From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Adventure - Atari for the Block
A Link to the past: How for me an intrepid square hero started it all.

If it was school to which I went to learn my ABCs and 123s, then it was the Atari 2600's world of wonder to which I traveled to learn how to play video games. That's where it all started for me.

Now, I'm not sure if the 2600's were the first games I ever played (picture evidence suggests that the three-year-old me might have sampled my father's Electronic Action TV Game Model 200, which featured a number of Pong clones and a light-gun game), but most certainly they're the ones that provided me my first true gaming memories. They're the ones that introduced me to an astonishing new medium that allowed for me to manipulate images on a television screen. They're the ones whose images and sounds evoked the feelings of intense surreality that provide shape and substance to my earliest gaming memories. And they're the ones that supplied me years of entertainment and unforgettable experiences as shared with my brother, my parents, and my friends.

The Atari 2600 is an essential piece of my history. I wouldn't be who I was without it. That's why I hold it sacred.

I hold sacred, also, the first batch of games I ever played on the console. The list of those who have attained such beloved status include Circus Atari, Space Invaders, Maze Craze: A Game of Cops 'n Robbers, and, of course, the legendary Adventure, which for me is the console's defining game; images of it are always the first to surface whenever I think about the 2600. It represents the greatest link between the console and I.

The 2600 belonged to my brother, James, who had quite a large collection for it. He had what I called "the magic box," which was a rather bulky cardboard box within which he stored all of his 2600 games (of course without their boxes or manuals, all of which he threw away). I labeled it as such because the contents within always seemed to be a constant state of exponential growth. Seriously: Every time I'd lug it out of the closet and open it up, I'd find that it now contained 10-15 games that weren't there previously. "Where is he getting all these games?" I'd wonder, quizzically. He couldn't have been buying them himself, since he was only 8 or 9 years old and had little in the way of money (only what he received on his birthday and during the holidays, which was probably a lot, yeah, but not enough to fund the purchase of a dozen-plus games), and even my generous father had his limits.

"So what was going on?" you ask.

Really, I'm not sure, and I'm afraid to know where guessing might take me. So let's just say that it was a mystery--that the situation was completely inexplicable--and leave it that. 

Yet, still, it was nowhere near as inexplicable as many of the games that would come to appear inside that box. Maybe sometime I'll tell you about them. Fortunately, my sampling of its contents began in the early months of 1981, when there fewer titles from which to choose, and there was a better chance that what was there was high-grade.

You know, like Adventure.

At a time when the gaming scene was dominated by space shooters, twitch-based action titles and Pac-Man clones, and pursuing the highest score was the standard reason for playing games, Adventure brought something markedly different to the table: It had an ultimate goal. It demanded that you work toward meeting that goal by exploring a multi-screened world and solving its riddles. And if you did so successfully, it rewarded you with an ending sequence that signaled to you that you'd achieved ultimate victory.

Adventure wasn't about shooting as many enemies as you could before a timer expired or collecting every heart onscreen so that you could move on and do the same exact thing in the next in a never-ending series of stages, no. It was about exploring a world and finding your own way forward. It was about obtaining weapons, slaying monsters, infiltrating enemy fortresses, finding treasure, and ultimately becoming the kingdom's greatest warrior. It was a game that allowed for you to set your own pace and take on challenges however you saw fit.

For those reasons, Adventure was instantly appealing to me. I loved the idea that I could have my own little digital playhouse wherein I was able to move about at my leisure and plan my course of action without fear that a big smiley-faced bomb creature would soon come bouncing in and destroy me because I was taking too much time. That's not to say that I didn't like twitch-based action games, no. I liked them a lot. It's just that Adventure made a strong case that video games could be something more--that not every game had to be about enduring under pressure.

Adventure was regarded as being both short and simple, but I saw it as having a ton of unrecognized depth. Its default difficulty, which was essentially a beginner mode, was brilliant in how it functioned as both a tutorial and a satisfying self-contained campaign (even if lasted no longer than a minute), but in a way it worked to belie the fact that there was much more to the game. People would play through Difficulty 1 and come away thinking that they'd seen everything the game had to offer--that playing through the subsequent difficulties was pointless because they probably contained more of the same.

Had they did, they would have known that Difficulty 1 was merely a training exercise for the game's two advanced difficulties, both of which added shrouded mazes, more rooms, a third castle, a third dragon enemy (a red dragon that was speedier and more fierce than its green and yellow buddies), and an annoying bat that had a penchant for hounding players and constantly stealing their items--swapping them for whatever (usually undesired) items he was currently carrying. 

Oh, what that terrible bat would put me through. It was bad enough when he'd steal my sword and leave an unneeded bridge in its place, but it was a whole next level of obnoxious when he'd steal my trophy, right as I was approaching home base, and drop a hungry dragon or even a dragon corpse onto the screen. And I knew that it was going to happen. I knew that he'd come swooping in and snatch that trophy even if I was hiding if offscreen. That bat--he was a bastard all right.

But that was all part of the fun of the advanced difficulties. That's what most of my 2600-playing friends and family members wound up missing (at least until I turned them on to that content years later, during the time when we were rediscovering the console). 

Admittedly, Difficulty 2 didn't excite me much; like Difficulty 1, its item-placement was unvaried, with only the bat's antics potentially mixing things up. I could clear it within two minutes regardless of how much or how many times the bat interfered. Instead Difficulty 3 was where the real action could be found. In this mode, item locations were completely randomized, which created for an untold number of permutations. Any item could be found anywhere. The yellow key to my home base, for example, could have been hidden in the locked black castle, whose black key might have been lying around the center of a maze somewhere (assuming the bat hadn't gotten to it first). In my three-year-old mind, this system of randomization held endless potential for fun.

Still, I'd always feel a tinge of nervousness whenever I'd play Difficulty 3, because it really was like venturing into the unknown. Anything could happen. There was a chance that a dragon might start viciously chomping at me a split second after I entered a normally vacant room. Let me tell you: It was terrifying enough when I was being chased by two or more of those duck-billed nightmares, but then the situation would soon deteriorate further when the bat would suddenly swoop in, steal my sword (which I originally thought was a spear), and leave me holding a useless magnet.

Danger could be lurking on any screen, knowing which helped me to see the value in patience and vigilance.

Indeed Difficulty 3 provided me a true adventure experience. It granted me no safe harbor. It stripped away the element of reliability. And it tossed me right into the middle of a world whose cogs and gears were in motion all around me. At the time, I could barely fathom the concept of unsystematic activity happening in the peripheral, beyond my scope of awareness; to my still-formative mind, all of this activity was tantamount to pure chaos. And it didn't help that I was being constantly assaulted by all of that graphical flickering, which worked to overload my senses. I mean, I understood that all of the flickering was being caused by a memory issue--that the 2600 could only capably process three items at a given time, and the introduction of a fourth would cause all sprites to flicker wildly. But, still, it was annoying as hell. What's worse was that all of that flickering was rendering the sprite-detection inoperative and consequently granting the dragons invulnerability! "That's so unfair!" I'd shout whenever a dragon would clip through my sword, as if it were incorporeal, and swallow me down whole.

Sometimes I'd spend half the play-through trying to locate safe spaces if only to escape the game's visual noise. 

It seemed as though Adventure was keen to attack my senses in addition to my still-forming psyche.

Really, though, I wasn't turned off by any of it. The flickering and flashing were just part of the experience. That's how it was with 2600 games. All that mattered was that I was having fun. I loved being overcome with this new feeling of excitement, of being left to my own devices to deal with and solve issues, gameplay- or graphical-wise. That's what Adventure did for me.

When previously I was writing about NES games and 8-bit games in general, I frequently stressed that your imagination and sense of wonder were two of the best tools you could carry on hand as you journeyed into a game world. By thinking about what a game's scenes and settings might look like if only you could transport yourself into them and see them up close, you were able to provide them ever-more-substantive form; you were able to perceive their simple sprite formations as being something much grander. In doing so, you were able to personalize the experience and form a lasting connection with a game.

That's what would happen if you decided that it was worth it to expend a little extra mental energy.

Well, in the Atari 2600 era, having to use your imagination was the rule rather than an option. Back then, game worlds were incredibly rudimentary in form, their structures sometimes barely identifiable, and their protagonists were usually tiny blocks or stick figures. Decipherability was completely out the window. If ever you decided that you wanted to immerse yourself in a 2600 game's world--that you desired for its graphics to have real shape--you had to think in the abstract; you had to pretend that the single-color rooms through which you were traveling were exotic locations and make believe that irregularly drawn block formations were cityscapes or other landmarks.

For me, that's where Adventure held great appeal. I saw each of its rooms as a blank slate onto which I could overlay the mental image I'd formed in my head. I'd thoughtfully interpret its every screen: There was the blue maze whose boundaries I saw as being a series of complexly joined river canals, their waters so rough that swimming them was impossible. The shrouded area to the east was an unlit hedge maze, and the ring of light that surrounded the hero was being cast by the torch he was holding (as it was in Haunted House). The black castle's shrouded maze was an underground cave system. The white castle's red boundaries were lava streams. And the normally empty rooms found on either side of the hedge maze were quiet, barren pockets of woodland.

I turned Adventure's world into my personal playground. I could stay there as long I wished to and do anything I wanted.

More than the randomness of its third difficulty, Adventure's exploitability turned out to be the long-term source of replayability for me. I loved to push the game's boundaries and see just how far I could go in exploiting its bugs and glitches. I always had fun messing around with the items, finding out if I could, say, push a key or the magnet past a room's border and make it reappear nine or ten screens over. If I could make the game explode by piling every single item onto one screen. Or if after getting eaten by a dragon, and becoming irreversibly embedded in its stomach, I could coax the bat into picking us up and carrying us around in what would usually amount to a world tour.

By far, my favorite thing to do was to the take the bridge, lay it over a screen's border, and see where I'd arrive after crossing it. I called this "wall warping," doing which allowed me to engage in an unintended mode of travel. In most cases, there wasn't much on the other side; it was usual to push up against an unbreachable barrier and get nothing more than a Metal Gear-style glimpse into an (apparently) adjacent room. But sometimes the amazing would happen and I'd emerge in some far-off location or in a square opening atop a castle's exterior portion (a place from which you can't escape without resetting the game). It was pretty obvious that there was only a limited number of viable wall-warp points, yeah, but I could always convince myself that there were more of them out there--that somewhere in Adventure's world there had to be a remote, highly secret location that I might discover if I were to lay down the bridge in a very specific way or if I were to charge through at a certain angle.

In truth, there was a big secret hiding behind one of the game's screen borders. I learned of it when my brother interrupted one of my wall-hugging sessions (in-game, of course) and informed me that a sneakily-implemented hidden room had been discovered. I listened on, with great excitement, as he explained to me that there was a secret item concealed within the black castle's maze and that procuring it was the key to accessing the hidden room. Though, he couldn't remember where, exactly, either the item or the access point was located.

It was my uncle, of all people, who discovered the hidden room and taught my brother how to access it. This was surprising to me because I never thought of him as someone who played video games. If you were to hear him talk today, you'd never believe that he was once a 2600 owner. Now in his 60s, he regards video games as "a waste of time" and acts as though he's completely unfamiliar with the medium.

I still can't decide which is the bigger shocker: the existence of Adventure's hidden room or the fact that we learned about it from a guy who's so averse to technology that he can't even figure out how to turn on his flat-screen TV.

So with a new sense of hope, I infiltrated the black castle and launched an extensive search of its maze. Feverishly I hugged every wall and every surface hoping to find some sort of key. When nothing turned up, I grabbed the magnet and ran through the maze again, expecting that soon an awe-inspiring artifact would gravitate toward me. No such item appeared. There wasn't even the trace of an item. From what I could see, there was nothing in this maze but empty space.

I was just about ready to give up and switch off the 2600 when suddenly I noticed something: One of the maze's upper rooms was flashing even though there was only one item (the magnet) laying within it. This meant that there had to be a second item in there somewhere! While thoroughly investigating the room, I noticed that there was small, inaccessible space in the room's bottom-center portion. So I fetched the bridge, laid it over the barrier, and crossed over into the walled-in space, wherein I continued my berserk hugfest. Seconds later, I heard the item-grabbing sound! Finally I'd found it!

And there I was in possession of ... a dot. Yes--a friggin' one-pixel dot. It was gray-colored and for some reason only visible when it was overlapping walls or other structures. "What am I supposed to do with this thing?!" I questioned, my expression one of puzzlement. "Maybe I have to place it somewhere?!"

While carrying it around, I stumbled onto a point of interest: the room located down and to the right of the yellow castle. Much like the room wherein I found the dot, it was flashing rapidly even though in contained only one other item. This had to be a sign that the holy grail was near, I thought. So I set the dot down and began hugging away at those walls; consequently, I discovered that you could now clip through the room's eastern barrier. Moments later, I was there, in the hidden room I'd longed to walk upon.

"And what was in that room?!" you ask. "Was there an object of immense beauty?! A message of great importance?! The entrance to a vast secret world?!"

Nope--nothing of the sort. The only thing the eye could see was a vertical text scroll emerging from an entranceway that led nowhere. The text read "Created by Warren Robinett." I had no idea who the hell that was or why I was supposed to care. I didn't know, nor did I sense, that I'd just discovered gaming's first-ever Easter egg (Atari had a policy that forbade developers from taking credit for their games, so Warren, who disagreed with the policy, decided to smuggle in a personal credit under the company's nose, thus creating the first hidden Easter egg). All I knew was that nothing lay beyond--that the entranceway's inclusion was pointless and that clipping through the oddly formatted credit was a pointless act.

Still, I was excited to find the secret room. To move about it felt like walking upon untraveled sacred ground. By simply being there, I'd become a member of an exclusive group. I was one of only a tiny number of people to have ever laid eyes on it.

When my brother returned to the room--to his room, where the 2600 took residence for the longest time--I excitedly shared the news with him. Not yet a wordsmith or anything close, I proudly stated that I had found "the spick"!

I sensed that something was wrong when in response he clenched his teeth and made a hissing sound, though I wasn't sure what. I'd erred in some way, apparently, but he wouldn't explain how; all he did was tell me that I probably shouldn't be yelling something like that out loud. My mistake became clear to me the next time I mentioned the feat, when during a family gathering I loudly informed my friend about the existence of "the spick" and as a result brought the entire room's activity to a halt.

See--the word I was looking for was speck, and even that was a poor identifier. (Naturally I was talking about that stupid dot.)

I think I probably banged my head on the bottom of the table too many times when I was a kid.

That's how it was with me and Adventure, a game whose short length and small number of rooms were hardly an indication of its value. If you were like me, then you knew that below the surface lay a metric ton of interesting content and near-endless possibilities for fun. Adventure was as large and as vast as you wanted it to be.

When I do return to it, which these days is sadly very rarely, I engage with it in much the same way. Oh, I play it straight at first; I carry out my quest in accordance with a prescribed method and work toward bringing that trophy home. And then, when no one is looking, I mischievously return to my old tricks and start attempting to clip through every barrier in sight with the great hope that one will eventually give way and allow me passage to the ultimate secret. And who knows: One of these days, I just might find it.

For game developers, Adventure was an inspiration. For the industry, it was a revelation. For me, it was a gateway to a world of imagination--a place wherein I felt inspired to wonder about possibilities and potential, both for Adventure and for a medium that would surely be influenced by it. It's where I trained for my future adventures in Hyrule, Rendar, Eggerland, and so many of the other worlds that inspired me all the same. It's where I learned to play games.

And for that reason, I'll always hold it dear.