Was it really "impossible," or was I just a complete idiot?
The Commodore 64's library, I was learning, was filled with games that looked, played and felt radically different from any of the arcade or Atari 2600 games on which I'd been weaned. There were none like them anywhere; in the previous three years, I had never come across a single game that exhibited their type of especially "weird" characteristics--not on either of the aforementioned platforms, on my cousins' ColecoVision, or on any other consoles I'd ever sampled.
At the time, though, I didn't possess the vocabulary or the verbal intelligence necessary to explain how, exactly, they were different from games on other platforms (had I been smarter, I would have used words like experimental, unconventional and arcane in place of simple, largely nonspecific descriptors like "weird"). All I knew was what I felt. And whenever I was around the Commodore 64 and its games, I would always find myself overcome with a multifarious mix of feelings: fascination, intimidation, wonderment and bewilderment, all of which would conspire to deliver me into a wholly-unique-feeling state of entrancement.
But like I said: I couldn't describe what was unique about it. The only thing I could say was that no other platform or game type could capture me in that fashion; no other could evoke so many disparate emotions and in doing so make me feel as though I was an awestruck visitor in a strange and wonderful alien world.
That was the nature of my relationship with the Commodore 64. I was utterly captivated by it--especially early on, during the period when I would spend entire afternoons excitedly, though somewhat timidly, exploring its library of entirely-bizarre-yet-highly-intriguing games. I saw it as a magical machine that had the power to teleport me away to an untraveled land filled with wonder and mystery. And it was there, in that strange wonderland, where I discovered many of the most deeply impactful games I'd ever play.
It was there where I discovered the curious, distinctly alluring Impossible Mission--the game I always felt best encapsulated the nature of my emotional connection to the C64. To me, it was the quintessential C64 game because it managed to all at once delight me, confuse me, engross me, and make me feel as though I was occupying a world whose rules I could never hope to fully comprehend. And because it wielded this unusual, amazingly stirring power, I couldn't stay away from it; I could never resist the urge to revisit its world and give myself over to it--allow it to freely influence my thoughts and therein test the bounds of my inquisitive spirit.
The first time I loaded up Impossible Mission, though, I didn't expect that it could have such an allure. There was nothing about its plainly rendered, deathly silent title screen that made me think that I was about to play a game that had any real depth to it. Nothing about the screen's presentation induced me to imagine that soon I'd be lost in the woods and in way over my head and for those reasons oddly entranced by what I was experiencing.
When the action came into view, I reacted the same way. I examined the opening screen, which displayed a man standing in an elevator shaft, and thought to myself, "There doesn't appear to be anything unusual about this game."
Rather, it looked to be a simple, straightforward action game. I thought as much because its starting scene was reminiscent of the one I remembered from Elevator Action, which was as uncomplicated a game as you could find.
"It looks like Elevator Action, so surely it must play like it!" I was certain.
Though, it wasn't long before Impossible Mission began to boast a level of complexity that was far beyond the one exhibited by Elevator Action and for that matter, most frighteningly, a degree or two higher than the ones exhibited by those like The Goonies, Zorro and other games that I was certain represented the peak of complexity.
So yeah--it turned out that Impossible Mission was anything but conventional. That much became clear to me about two seconds after I made my snap judgement, which was, well, about two seconds after the action came into view (I wasn't the patient sort, if you couldn't tell). In those opening moments, I was completely in awe of the game. Particularly, I was blown away by the game's synthesized speech samples. Before then, I'd never heard a realistic-sounding voice in a video game, and I never imagined that a video game could produce such a thing. But there I was, being greeted by the voice of what was presumably the game's antagonist, who enunciated and changed inflection in the same way real people did.
The voice was so convincing-sounding that I could picture it coming from a sly, callous movie villain--one who would taunt his pursuers over his fortress' PR system. And there was no taunt more memorable than the one he delivered at the start: "Ano-thah vee-see-tor! Stay a while. Staaaaaay for-ev-aaaaaah!"
Those words were permanently etched into my memory the first time I heard them; had I exited the game right then and never touched it again, I still would have never forgotten that line and the manner in which it was delivered.
I was also extremely impressed with the game's digitized graphics and especially with its hero's movement animations, all of which I found to be astonishing. Impossible Mission presented a main character whose animation frames were so numerous and so finely sequenced that they succeeded in rendering the most lifelike video-game character I'd ever seen (in either an 8-bit game or an arcade game). I spent the first five-ten minutes running and flip-jumping about the opening screen and being utterly mesmerized by how smooth and fluid the hero's movement animation was--by how amazingly realistic it looked.
I hadn't seen beyond the game's first screen, yet I was already firmly in its grasp.
There were many more surprises to come. The first was another speech sample that I quickly came to hold in high regard. It would occasionally sound in the game's "action" rooms, to which the unseen antagonist would welcome me by issuing a chilling, menacing order. "Destrooooooy him, my ro-bawts!" he'd command his mechanical minions. The robots were apt to do as much regardless, yeah, but still that extra dash of ill-intention and the manner in which it was prescribed did much to heighten the feeling of danger. "I'm in big trouble!" I'd always think upon hearing it. Like most every other Impossible Mission speech sample, it was a fun to mimic and naturally became a staple of my brother and I's playful banter; we were sure to repeat it to each other whenever one of us would enter a room that was already occupied by the other.
Though, one speech sample in particular wasn't so amusing to me. In fact, I found it to be quite disturbing. It was the noise that the hero made whenever he fell into a death pit; as he plunged, he'd emit a horrifyingly anguished scream that lasted five whole seconds--long enough to leave me in a state of disquieted silence. Something about the expression's conveyance of helplessness and pain seemed a little too real to me; to someone who had only played games in which heroes died by nonsensically dematerializing, comically collapsing and goofily falling of the screen, this death sound seemed so inexplicably agonizing and grave, and I didn't know how to feel about that. Certainly it gave me something to think about in the hours following that first play-session.
So yeah--I was deeply enthralled by Impossible Mission's lifelike animation and realistic-sounding speech samples. I'd never been so impressed by a game's visuals and sound design.
Though, I wasn't particularly enamored with the gameplay--not in that first play-session, at least. I didn't know where I was, where I was supposed to be going, what or what I was supposed to be doing. The game's intimidating open-endedness and lack of a clear objective left me feeling a bad combination of unnerved and perplexed. I mean, I understood that you had to evade the killer robots and search furniture for what looked like puzzle pieces, yes, but I had no idea why I was doing any of this or how it was helping me to advance. Hell--I couldn't even tell if any of it actually was helping me to progress.
What I thought to do is hang out in the elevator shafts and try to fit together puzzle pieces jigsaw-style. "That's what the game must want me to do!" I was certain.
So I'd open up the bottom menu and arrange puzzle pieces in a 2-by-2 configuration and do so with the hope that eventually I'd form a decipherable image--one that would point me in the direction I needed to go. Unfortunately, none of my configurations ever elicited a response from the game--not one single confirming beep or ringing noise or even a short message telling me that what I registered was invalid (it would have been quite helpful had, say, Big Bird popped up and given me one of those ol' "That's not a thing, stupid!"). I'd flip the pieces, invert them, change their colors, match them together using every logical method I could think of, and still nothing would ever happen.
I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what any of the menu's symbols represented. I wasn't sure if the symbols on the adjacent number pad had anything to do with the puzzle system. And, more than anything, I had no damn clue what the objective was!
Had I not been in love with how Impossible Mission looked and sounded, I probably would have said "Screw this" and given up on it. Its powerfully alluring aural and visual qualities saved it; they're what inspired me to stick with the game and return to it on a regular basis. Together they produced an intoxicating vibe whose emanation functioned to ease my feelings perplexment and awaken the courageous explorer in me; its influence made me want to eagerly, comprehensively scour the game's every space--its every interconnected corridor--in search of solid answers to questions that pertained to both its objective and the nature of its world.
All the while, I'd enjoy immersing myself in and thinking about the game's coldly mechanical, eerily muted environments--the mysteriously silent elevator shafts and the action rooms whose only accompaniment was a whirring, droning ambiance that served to evoke feelings of unease. While traversing my way through them, I'd ruminate on their construction. "Who built all of these elevator shafts?" I'd wonder. "And why would anyone put vending machines and fireplaces in the most difficult-to-access spaces?"
It was fun to think about such things.
The actual traversal process, however, wasn't always as fun. In fact, it was often quite frustrating. This was the case because the controls were both stiff and imprecise, and consequently I'd sometimes struggle with my accuracy. It didn't help that the hero had a fixed five-tile jumping range and that a lot of the platforms were spaced only three or four tiles apart and frequently positioned at different heights; making these jumps required careful calculation, and, well, I could never consistently make such determinations. Usually I'd overshoot and drop into a pit. So I rarely felt comfortable when I was attempting to make long jumps or flip-jump over the robots--even when they were stationary; I always had that fear that I'd miscalculate in some way and throw away a life.
For me, a big part of the challenge was trying to get a grasp on the collision detection--on trying to determine what would be, say, the best point from which to jump if I wanted to land on a one-tile-wide platform and do so without an adjacent platform's indecipherable hitbox canceling out the jumping animation and causing me to drop straight down, usually into a pit. The hitboxes were completely inconsistent, so it was always a guess as to whether a platform's edge was of the solid or jump-through variety.
What gave me the most trouble, though, were the sequences in which you were required to walk over series of one-tile gaps. At first they seemed impossible because I kept trying to clear them with jumps--jumps that would of course never line up because they weren't designed to be used in spaces whose layouts were formed from alternating-platform-gap configurations. I was doing this because, at the time, I had no idea that a walk-over-gaps mechanic even existed; and I probably would have continued to be oblivious to its existence had I not discovered it by accidental in a future session and specifically during another one of those hours-long stretches in which I was stubbornly attempting to clear such sequences with far-edge-to-far-edge jumps. It happened suddenly, and all I could think in following was "Are you kidding me?"
I mean, how could I have known? The game gives you absolutely no indication that you can walk over gaps, and you wouldn't think that such a thing was possible after you observed the hero's running animation and noticed that he takes half-tile strides during each bound. "His half-tile stride could never carry him over a one-tile gap," you'd reasonably conclude.
Actually getting the gap-bounding mechanic to work was a whole other struggle. The problem was that it would only function properly if certain conditions were met. It wasn't like in Super Mario Bros. where you were guaranteed to run over a series of gaps if you were holding both left or right on the d-pad and the run button, no; if you wanted to clear a gap, you had to start running from exactly the right pixel and step on the immediate platform edge on exactly the right frame. And if you failed to meet either condition, you'd promptly drop right into the gap.
Impossible Mission's platforming was rough and unforgiving, its puzzle element was entirely arcane, and its goal couldn't have been less clear. Every part of it was impenetrable. After playing it for three or four days and failing to make any meaningful progress, I came to the conclusion that Impossible Mission was one of those games that I'd never be skilled or patient enough to beat.
Yet, still, I couldn't stay away from it. It was an unreasonably difficult game, sure, but it had many redeeming qualities--aspects that were so deeply alluring that I didn't want to stop enjoying them. "Any game that can delight me in this way certainly deserves to be experienced again and again," I thought to myself. "And because it does, I should probably at least try to figure it out what it wants from me."
So I continued to return to it on a regular basis. And yeah--I figured some things out; I discovered some secrets.
"So, uh, how far did you get?" you ask, clearly riveted.
Well, I'm not sure. I didn't have access to the game's manual (since my brother, as I explained in previous pieces, would toss manuals into the trash seconds after removing them from the boxes), so I was never going to know what the goal was or if I was close to meeting it. So what I did instead was measure my progress in terms of completion-rate--in terms of the amount of rooms I cleared out and the number of puzzles I "solved."
I learned by observing--a skill that games like Impossible Mission pushed me to develop. For the first time in my life, I actually made the effort to examine in-game text and visual clues and attempt to comprehend what they meant. That's how I figured out how the two disk types functioned. "The images they display must correlate to the text shown on the terminals!" I concluded. And they surely did: The ones that displayed platform-arrow composites functioned to reset a room's movable platforms, and the ones that displayed sleeping robots functioned to temporarily disable a room's robot guardians! I didn't know what a "terminal" was or what "functioning" meant, no, but I knew that I was making progress, and that's all that was important to me.
I also "figured out" what those rooms with the checker-board-displaying monitors were all about. Obviously they represented a Simon Says-style mini-game that was put there to give me a little breather! And let me tell you, man: I was the best at it; any time I played it, I'll perform amazingly and in doing so perfectly replicate every command string.
In reality, those monitors had absolutely nothing to do with Simon Says and instead represented a "music" test in which you had to touch notes in a certain order--sequence them from lowest to highest. And if you did it correctly, you'd earn a prize (either of the aforementioned disks). As far as I knew, though, I was dominating a stylishly produced memory game. I was a genius worthy of the highest praise!
Look, man--just shut up and leave me to my delusions.
Since, of course, I was an oblivious youth, I didn't notice until months later that the game's map was being randomly generated. In any mission, the elevator-shaft layout would take a unique shape, and the action of rooms would be shuffled about the map; and because that was the case, you were guaranteed to have a markedly different experience each time you played. Though, even then, it always seemed to be the case that the most challenging action rooms were placed on the map's right side (the far-off "hard section," as I thought of it) and close in proximity to one another (my guess is that the developers intentionally programmed this in and did so because it was the only way to ensure that each mission had some degree of progressive difficulty).
And let me tell you: I was astonished by the concept of "randomly generated worlds." I thought of it as something that was so "futuristic" that it could only be actualized by a game that was somehow transcending the limitations of the C64 hardware--somehow tapping into a remotely located, mystical power source. It was yet another unfathomable game element and one that helped to make Impossible Mission seem so otherworldly to me--so rich with qualities that were and forever would be well beyond my understanding.
I was certain, however, that the game's goal wasn't one of the elements that was beyond comprehension. I believed that eventually I'd figure out what, exactly, it was. That's why I'd return to it every few weeks and attempt to discover the true nature of its puzzle-solving mechanic. "It's within my grasp!" I'd always tell myself.
Each time, though, my effort would be for naught. The puzzle pieces would never fit together, and all of my theories would be promptly squashed. So I'd give up; then, feeling thoroughly dispirited, I'd resort to trying to milk some fun out of the game in other ways. Mainly, I'd have a good time mindlessly tossing the hero (whose name I never knew) into bottomless pits and mimicking his death-cry (by then I'd gotten over the hang-up I had with it)--both the length and pitch of it--and usually I'd hurt my throat in the process. And I'd continue doing that until I was hit with a Game Over.
I wasn't sure why the game would allow for me to fall to my death dozens of times before it'd finally decide to punish me with a Game Over, no, so I determined that this was just another area in which the game was being its ol' arcane self. It was just being the typical Commodore 64 game.
I have no regrets about spending hours throwing myself into pits. It was still a better use of my time than many of the other activities in which I'd normally engage. You know--like recording myself singing wrestler themes in my parents' bathroom and all the while muffling my voice with the hope that no one in the house would hear me.
Though, let's be honest: You should never hold back when you're spreadin' that Honky Love, baby!
So that's how it was with Impossible Mission. I was never able to fully grasp its mechanics. I could never make any meaningful progress. In the end, the only thing I could do was accept defeat and officially classify Impossible Mission as another one of those "advanced" games (like The Goonies, Zorro and Cliff Hanger) that a dumb tyke like me was never meant to finish. And for the next 16 or so years, that was my enduring image of the game.
To be clear, though: I didn't see its arcanity as a negative trait, no; rather, I saw it as a source of great allurement. It's what helped Impossible Mission to earn its way into a special class of games--into a select group whose members resonated with me because each of them had, above all, an unabating air of wonder and mystery. It's for that reason that I didn't want to go back and finish them; I felt that doing so might possibly ruin their place in my memory.
When the Internet came into my life, though, I saw an opportunity to at least get an idea of what Impossible Mission's goal was. So around that time, in the early 2000s, I sought out some gameplay videos (this was in the pre-Youtube Wild West era, when video-hunting was a matter of searching the web for poor-quality AVI files and hoping that none of the shady-looking pop-up ads would function to kill your computer). What I discovered is that the hero's mission is to collect 36 puzzle pieces and then work to complete 9 separate puzzles by first discerning which pieces are part of which quartet and then interlocking the related quartet pieces (you'll know that puzzle pieces are related when your overlapping them produces shapes that are absent of dark-colored or unfilled pixels); the completed puzzles reveal a 9-letter password that will allow him access to the main villain's control room, entering which triggers the ending scene.
(By the way: It's by watching those videos that I learned about the true nature of those "Simon Says" rooms. Though, I've already told you all about that. We don't need to rehash it here. Hell--let's go even further than that and agree to never ever mention it again anywhere.)
Once I became invested in what I was watching, though, I couldn't help myself; I gave in to temptation and watched the ending scene. As a kid, I imagined that Impossible Mission's ending held nothing less than the secrets of life. "Any game whose difficulty-level is this extreme has to offer a mind-blowing reward!" I always thought.
Unfortunately it didn't. Rather, it contained only a short scene in which the largely unmoved antagonist looked toward the camera and delivered one of the flattest, goofiest-sounding closing lines ever recorded. "No. No. No," he said, sounding only mildly annoyed and like a sleepy 9-to-5er reacting to the news that his favorite episode of Two and a Half Men was being preempted by a Knicks game. And just like that, the character lost all of its mystique. For all those years, my conception of the him was one of a cool, debonair Hans Gruber-type villain--one of a well-coiffed suit-wearing charmer; that's what his voice had always projected to me. It turned out, though, that he was nothing more than a typical old, bald mad scientist hiding in a small computer room. Seeing him made me think that it would have been better had I refrained from watching the ending and instead left it all to the imagination.
It's only recently that I played through and completed Impossible Mission for the first time. I did so in preparation for this piece and specifically because I needed to snap some screenshots. Though, I admit that I resorted to abusing save-states. I simply didn't have the time or the patience to complete (or attempt to complete) it legitimately. So let's just say that I have yet to achieve ultimate victory.
I desire to beat Impossible Mission, yes, but I know that doing so is going to prove to be quite difficult. Victory will require that I play skillfully and intelligently at the same time find a way to face and conquer the undermining feelings of intimidation that are residual from those early years. It'll be a tough mental hurdle to overcome, certainly, but I'll find a way to do it. And one day, I'll finally beat this game.
Until that happens, though, I'll continue to be just another visitor.
No comments:
Post a Comment