From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Adventure Island - A Fruit-Filled Yet Fruitless Adventure
Only horror and death was lying behind its cheery veneer.

By the time I became an NES-owner in 1988, I was already well familiar with the console and its library. Such was the case because I'd been immersed in the NES scene since as early as 1986 and particularly because I'd spent many an hour at friends and cousins' houses playing standout games like Balloon Fight, Wrecking Crew, Super Mario Bros., Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, R.C. Pro-Am and Contra.

But my play-time wasn't limited to merely the NES' most commonly owned titles, no; rather, mine was a wide range of experiences. I'd played popular games, and I'd played obscure ones. I'd played ambitious action-adventure games, and I'd played simple one-screen platformers. I'd played realistic-feeling games, and I'd played those that were so strange and so unearthly that they bordered on surreal.

Oh yeah--I'd played a whole lot of games in that two-year period. And in that time, I'd developed certain feelings for most of them: There were those that I liked, those that I despised, and those about which I didn't know how to feel--those that resonated with me for reasons that had nothing to do with their being good or bad.

Present in that third group was a "special" little game called Adventure Island, whose cheerfully optimistic personality was highly alluring, I felt, but in some way a deviously developed facade, though I wasn't yet sophisticated enough to fully comprehend something so deep. Rather, in my naive, linguistically challenged thinking, I saw Adventure Island as a jovial, inviting platformer whose level designers, probably accidentally, went a tad overboard with the difficulty in some spots; their motive for doing so, surely, had everything to do with their wanting me to raise my game so that I could go about enjoying the rest of what was likely an overall pleasantly designed, player-friendly platformer. 

"Their intentions are undoubtedly innocent," I told myself.

"Well, I think."

Oh, if only I'd known then what was actually lurking in their dark hearts.

I remember how I came to know Adventure Island. I was introduced to it by my friend Mike, who lived on 73rd Street between 10th and 11th avenue, across the street from the three-family house in which my aunt and grandmother and some family friends resided. He was one of the first real friends I ever had. He was also one of those kids who was lucky enough to own both an NES and a Sega Master System, which, out of ignorance, I called "the Sega" (I still find it odd that Mike never corrected me on this mislabeling and instead chose to adopt the use of my identifier, as if he didn't know the name of his own console. It might have been the case that he actually didn't. Or it might have been that my obliviousness was infectious and thus messed with his memory).

Thanks to Mike, I was able to discover a lot of interesting NES and Master System games that were either overlooked or largely unknown. I'm talking about games like Great Baseball, Great Volleyball, Pro Wrestling, Gumshoe, Dragon Power, and, of course, the ever-unassuming Adventure Island, which was the most appealing of the bunch; whenever I was at Mike's house, I'd always request that we play it.

At the time, I very much enjoyed playing Adventure Island. It flowed well. Its controls were intuitive and highly functional (if not a bit slippery). Its stage themes were catchy and inspiriting. Its skateboarding mechanic was innovative and fun to exploit. And it had attractive visuals; I was taken with its primitive-looking stone-age environments and the imagery that defined them: the long patches of undisturbed layers-deep woodland; the serene seascapes with their palm trees and soft, puffy clouds; the starkly rendered caverns with their rocky, craggy texturing; and the temples' unblemished ornamented brickwork. "This game's pleasing to look at," I thought.

The only problem was that Adventure Island quickly grew to be too difficult. In just the early stages of its second world, it was already requiring levels of precision and reaction time that were well above those we were currently at. On our best day, we could only make it as far as the early stages of World 4; and after Game Overing a bunch of times, we'd eventually give up. Still, we kept coming back to Adventure Island because it was so very charming and we wanted to see more of it; we'd play it once a week, and each time we'd make an earnest effort to to advance to World 5.

Though, eventually it became clear to us that doing as much was currently an impossibility because, quite simply, we weren't skilled enough, and it didn't appear as though we'd be able to make a marked improvement anytime soon. That's when we decided that it was probably a good time to move on from the game.

"I'm guessing that this is one of those games in which you have to invest about a dozen hours if you hope to become good at it," I thought to myself. Though, to me, the thought of having to spend huge chunks of time replaying the same stages over and over again was a complete turn-off. "It's better for us to stick to games that strike us as being actually beatable," Mike and I agreed.

As a prospective NES-owner, I just didn't see Adventure Island as the type of game that would ever show up on my radar. I liked it, yes, but I saw no reason to own a game that required me to make a commitment and put in a ton of work.

So naturally, a few months after I became an NES-owner, I made sure to ask my dad to buy it for me when we were browsing through a local electronics store and I saw a copy of it lying on a shelf. My sudden interest was driven by two separately triggered urges: (a) I was an impulsive monkey boy who wanted a shiny new toy, and (b) I was currently in my copycat-gamer phase in which I desired to get my hands on any game that my friends or cousins owned, whether I liked it or not.

Oh, I knew what I was getting into. I remembered how much Mike and I struggled with Adventure Island--how we were never able to make meaningful progress. I still felt the same way about the game. And I even felt somewhat regretful as I watched the cashier ring it up and place it in the bag. "This is probably a wrongheaded decision," I thought.

You'll be happy to know, though, that I did find consolation in the knowledge that I wasn't the one who was going to have to pay for it. That's the thing about buyer's remorse: It doesn't weigh on you quite as heavily when you're not the one shelling out the cash. (My poor father. He should have learned how to say no.)

When we got home, I promptly headed up to my room with my new game in hand. After removing it from its distinctive-looking green box, I popped it into the NES and played it in an intimate setting for the first time. And soon enough, what I remembered was confirmed to be true: This game was rough, man. Also, when I was finally able to somehow advance to World 4's later stages, I learned that its difficulty curve was much steeper than I'd original estimated; the platforming challenges that were being thrown at me in these stages--in the ice palace, with its hard-to-dodge falling icicles, and in the forest, which was absolutely packed with spiders, crows and other obnoxious enemies--were much more ridiculous than those I'd faced in the first two.

I mean, we're talking about an exponential increase in difficulty over a very short period of time. There was no incrementation here; there was no natural progression. No--there was just an insane jump; it was like immediately going from 1-4 of Super Mario Bros. to 8-1 of Lost Levels. I couldn't even come close to advancing; every attempt would end the same way: in miserable failure. It was agonizing. And after being repeatedly punished over an hours-long period, I couldn't even find the energy to be angry anymore; I was too dispirited and demoralized. "If I can't even handle these middle worlds," I wondered in despondency, "then what hope do I have of conquering its later worlds?"

That's when it hit me. That was the moment when I finally came to realize the truth--that Adventure Island's colorful, cheery presentation was actually a facade designed to distract me from the reality that a bunch of sadistic game designers had joined forces and created this nightmare game with the malevolent intention of torturing children and absolutely crushing their souls. And their trap worked; it very much succeeded in luring me in.

And to think that it all started out so innocently--that at first it was such a charming, welcoming game. Back then, I considered Adventure Island to be a desirable model for side-scrolling platformers. I thought of it as a visually superior, more-action-packed version of Super Mario Bros. I saw its cleft-lipped, grass-skirt-wearing hero, Master Higgins, as basically a stone-age Mario who was so skilled that he could adeptly toss both hammers and fireballs--except his fireballs were thrown in sets of three whereas Mario could only fire a measly one at a time. And Higgins could do this while riding on a skateboard! "How cool is that!" I thought.

And it played so well. There was such a wonderful flow and rhythm to its gameplay. If you were comfortable with the controls and had a feel for the level design, you could gracefully, exuberantly zip your way through stages and do so without ever needing to halt your movement. It was great fun.

But then, for some reason, the game decided that it didn't want to play nice anymore. Instead it wanted to hurt me, both physically and emotionally. Now, suddenly, it was eager to subject me to the harshest form of trial-and-error-style gameplay and do so without providing me anything close to an adequate amount of time (the further you advance into the game, the faster your health meter depletes, and later on, the game starts to become ever-stingier in its provision of fruits and vegetables) or extra lives.

Also, because there were now several instances in which it was necessary to come to a complete stop and (a) carefully observe the terrain or (b) get a sense of a platform's movement-pattern, the skateboard, which entered you into a state of constant motion, became a total detriment. Riding on one for too long would only result in your getting tossed face-first into an enemy or in your helpless plunge into a pit--this because one of the segment's moving platforms was positioned too high at the time. So it made the most sense, I thought, to avoid them at all costs (and I'd do so forevermore). A skateboard provided you an extra hit, sure, but that didn't mean much when the designers had, in so many instances, chosen to deliberately position enemies and pits within proximity to each other as to guarantee that a dismounted Higgins would always be flying toward an oncoming hazard. Their use simply carried too much risk.

Oh, and if ever you found yourself in a situation where you had to traverse an entire stage without a weapon, forget it--you were screwed. In such a scenario, you'd have to repeatedly engage in the type of tense, stressful precision-platforming that could break the will of even the most hardcore player. If you were hammer-less, a normally-manageable platforming sequence could instead prove monstrous. Any screen on which, say, moving spiders and campfires were present in large numbers and tightly grouped together was a rough spot in which you could potentially dump your entire life-stock. Going hammer-less is not something you ever wanted to do.

Also, that's when Higgins' slippery movement would come to prove extremely troublesome. That's when his constantly slipping and sliding about would start to drive you mad. In general, you had to know how to apply counterbalance to Higgin's landing motion; otherwise, he'd slide forward, usually into any enemy. Learning to land firmly was crucial to success; if you couldn't do it, you'd be in for a rough time, especially if you were without a weapon. Hell--clearing a later stage weaponless was like trying to jump between bamboo poles while wearing banana-peel shoes; it was an exercise in futility.

I'd played a lot of difficult games in my day, yeah, but none quite like Adventure Island. This one was a different kind of difficult. It was something next-level. It was relentlessly brutal in the way it inflicted punishment. It had no regard for the sanity of the player. It didn't want anyone to see what was waiting at the end. It was, in short, my introduction to the "NES-hard" variety of game.

Those that carried the label "NES-hard" stood among the most absurdly difficult games ever made. We're talkin' about those whose difficulty-level exceeded that of the Bionic Commandos, Castlevanias and Ninja Gaidens of the world. Those that were far more unforgiving than fiendishly designed, super-tough Commodore 64 games like Impossible Mission, Cliff Hanger and The Goonies.

If you wanted to beat an NES-hard game, you had to put in some major work. You had to spend a hundred hours engaging in both trial-and-error and endless repetition. You had to know where every enemy was positioned, how it was likely to behave on each specific frame, and how to effectively deal with it (that is, find the cheapest way to bypass it). You had to know where every gap was, how far you had to jump to clear it, where you had to land, and at which point obstructing enemies would be spawning in. You had to achieve mastery over every weapon and system. Really, you had to know the game inside and out and basically memorize it. That's what Adventure Island, suddenly, was asking me to do.

Though, I just wasn't prepared to put in that kind of effort. It was too much. And it didn't seem worth it--not for a game that required you to make multiple pixel-perfect jumps in a row. Not for a game that cruelly placed rocks and enemies on the edges of platforms on which I was required to land after jumping off of low-positioned falling platforms. Not for a game in which you had to jump from one moving platform to the next while bats were swooping in and doing so in randomly decided arcs. And not for a game that liked to hide energy-draining eggplants in places where I couldn't avoid them.

Seriously--what is it with Japanese game designers and eggplants?

As much as I wanted to advance further into Adventure Island, I just couldn't see how it could be done. I mean, I certainly wasn't going to reach World 6 using my recently developed fraidy-cat tactic, which dictated that I slowly traipse my way across a stage with the intention of getting a clear preview of each upcoming danger. There simply wasn't enough time; no--the game demanded much-swifter movement. So I was stuck.

The fact of the matter was that I wasn't skilled enough to advance any further. I just didn't have it what took to beat Adventure Island. So I decided that now was probably the right time to shelve it. "Maybe I'll revisit it in the distant future," I thought as I placed the cartridge in the game rack.

But about a week later, something entirely convenient happened: Mike came over to my house for a visit, and he happened to have some news for me regarding Adventure Island. In the time since we last got together, he had discovered the existence of an item called the "continue bee" (Hudson's mascot, Hu-Bee, in sprite form); it was hidden in a concealed egg placed just to the left of the first stage's exit point. If you were to obtain this item, he explained, the game would allow for you to continue from the starting point of any stage in which you Game Overed, To employ its use, he continued, all you had to do was properly input a special code at the title screen: hold up on the d-pad and then press Start. "What a great find!" I said in surprise.

"And just how did he discover this 'continue bee'?" you ask.

Well, you see, he did something amazing: He actually read the manual. It turned out that information pertaining to the continue bee was displayed right there on the manual's final page. "DOH!" was all I could think.

This one stung because it had always been normal that I'd read through a manual in the run-up to playing a game. Had I stuck to this procedure, I would have discovered the continue code much, much earlier and saved myself a ton of suffering. As to why I didn't, I don't remember. Maybe my logic was that I didn't need to read the manual to a game with which I was already highly familiar? That's my only guess.

"But what a benefit it is," I thought, "to be able to continue from any point!"

Well, it didn't really mean all that much. I was able to advance farther into the game, yeah, but I still wasn't able to get within an inch of the final world. As I suspected, the later stages were unbearably difficult and near-impossible if you had to traverse them or even parts of them without a weapon (the game also became increasingly stingy in regard to its weapon-provision). It was overwhelming. I Game Overed countless times. I suffered one death after another; and with each death, I grew angrier. And when inevitably I screwed up the continue code's input out of frustration (I probably hit B instead of A), I got pissed and rage-quit.

The only thing that "continued," it seemed, was my pointless struggle.

I might have endeavored to endure had Adventure Island not been so damn repetitive-feeling. It was more visually and aurally diverse than Super Mario Bros., sure, but it didn't hold a candle to its year-old inspiration in terms of variety of level design. Roughly 70% of its stages were copy-paste jobs; the only difference was that there'd be an increase in the enemy-rate in each successive iteration--there'd be a couple of more snails or fire skulls. Also, the designers would reuse the same handful of obstacles over and over again, only they'd add a newer, deadlier twist each time; now there'd be ten more eels diving out from one small stretch of ocean or five more ravens traveling with the pack.

Save for their distinctly rendered heads, the bosses, too, were all recycled, and they all had the same exact attack and attack-pattern: walk back and forth and periodically toss a fireball in a downward arc. The only minor difference was that each successive boss moved a bit faster than the last. That was it. At least Super Mario Bros.'s designers would occasionally change things up a bit and give Bowser fire-breathing ability or a hammer-tossing attack.

As strange as it might sound, it was actually said repetitiveness that was doing the most to wear me down. "Oh no, not this again," I'd say, feeling ever-more dispirited. "Not another four screen's worth of spiders undulating directly above campfires."

There was more to the game, yeah: There were "many hidden items to find," the manual said. There were numerous secret areas I hadn't discovered. There were concealed eggs I'd missed. And there was talk about a system wherein you collect "rings" to earn a 1up, or something similarly arcane.

Really, though, I couldn't bring myself to care about any of that stuff. By that point, I was too emotionally drained by. The game had succeeded in beating me down and destroying my will.

And that's how Hudson's developers--that is, Satan's minions--succeeded in their mission. They lured me in with colorful, wonderfully cheery graphics, and when I obliviously frolicked my way in to get a closer look, they dropped a big ol' hammer on me. Then they all shared a hearty laugh and did so at my expense. "Welcome to Adventure Island," they said, "and please enjoy your eternal torment!"

I have to admit it: Those bastards got me good.

Well, OK--maybe it's true that I'm exaggerating just a little bit. Maybe Adventure Island isn't quite that evil. It's not, really. If it were, I wouldn't have any fondness for it at all. I wouldn't waste time telling you how much I adore its visuals and music or how I think that its early stages are worth sampling because it's so much fun to both run and skateboard your way through them. Honestly, there are a lot of things to like about Adventure Island, even if most of it can only be enjoyed in little sips.

For one, the composer, Jun Chikuma, did a great job of not only producing high-spirited, delightful tunes but of putting together a soundtrack whose mode of succession tells quite a captivating story. If you pay close attention to the music as you progress through a world, you'll notice that it grows slightly less cheery over the course of its four stages and does so in a very subtle way; slowly the music reveals the game's dark heart and captures the player in its web before he or she can notice that their travels have taken them to a very grim place. The woodsy starting rounds greet you with upbeat, inspiriting tunes and then those in following, while presenting a similar tone, understatedly mix in increasingly somber-sounding note sequences until suddenly you're in the boss' gloomy, shadowy domain and for some reason your smile has vanished and your head is no longer swaying back and forth. "How did that change happen so suddenly?" you'll wonder.

I can't help but appreciate the effort.

As an aside: I like how the designers used tiny numbered posts to mark the locations of checkpoints. I found them appealing because they reminded me of the mile markers I'd count off whenever we were driving along the highway en route to New Jersey or Long Island. It was one of those little things that helped me to connect with the game on an emotional level. 

That was me, man: always making connections between video games and my life experiences. That's how I rolled.

So even though Adventure Island had repeatedly kicked my teeth in, I never thought to completely abandon it, no. I returned to it every now and then and did so for the reasons mentioned above--for the same reason I occasionally revisited other enormously difficult, seemingly-unbeatable games like Battletoads, Ghosts 'n Goblins and Gauntlet: to enjoy the aspects of it that appealed to me. After all: You didn't have to be able to beat a game to find value in it.

Eventually, though, I was able to find ways to beat Adventure Island. The first time I accomplished as much was in the mid-90s, on a day when I determined to see the game through to the end; though, it's not the type of victory I can brag about. That's because I had to resort to using an unsavory tactic: snapping on a Game Genie and inputting an unlimited-health code (though, if it means anything, the code didn't protect Higgins from pitfall deaths!). I chose this path not because I was looking to attain a cheap "victory," no, but because I wanted to see the game's ending--because I desired to witness what I could only imagine was an awe-inspiring, life-altering scene whose message was so extraordinarily powerful and so amazingly inspiring that it was worth suffering for. "A game this nightmarishly difficult has to have an ending of that nature," I was convinced.

Well, guess what: There was zilch. Nada. Absolutely nothing of consequence happened. There was no finely produced multi-shot cut-scene in which Higgins and Tina (his girlfriend and the game's damsel in distress) ran toward each other and lovingly embraced. No profound words of wisdom. No colorful displays. No rewarding message of any kind. Nope--there was just (a) a single shot in which Higgins lightly jogged towards Tina, freed her from a rope's grasp, and then took her hand; (b) a cliched "Congratulations!"; and (c) a short six-word description of what I'd accomplished by torturing myself with this game. It was as if the designer figured that any player who managed to endure Adventure Island would at this point be in too much of a stupor to comprehend anything more significant.

And, really, he guessed correctly. That's exactly where my head was at the time.

A couple of years later, at the start of the Internet age, I was finally able to beat Adventure Island in a more-legitimate fashion. Basically I utilized the continue code and tanked my way through it. It's not anything to brag about, no, but hey--victory is victory. And truth be told, I've gotten pretty good at the game; on a good day, I can make it as far as the sixth world's midpoint in one credit. However, I don't know if I'll ever be crazy enough to attempt to pull off a full no-continue run. I know what that entails. It's just too much.

You have to play this game with continues. You'd be insane not to. Adventure Island without continues makes Battletoads look like Ducktales.

So I beg of you: Save your soul! Use the coooooooode!

It wasn't until fairly recently that I learned about the Adventure Island series' weird, convoluted history. It turns out that the first Adventure Island is a near-identical conversion of Escape's Wonder Boy, a 1986 arcade game that was published by Sega, which later brought the game to both of its 8-bit consoles--the still-kicking SG-1000 and the Master System.

As part of this business arrangement, Sega came away with ownership of the Wonder Boy trademark. Still, Escape wanted to port the game elsewhere, so what it did was license the game's engine to its new partner Hudson Soft, which proceeded to remove the existing protagonist, Tom Tom, from the game and replace him with the company's own created character: Master Higgins, who was modeled after the company's quick-fingered executive Takahashi Meijin. After making a few additional cosmetic changes, Hudson ported the game to both the Famicom and MSX under the name Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima, which translates to "Master Takahashi's Adventure Island." The title was shortened to "Adventure Island" for its North American NES release. Years later, in 1992, Hudson ported this version to Game Boy.

Meanwhile, Escape continued to bring Wonder Boy titles to arcades and worked to distance the series from Adventure Island by placing each of its new games in a distinct fantasy setting. These Wonder Boy titles were then ported exclusively to Sega consoles, where they were treated like a big deal; consequently Wonder Boy, the character, became something of an early mascot for Sega.

Got all that?

Good, because I'm not repeating it. (Mind you, this is a condensed version of the story. The full story of the Wonder Boy-Adventure Island divergence is far more convoluted.)

So, really, that explains it. That explains why Adventure Island is so unreasonably difficult: It's actually a largely unconverted arcade game! It must have been that Hudson hadn't yet figured out what a "console game" was or how to make one, so its developers took the easiest path and simply left the Wonder Boy engine untouched. Yeah--that's probably it. R-right?

Thinking back, I'm surprised that Mike, who was more of a Sega guy, chose to buy Adventure Island instead of Wonder Boy. I wonder what made him betray the home team like that. Could it have been that he wasn't aware of Wonder Boy? Maybe he wasn't that deeply immersed in the scene? Though, does it really matter which version he owned? I mean, we're talking Adventure Island and Wonder Boy here. We're talking about a choice between swimming in a vat of boiling acid and drinking spoonfuls of Drano. There's no preferable option.

From there, the Adventure Island series continued on its own path and spawned multiple games across multiple platforms (some of which I plan to cover in the future). And many of them have been made a part of my life and have had some sort of notable impact on it--mostly positive impact. Really, I'm a big fan of most of them. I enjoy playing them over the original because they retain the aspects that I like--the cheery island setting, the tropical-sounding music, and the flowing, rhythmic gameplay--while toning down the difficulty and having more fun with the concept with their mountable dinosaur buddies, multi-level stages, and uniquely scripted boss battles. Adventure Islands II and III are often dismissed as slightly polished retreads, but I argue that they're underrated--that they look, sound and play much better than the original (though, to be honest, they're not much different from each other; they're in fact very similar to each other aesthetically and aurally).

Also, the Japan-only Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima IV (or "Adventure Island IV," as we'll call it) is one of the Famicom's hidden gems. It swaps the series' standard stage-based formula for a Metroid-style action-adventure formula and presents one of the most fun, inventive action-adventure games I've ever played. It's the type of game the Virtual Console was made for. I hope to see it there one day.

But that original Adventure Island, man--it's really something. It's its own animal and, I've come to think, a metaphor for life. It's there to remind us that no matter how long you live and no matter how hard you try to attain ultimate success, you're destined to fail. That is, it's inevitable that you're going to fall into a pit of despair, have your dreams go up in smoke, get the life sucked out of you by selfish leeches, have the weight of the world crush you like a boulder, and ultimate die horribly.

Thank you, Adventure Island, for being so blunt.