Because it was about time that some someone used a 1960s sitcom as the vehicle for an errand-boy simulator.
There are times when I'll be looking through my old toy and game collections, with the intention of reminiscing about them and thinking about what they meant to me when they were most relevant to my life, and I'll find myself holding an item whose presence is so inexplicable that it makes me shake my head and ask aloud, "What the hell was I thinking when I bought or asked for this?"
And had I been as discerning 25 years earlier, I probably would have asked myself that same question every time I looked upon the box cover of my most recent purchase: The Adventures of Gilligan's Island for the NES.
Now, in order to understand why I wasn't willing to exercise any judgment when I decided to purchase Gilligan's Island, you have to consider the circumstances: It was September of 1991, at a very late point in the NES' life, and I was sad because the console was reportedly on its way out. The SNES was coming to replace it, I was told by gaming magazines, and I didn't want that to happen because I loved the NES and wanted it to live on forever.
At that moment in time, I was desperate to stumble upon any great new NES game so that I could point to it and use it as proof that the console was still very capable of providing players high-level gaming experiences. "If such a game exists," I thought, "then it means that the NES is, in the minds to developers, still viable and thus rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated."
That's what I wanted to convince myself.
The only problem was that I simply wasn't able to find a game that could live up to that expectation. Every new purchase was falling short. And after I suffered my 9th or 10th disappointment, I arrived at a point in which I started looking for explanations as to why I couldn't find the magical game I was looking for. "It has to be out there somewhere," I was certain.
Ultimately I came to a logical conclusion: "The answer has to be that I've already played all of the NES' best games!" I thought. "So it's futile for me to continue to engage in weekly strolls down the aisle of our local Toys R Us because its game-wall's selection is destined to never again grow beyond the same collection of aging black-box games and all of the others with which I'm already familiar."
"So obviously I already own the magical game that I'm seeking!" I told myself. "It's right there in my library. It's somewhere among the games that I ignorantly dismissed. It's one of those that I tossed away after playing it for only a few minutes. Now all I have to do is find it!"
I mean, I knew that I was deluding myself. I knew that my library didn't contain such a game. It was just that I wasn't ready to face to facts. A cold hard reality was starting to set in, and I was desperate to repel it.
For my world to continue to make sense, I knew, I needed to ignore what all of the signs were telling me and do whatever was necessary to keep my favorite console's spirit alive. And I was ready to compromise if necessary. I was ready to lower my expectations and put my faith in any game that had a recognizable character or a popular license attached to it (because even at that point, I was, sadly, still apt to play it safe).
That's where my mind was at during my next visit to Toys R Us. "Today has to be the day," I thought to myself. "I have to find the game that I'm looking for!"
I walked across the games aisle several times, but I just couldn't find a game that met the criteria. And after a few minutes, I fell into despair. And that's when I engaged in the ultimate of desperate of acts: I gravitated toward the aisle's right side and undiscerningly plucked out a yellow tag that belonged to the only remaining recognizable property--the tag that belonged to a turquoise-colored box whose front cover depicted the familiar mugs of Gilligan and Skipper from the old sitcom Gilligan's Island.
My demeanor at the time probably suggested that I wasn't fully confident in my purchasing decision, and I say that because my father, who had never before cared about the matter of a video game's quality, looked at me suspiciously and asked, "Are you sure you want to buy this?"
Oh, I was sure all right.
Well, not really. But I did my best to put up a good front!
I was an odd duck in that sense: Whereas other kids devoted all of their TV-watching time to cartoons like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Alvin and the Chipmunks, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and The Transformers, I spent the majority of the daytime hours watching "old people" shows like I Love Lucy, The Munsters, Bewitched, All in the Family, The Brady Bunch, and others whose original air dates long preceded my birth year.
I loved those shows. I watched them religiously. And in fact, I found them more entertaining than most kid shows!
So I had a natural reason to be interested in such a game!
Also, I had a great fondness for old-time comedy duos. I loved observing the antics of those like Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton (who appeared in my all-time-favorite sitcom The Honeymooners), Laurel and Hardy, and Abbot and Costello. Their clashing personalities, funny mannerisms, and absurd interactions combined to produce many of the most hilarious bits I'd ever seen (like the one in which Lou Costello was able to repeatedly prove that 7 multiplied by 13 equaled "28").
And coincidentally, Gilligan's Island just happened to have one of my favorite comedy duos: the vacuous Gilligan and the easily frustrated Skipper! They, too, always made me laugh with their nonsensical interactions and ridiculous antics.
"And there's a chance," I thought, "that the game might be able to capture some of that energy!"
How any of this was going to make for a quality video game, though, I wasn't quite sure. So I made it a point to avoid thinking about Gilligan's Island in those terms. That, I knew, was the only way I was going to maintain my positive outlook.
Really, I didn't know what, exactly, to expect from Gilligan's Island because it was never mentioned in print. I couldn't recall seeing a single preview for the game in Nintendo Power or any other gaming magazine. None of them ever bothered to include its name on their monthly "Upcoming Games" lists!
I wasn't sure why that was, and my only guess was that the magazines' editors scoffed at the notion of providing coverage of the game because they felt that the property on which it was based was simply too old to appeal to kids from my era.
"That has to be the reason for the complete lack of coverage," I thought. "There's simply no other explanation!"
The game's manual wasn't particularly enlightening, either, because it spoke of the game's systems and mechanics in the vaguest of terms and focused mostly on providing giant sketches of fish and other types of sea life (it was almost as if Bandai's localization team was using large, obstructive imagery to distract me from something). It told me basically nothing about the game.
So clearly I was going to have to actually play Gilligan's Island to find out what, exactly, it was.
When the action came into view, I immediately discovered that Gilligan's Island was similar to games like Mickey Mousecapade and A Boy and His Blob in that its gameplay entailed controlling two characters simultaneously and working with a partner who would sometimes carry out actions in a scripted manner. In Gilligan's case, the scripted actions included his automatically jumping over series of obstructive rocks and his fleeing in terror at the sight of certain enemies.
"This seems like a nice little partner system," I thought to myself as I watched Gilligan energetically bounce all over the screen. "It's silly but still pretty interesting."
That's what I thought before I learned the truth.
Before long, it became apparent to me that I'd seriously misjudged the situation. Gilligan, in reality, was nothing like Minnie or the Blob, no. He wasn't a "helper" or an "assist character." Rather, he was instead designed to be a constant nuisance (as a way of replicating the TV character's behavior, I guess), and consequently I was required to operate in a very cautious and supervisory manner if I wanted to keep him under control.
At all times, I had to stay within a certain distance of him lest he would break away from me and refuse to follow me over to the next screen. I had to direct him away from enemies and hazards so that he wouldn't misguidedly interact with them and get us in trouble. And I had to carefully guide his movement so that he wouldn't mindlessly walk or fall into pits and thus drop into the underlying cavernous depths, which was where he'd remain imprisoned until I'd decide, reluctantly, that it was in my best interest to drop down there and rescue him (when I started paying attention, I realized that locating him quickly was paramount because the rules would suddenly change when he wasn't present; the game would suddenly impose a strict two-minute time-limit, and it would disallow storyline advancement, so leaving him behind, regardless of how liberating it felt, simply wasn't an option).
When I'd decide to voluntarily drop into a cavern, Gilligan wouldn't follow me. If I wanted him to join me down there, I'd have to do something special: I'd have to lead him into the pit beforehand and then follow him down. Doing this was a challenge of its own because the game's collision physics were finicky and there was always an equal chance that I would drop into the pit first, accidentally, because the game would decide that being one or two pixels away from the pit was close enough to be considered touching it. And if there was no ladder there to grant me immediate exit, I'd have to traverse the caverns in search of one and then proceed to circle around the entire island just to get back to the original drop-down point. Then, once again, I'd have to try to get Gilligan to drop down first!
I couldn't believe that this torturous style of gameplay was some designer's idea of "fun."
"Really?" I thought. "A purposely rigid trailing system designed to stall the player's progress for no other reason than to artificially increase the game's length? What kind of idiot would decide to go with that idea?"
Obviously it was someone who thought that purposely frustrating the player was funny.
It was true that you could use rope items to instantly transport the straying Gilligan to your current location, sure, but the problem was that you didn't always have that option. Your starting rope-total was always pretty limited, and there was no guarantee that enemies would drop ropes during the course of an episode.
So in the majority of instances, I had no choice but to search the entire island for Gilligan!
And while I was in the process of monotonously re-traversing the same two or three caverns in search of Gilligan, I became disengaged from the immediate action and started to instead think about and question other aspects of the game. And one of the first things I wondered was, "Where the hell is Ginger? Why is she not in this game?!"
I expected my video games to authentically represent the movies and shows on which they were based, and Gilligan's Island failed to do that. It left out Ginger, who was an essential member of the show's cast, and it did so in a really obvious way. And that bothered me. It put more of a damper on a game that was already having trouble meeting my low expectations. (Though, I wouldn't have been as annoyed by the omission had I known that Tina Louise, the actress who played Ginger, was in a continued dispute with the show's producers and was unwilling to participate in future Gilligan's Island projects. I would have understood why Bandai was unable to get the rights to the character.)
I had a problem, also, with how under-developed the action was. The main hero, Skipper, had jumping and punching abilities, which made me think that the game would contain some interesting platforming challenges and fighting scenes.
Somehow, though, the developers forget to include either of those things. There were no real platforming challenges (unless you count "jumping over rocks and holes that could just as easily by avoided" as a "platforming challenge"), and the enemies (or at least the wildlife encountered early on, like the hyperactive monkeys, runaway boars, and slithering snakes) were completely immune to the Skipper's strikes!
"These moves are useless," I quickly realized.
The closest thing to an actual platforming challenge was a segment in which you had to travel over a large gap via a narrow bridge that was constantly being deluged by bouncing rocks--the type that would appear from the screen's edge without any warning and smack into you before you even had the chance to react. Because the bridge was so narrow, you couldn't move horizontally to avoid the rocks. If you attempted to do so, you'd risk sending Gilligan into the gap. So all you could do, really, was charge forward, jump repeatedly, and hope that the rocks would miss.
Otherwise, aerial action was, like I said, limited to jumping over rocks, most of which Gilligan and Skipper would trip over no matter how precise your input was. And their doing so would deplete small portions of your already-lacking heart meter (the "Life" box contained ten heart units, but only five of them were filled at the start of an episode).
You could use bananas to replenish heart units, yeah, but the problem was that you only had two bananas in your starting inventory, and you couldn't count on picking up more of them. There was no guarantee that enemies would drop them, either.
And that pretty much summed up the action in Gilligan's Island.
"What the hell am I playing?" I continued to wonder as I learned about how the game functioned.
My search for answers was further complicated by my inability to deal with the game's "level design," which dictated that every stage must be formed from (a) numerous mud pits (sometimes of the super-lengthy variety), (b) equally abundant pools of quicksand, through which you had to painfully trudge by feverishly mashing the jump button, and (c) water and sand bodies whose quick-flowing currents would inconveniently carry you to other parts of the island if you failed to swiftly swim across their surfaces.
After all: It's hard to assess a game and think about it critically when you're too busy spending all of your time pounding away at a controller's buttons like a madman. (And as I say this, I realize that I've probably identified the developers' intended design plan.)
Honestly, the mud pits and the pools of quicksand weren't too difficult to deal with. I didn't much trouble traversing them. But it was a completely different story with the water and sand bodies. They, contrastingly, were a nightmare for me. I struggled to swim across them in time, and I'd come close to losing my mind whenever I was short on time and a current would transfer me all of the way back to an earlier part of the stage simply because my thumb locked up for, like, a single millisecond. As it was happening, I'd feel as though I was being abused and tortured by the game.
The only thing I could do in response was learn how to use jumps to bypass water and sand bodies early sections. It was the only way to buy myself more time and reduce finger fatigue. And still it didn't guarantee that I'd actually make it across the bodies' surfaces in time. The chance of failure was still high.
The game tried to distract me from its mundanity, otherwise, with its character dialogue. Gilligan and the Skipper were always chattering, and their frequent exchanges would be displayed in the HUD's oversized dialogue box. The problem was that there was little substance to their chatter; it was comprised mostly of lame jokes and puns and goofy observations. Also, they were apt to repeat the same three or four lines incessantly during the course of an episode, and their doing so would quickly get old.
I mean, it was cute the first and second time Gilligan openly ruminated about the island's beautiful scenery, sure, but certainly not when he did so the 40th time and at a moment in which I was painfully trudging my way through yet another mile-long pool of quicksand and on the verge of having a conniption. At that point, his detached-feeling observation started to get a bit grating.
And that was what my first Gilligan's Island experience was like: I didn't enjoy the platforming or the action because there wasn't any. I didn't have any fun with the fighting aspect because the enemies were seemingly invincible and they kept trouncing me. My fingers were worn out from all of the button-mashing. And I had spent the majority of my time hunting down the frequently AWOL Gilligan.
You could say that I wasn't particularly enthused about what the game had shown me.
"I'm confused, man" you say in an exasperated manner. "What, exactly, were you supposed to be doing in this silly game?"
Well, it was simple, really. Gilligan's Island's gameplay basically boiled down to continuously traveling from one side of the island to the other and running errands for the rest of the castaways. Each character would ask you to convey information to some other character or perform some type of job.
The Howells, for instance, would ask you to to travel to a certain area and retrieve an item that they lost while they were hanging out over there. The Professor or Mary Ann would request that you deliver an item or a message to someone else. And in each episode, your goal was to find all of the other castaways and receive tasks from them and finish carrying out said tasks before time ran out.
This idea wasn't only boring in principle; it was also stretched to an absurd degree. Clearing an episode wasn't simply a matter of talking to each castaway a single time and then delivering a message for him or her, no. You were, in most instances, required to travel back and forth between the two parties somewhere around four or five times. These trip would eat up several minutes, and they would require you to re-traverse the same treacherous, aggravation-inducing route multiple times.
And that's pretty much all that the game entailed.
So it could be said that Bandai had succeeded in creating the world's first and ultimate nothing-but-fetch-quests video game. And I was lucky enough to be one of the few who got to experience its many thrills, like finding a golf ball and then trekking through a dozen mile-long mud pits to return the ball to its owner.
My biggest problem was that I had trouble memorizing the correct routes in the subsequent stages, each of which was was exponentially larger and more complex than the last (the stages' environments, for context, are labyrinthine in nature and structured like those that you travel in Friday the 13th and Rambo). I was always getting lost. And it didn't help that the stages' background variety was very limited (almost all of the woodland areas' backgrounds were comprised of the same type of shrubbery, and all of the cave walls had similar-looking textures) and thus certain areas were completely indistinguishable from others; this prevented me from relying on visual indicators.
In every stage-clearing attempt, I'd become hopelessly confused and increasingly anxious as the timer continued to rapidly drain and none of the available paths were bringing me any closer to my target, who I had no trouble locating the first time. And the stage map wasn't much of a help to me in these situations because it didn't explain how the stage's separate areas were connected, and it didn't give me any indication of where the water and sand currents would warp me. And resultantly, stage-traversal wound up feeling less like a journey and more like a maddening game of survival.
Only a few games had ever caused me this type of stress, and the majority of their group was comprised of insanely arcane Commodore 64 games. That's how rough the game was.
Theoretically, Gilligan's Island was a short game. It only had four stages. Though, its convoluted level design, speed-reducing hazards, and requirement that you commit multiple routes to memory made it seem far longer. During each session, I'd conclude that it was going take me four to five hours to beat the game if I attempted to do so, and each time I decided that I really didn't want to spend that much time with the game. It wasn't worth the stress. So I'd play until I got bored, and then I'd move on to another game.
To be fair, the game did have some actual action scenes: At certain points in stages, you'd obtain a club, and thereafter you'd have to find a boss and beat it over the head until decided to cease its attack and flee!
These boss battles added some much-needed variety to the gameplay, certainly, but still I had a major issue with them: Bosses lacked decipherable hitboxes, so I could never tell if I was inflicting damage on them. Usually they'd react to my clubbing swings as though they were taking damage from the attack (they'd snap back violently), but they actually weren't. Really, I didn't know what their reactions were meant to signal.
I couldn't figure out why bosses sometimes yielded immediately and why other times they'd able to endure for minutes, so what I decided to do was just club away wildly and hope for the former scenario to play out. If it didn't, I'd take a beating and likely Game Over. (I didn't know until years later that the only way to inflict damage on a boss was to club it while it was in a very specific frame of animation. By that point, though, I'd been away from the game for a long time, and consequently I had no desire to return to it and apply my new knowledge.)
This game, man. So much of it was completely baffling.
And yet, I didn't feel as though the game was completely bereft of positive qualities. There was, in fact, one aspect of the game that I really enjoyed: the jungle setting.
I'd always had a thing for jungle settings, and Gilligan's Island had one of the best I'd ever seen in a game. It was filled with the types of visuals that I loved to look at and examine: lush tropical environments, multiple layers of plant life, and jungle patches whose shrouding foliage was able to create an alluring sense of isolation. These visuals, I thought, provided the game's jungle setting a wonderfully rich ambiance.
During my play-throughs, I liked to take in the sights. I liked to visit places like the little island pockets whose lush foliage and tree patches overlaid mysterious black background and take the time to examine them, absorb their atmosphere, and have fun thinking about the wondrous visualizations they were inspiring. They'd stir me to envision the most enchantingly exotic jungle scenes and remote tropical islands.
And whenever I'd stumble upon an area in which a thicket of wild bushes could be seen quietly resting beneath a vibrant, sparsely clouded blue sky, I'd stop and take a moment to imagine how amazingly peaceful such a location would be if it were real. I'd think of it as the perfect hiding spot--the place I'd most want to go if ever I was in a position in which I wanted to get away from civilization for a while and I just happened to possess the ability to transport myself into a video game. "It would be great to lay down here and stare at the sky for a couple of hours," I thought, "and then find a nice quiet spot near the bushes and play some Game Boy!"
These days, I associate Gilligan's Island mostly with the mental images that its visuals inspired. They mean a lot more to me than any of the game's other aspects, most of which are, in contrast, painful to think about.
The only other thing I liked about the game was the music. It was surprisingly good! At first, it was weird and goofy-sounding (and thus it filled me with the sense that the composer wasn't treating the job seriously), but before long, it grew more melodic and became quite enchanting. Over time, the soundtrack continued to produce tunes that were alluringly cheerful, intense and wistful and thus capable of evoking strong emotions, and I continued to be impressed with its ability to engage me on that level. I enjoyed listening to its tunes and thinking about the scenes that they were describing and the stories that they were telling.
To me, Gilligan's Island's soundtrack was like Bad Dudes' in the sense that it was too good for the game to which it was attached. It was the type of soundtrack that deserved to appear in a much-higher-level game.
On my best days, I was able to make it all of the way to the final episode's boss--the bone-wielding skeleton. But I just wasn't able to beat him. In each instance, I was very low on time and health, and consequently I didn't stand a chance of winning. Usually the skeleton would thank through my attacks and dispose of me quickly.
During my play-throughs, I'd keep thinking ahead and worrying about skeleton fight. Thoughts of it would continue to weigh heavily on me and make me feel as though my attempts were pointless. "No matter how well I do, it won't really matter," I'd think. "That skeleton is going to destroy me, and he's going to do so even if I'm somehow lucky enough to make it to him with a decent amount of health. He's just too tough."
Honestly, I'm not sure why I bothered returning to the game at that point. Obviously I wasn't having any fun with it. So what reason could I possibly have had to continue subjecting myself to it? I wish I knew. My only guess is that I kept returning to it only because I was light on options at the time. It was, after all, a down period in which the NES' release-schedule was empty and I'd already played my favorite SNES launch games to death. So maybe I saw Gilligan's Island as a game that could fill the void.
Or maybe I was completely insane.
I don't know.
I do remember why, though, I returned to it in 1992: I wanted to finally beat it. As always, I couldn't stand the thought of a video game getting the best of me. I couldn't live with failure, so I always strived to beat every game I played no matter how insanely difficult or torturously designed it was. I had to win. I had to conquer to Gilligan's Island.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do that. The game was simply too difficult for me. And after I failed to beat it for several weeks, I realized that continuing to try to do so was a waste of time. It wasn't going to happen. The game was too tough, and I knew that it would break me emotionally if I continued playing it. So I conceded defeat and decided to move on from it. I popped it out of my NES and permanently shelved it. And I didn't see it again until the mid-2000s, when the age of Internet video began.
And when YouTube came around, I was able to get my first look at the game's ending. What I learned is that Gilligan and Skipper's ultimate victory earned the castaways a wish, and naturally they decided that they were going to use the wish to escape the island. Of course, though, Gilligan ruined their plan by unthinkingly wishing for ice cream and resultantly turning the island's lagoon into a giant ice cream cone.
And after seeing the ending, all I could do was wonder, "Would this have been worth it? Would this ending have justified all of the horror I would have had to endure to earn it?"
The answer: Probably not, no. (I have to note, though, that I have since beaten the game. And no: The ending wasn't rewarding in any way.)
But you know what? Despite it all--despite my having derived a huge amount of pain and suffering from my experiences with Gilligan's Island--I have absolutely no regrets about purchasing the game. I say that because it turned out to be an important part of my gaming history. At a time in my life when I was stubbornly fighting the winds of change and desperately clinging to the old ways, it came along and gave me the cold hard that I needed to receive. It grabbed me by the collar and told me, in an upfront and matter-of-fact way, "This is all that's left here, kid. The well has run dry, and if you decide to stick around this space, you'll be subjected to nothing but cynically created corporate schlock and become increasingly unhappy."
Gilligan's Island was the most glaring of signals that it was time for me to let go of the past and move on. It was time for me to open my mind to new things (the SNES, in particular).
And that's what I did.
I can't deny, though, that I remain fascinated with The Adventures of Gilligan's Island. I can't believe that it actually exists. To think that a video-game company would create a game based on Gilligan's Island in 1990, a quarter of a century after the show's original run ended, and put it on the NES at a time when everyone's focus was starting to turn to the next generation. It blows the mind.
It's a bad game, certainly, but I feel that it's worth remembering for all of its silliest moments, like when Gilligan suddenly climbs a tree like a coked-up monkey boy; or starts hopping around like a jackass for no particular reason; or happily commentates on the beauty of his surroundings as his buddy, the Skipper, is being torn to pieces by vicious jungle creatures. A lot of what it does is really funny.
And those are the kinds of things that I choose to think about whenever I reminisce about my experiences with it. I focus not on its horror-inducing level design and game mechanics but instead its most hilariously absurd moments, its charming visuals, its evocative music, and the way in which it impacted my life.
Call it silly sentimentality or misplaced nostalgia, but that's just how I feel about The Adventures of Gilligan's Island.
♪ So that was the tale of my island stay. I was there for a long, long time.
I had to make the best of things. It was an uphill climb.
The first mate and his Skipper, too, did their very best to make me most uncomfortable in that tropic-island nest.
No joy, no fun, no merriment--not a hint of ecstasy. Like a Paul Blart: Mall Cop sequel, it was torturous as can be.
So join me here next week, my friends. You're sure to get a smile, 'cause surely there'll be no more talk of NES Gilligan's Iiiiiiiiiiisle!
doo-roooooop ♪
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