" I wondered as it came into view. It was hard not to be distracted by the crudely drawn imagery and especially the palace guards with their lanky balloon-animal limbs.

I understood that the designers had to work within the limitations of a 112x112-pixel view box, yeah, but, still, they could have done a bit more to make the king's throne room look as "majestic" as the narrator described it. What this closing visual looks like, instead, is a scene shot within someone's one-car garage.

I really liked the victory music, though. It was rewardingly soothing and evocative and thus the perfect capper to what had been a long, arduous journey.

I was excited by the game's final line because it seemed to hint at a sequel. I immediately started looking forward to it. (It turned out, however, that "The first story's end" was just a fancy way of saying "The End." There was no sequel coming. It was nice to dream, though. The good news was that other Shadowgate-like games came along and filled the void. I'll tell you about my experiences with them at a later date!)

So yeah--Shadowgate was one of the most highly impactful games I'd ever played. It changed my life and furthermore helped to shape who I was. It taught me so much about language and how to use language to evoke wondrous images and strong emotions. It taught me so many new and interesting words (the "Shadowgate words" that I often use in tribute) and therein helped to improve my vocabulary. It inspired me to create and helped to enrich my creative projects. And it was able to stir my imagination in wonderfully unique ways and help me to form some of the most powerful, most evocative images I ever visualized.

And Shadowgate meant a lot to me, also, because it was just a flat-out-great video game. It was a top-tier puzzle-adventure game and furthermore one of the genre's most amazingly distinct works. I loved playing it. I loved being in and exploring its uniquely presented, incredibly wondrous world.

Even though I knew all of Shadowgate's puzzle solutions and could never possibly forget them, I still returned to the game regularly. I'd return to it simply because I wanted to continue to enjoy its amazingly evocative music and soak in its wonderfully enchanting atmosphere. Also, there was great value, I knew, in reading all of its interesting descriptions. I loved to visit each room and examine all of its objects and find out what the narrator had to say about them. And each of his descriptions told me a lot about the game's world and helped to further enrich my visualizations of it.

So, you see, there was a lot to do in Shadowgate beyond solving puzzles.

And even after I'd been everywhere and seen everything, I was still convinced that I hadn't yet discovered all of the game's secrets. Shadowgate's powerfully mysterious character had a way of making me believe that there was more to its world than I was seeing. I've talked a lot about this over the course this piece--about how I spent enormous amounts of time trying to open the un-openable, access the inaccessible, and breach the unbreachable--but still, I feel as though I haven't been able to express just how passionately I went about it. I really wanted to discover huge, mind-blowing secrets, and I was certain that one day I would.

That's the true measure of Shadowgate's power.

I was so desperate to get more of what Shadowgate offered that I purchased Kemco's other MacAdventure conversions--Deja Vu and Uninvited--the moment they appeared in stores. I didn't find either to be quite as compelling as Shadowgate, no, but still I enjoyed them immensely. They, much like Shadowgate, were able to stir my imagination in ways that other games simply couldn't. (Like I said: I'll tell you about my experiences with them some other time.)

My hunger for more Shadowgate never ceased, and while the solidly entertaining (and sadly underrated) Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers was quite satiating, it just wasn't enough. I needed more. And I knew where to get it: in the PC world, wherein the genre was born. And once emulation became big, I decided that it was finally the right time to start delving deeply into the "strange and unusual" world of computers and experiencing games like Shadowgate within their natural habitat and therein gaining a true understanding of their intrinsic values.

I started with the Amiga and Windows 95 versions of Shadowgate.

And not surprisingly, they're quite different from the NES version--mostly in terms of how they control.

Both versions feature all of the same content. Their writing is superior (and there are no typos or missing words), of course, and they contain an extra a room (a "rectangular room" in which a group of hobgoblins can be seen playing cards), but all of the items, objects and enemies you remember from the NES version appear here in basically the same forms.

But how these versions play is a much different story. Their action is mouse-controlled and thus item-obtention is drag-and-drop based. So if you want to obtain an item, you have to click on it and then drag it over and drop it into your inventory window. The benefit to this is that you can drop items anywhere and at any time. And you have to drop items regularly because the inventory box has a limited capacity and can only hold a certain volume of items; you can fit a lot of small items into it, yes, but not a lot of big ones.

Also, the game's action unfolds in real time, which means that your torch's flame is dwindling by the second. So you can't just stand there idly. You can't use up too much time in examining objects or thinking about how to solve puzzles, no. You have to move quickly because each torch only lasts a few minutes (if even that). The NES version's torches, conversely, are programmed to extinguish after you engage in a certain number of actions (44 actions or something close to that number), so they'll last forever if you don't move (most people don't know this, and thus they needlessly freak out when the warning music hits).

I have to say: My eye-opening experiences with the original versions of Shadowgate have made me further regret that I was oblivious to the DOS, Windows and Mac scenes and that, resultantly, I missed out on the early days of point-and-click adventure games (and a lot of other computer classics). I'm absolutely certain that I would have loved playing them. I would have loved to pop open a window, grab a cold beverage, and spend a relaxing autumn day staring at a computer monitor and trying to solve a point-and-click adventure's every puzzle and mystery--and do this while not being distracted by modern conveniences like the Internet and cable TV with its 6,000 channels.

If only I'd been paying attention.

And I'm glad that Shadowgate is still around and very much relevant. The original Mac version is readily available on Steam, the 2014 Shadowgate remake is still being ported to newer consoles, and you can get easy access to the NES version by purchasing the ubiquitous 8-Bit Adventure Anthology. And I suggest that you play all of them because they're all great versions of the game.

I have some problems with the computer versions, yeah. I don't like that they have real-time torch mechanics and thus require you to essentially speedrun your way through them, and I'm not terribly fond of the 2014 remake's banshee-curse aspect that only serves to stack on yet another restraining, annoying time-limiting element.

Still, it's worth playing all of the different computer versions because each one them has an interestingly unique take on Shadowgate's action (either mechanically or visually) and gives you valuable insight into computer gaming and its wonderfully unique values.

Though, the NES version remains my favorite of the bunch. It's the quintessential Shadowgate game, and I'll continue to return to it regularly and do so for the same reason I always have: to soak in and enjoy its haunting vibe, its enchanting atmosphere, its amazingly evocative music, and its highly intriguing writing, language and world-building.

What else can I say? Shadowgate is one of the most impactful adventure games I've ever played. It changed my life, like I've said repeatedly, and it helped to make me a part of something special: the wide world of text- and point-and-click adventure games. And I've been a huge fan of the genre ever since.

So to Shadowgate's creators, all I can say is thank you for enriching my life and helping me to grow.

 

As I click on the "Publish" button, I know that although this chronicle has concluded, others wait to be written. After all: The blog-readers will need new stories to talk about and new 50,000-word blog posts to help cure their insomnia!

 

The first story's end.