A game about that masked swashbuckler from that old TV show? I wasn't sure about this one.
Whenever I attempt to characterize my history with video games, I find myself faced with the task of trying to reconcile two startlingly contradicting realities.
My prevailing view has always been that my younger self was an unadventurous, narrow-minded stick-in-the-mud whose interests were limited to uncomplicated, fast-paced side-scrolling action games and easy-to-understand arcade-style platformers, yet my history with the Commodore 64 and its software tells a remarkably different story. It speaks, instead, of a very curious lad who eagerly delved into the Commodore 64's ecosystem and thus eagerly embraced its wide selection of arcane action games, weird adventure games, and games whose concepts were so bizarre and so obscure that he couldn't even adequately describe what they were!
Mostly, it speaks of my inexplicable interest in games like Zorro.
If my original narrative is correct, then my fondness for Zorro really doesn't make any sense. I mean, here was a game whose subject-matter was completely uninteresting to me. I didn't know or care about who Zorro was or what he did, and I had no desire to learn about such. And my knowledge of the character was limited to what I'd see in the fuzzy memories that would surface whenever I'd think about the times when I was a preschooler and I was watching the 1950s Zorro series that would air exclusively on channel 13 (a lesser-known station to which I rarely turned my dial because its images were usually staticky and off-color and because it gave off a really weird alien vibe, as if it was receiving its signal from some unknown or otherworldly source).
Really, I knew two things about the character Zorro: He wore an all-black costume--an ensemble that included a Frisbee-lookin' hat, a Lone Ranger-style mask, and a cape--and he was skilled with a sword. That was it.
So I went into Zorro, the game, mostly blind. I didn't know what its story was or that it took place in Spain, and I was clueless as to the identities of its antagonists (though, I surmised that they were "Mexican" in nationality because, well, they were wearing what looked to be stereotypical Mexican garb!).
My first impression of Zorro was that its gameplay was a bad combination of plodding and cryptic; and whenever I felt that a game possessed the latter quality, in particular, I'd invariably conclude that I was out of my depth. "This is a clear warning sign," I'd think to myself.
Though, I continued to play Zorro because it had some genuinely interesting aspects. For one, it had some cool platforming mechanics. I liked how you could climb up trees and leap off from any point and thus improvise ways to access higher levels. And it was great how could bounce around on the oddly placed couch (which, to a kid, is always a relatable activity) that occupied the bottom level of an unidentifiable building (which is an apt description of most of Zorro's constructions).
Also, it had a fun fighting mechanic: If you moved to within close proximity of one of the patrolling guards, you'd automatically engage him and thus enter into a tense fencing-style sword fight--a distressing, nerve-wracking encounter whose struggle was heightened my the music's sudden sharp increase in tempo. Though, I could never fully grasp how the mechanic worked. At times, it seemed as though the key to victory was to mash the action button as quickly as possible. That's usually how I'd win. Other times, however, I'd mash like crazy but lose anyway! So I simply concluded that fight outcomes were determined randomly.
"It's either that," I thought, "or there's some type of system at play--one that's simply beyond my understanding."
Such a thing was always a possibility when it came to Commodore 64 games and their "unique" gameplay systems.
The game began with a rather intriguing sequence: When the action came into view, Zorro was seen standing beneath his beloved's balcony and watching helplessly as the main villain (who, honestly, looked pretty much like every other sword-wielding enemy) kidnapped her and carried her off to the right. It was obviously a scripted sequence, yeah, but the designers were clever about it and scripted it to where you could pursue the villain for several screens (when you'd enter a screen, you'd see him on its far side, just making his exit); and this would give you the false hope that you could actually catch him--outwit the game's scripting and thus cut him off and end the game early!
You could pursue him all of the way to his fortress. That's where the scripting would end. When you'd arrive there, the fortress' drawbridge would rise up and slam shut and thus decisively cut you off from your beloved, whose only recourse, now, was to encouragingly wave to you from atop the bell tower.
That was the first time I'd ever seen a scripted sequence in a game. I loved it. I thought it was one of the coolest, most original things a game had ever done.
And I got a kick out of one of the design oversights: The person who scripted the sequence didn't take into account that the player could take an alternate route from the opening screen. So if you returned to the starting point after the sequence had completed and took the alternate route to the "bull room," as I called it, you'd see, inexplicably, the main villain exiting to the right with your beloved in tow! I didn't know how to describe what went wrong there, no, but I found it funny nonetheless!
It might've been dumb to derive pleasure from such things as "programming oversights," yeah, but for me it was one of the best ways to extract enjoyment from seemingly-unbeatable Commodore 64 games. I had to take little victories where I could get them, even if such a victories entailed ridiculousness like one-upping sadist designers by breaking their games.
In fact, that oversight had me convinced that there actually was a way to catch up to the main villain. "If I travel a very specific path from the start," I thought, "I might be able to trick the game and somehow get in front of him!"
I could never do it, no, yet I continued to believe that it was possible.
One particular event set my desire into overdrive: My friend Mike claimed to have caught the main villain! This was incredible to me because Mike had never given me any indication that (a) he'd ever heard of the game or (b) he'd ever interacted with a Commodore 64 before meeting me (I'm pretty sure he hadn't). Though, I talked myself into believing him, anyway, and with renewed vigor, I loaded up Zorro and spent an entire afternoon doing everything I could to finally cut that villain off at the pass! "If Mike can do it," I kept thinking to myself, "then so can I!"
In that span of time, I exhausted all possibilities. Nothing worked. And I was never able to catch him. So eventually I stopped trying; I gave up on the mission and moved on.
Mike was telling a tall tale, of course, because, well, that's what he liked to do! I didn't blame him, though, no. I blamed myself for being for being an idiot and for choosing to believe the things he was telling me. After all: How could I not believe the guy who (a) let me in on amazing secrets like Metroid's having a "secret meeting room" and (b) provided me the highly accurate inside information that pro-wrestler Tugboat was actually manager Jimmy Hart stuffed with pillows?
I didn't know how to term it at the time, but Zorro had a clear "stealth element" to it, and thus there was a benefit to advancing cautiously, taking your time, and tactically evading the game's only enemies--those persistent swordsmen who could be seen constantly patrolling the levels of any building that had multiple doors, which they'd enter into and exit in set patterns.
But of course, I did none of that. Rather, because I was never patient enough to wait for the right opportunities to sneak by the swordsmen, I'd usually rush across levels and hope that no swordsmen were currently present; and if I was unlucky enough to get into a sword fight, I'd pound away at the action button and pray that the RNG (random number generator) was on my side.
The word strategy, dear reader, was not in my dictionary.
Zorro's world wasn't enormous in size, no; it was comprised of a mere 20 screens. But at the time, though, it seemed far larger to me; I saw it as a vast labyrinth--one in which I could become lost for hours. Also, the game's campaign seemed to be so much longer than it actually was. It felt so lengthy to me because the action moved at a rather slow pace and because the solving of puzzles sometimes required the most meticulous and most painstaking of efforts. Usually your execution had to be perfect, and if it wasn't, you'd have to spend several minutes repeating the entire process. And I'd fail repeatedly because I was both jumpy and impatient.
It didn't help that I was always greatly confused by games whose level design had three-dimensional aspects to them--abstruse-feeling means of progression. I never understood how two exits that were extremely close in proximity could lead to completely separate rooms. "If this building's upper level also exits to the right, how, then, can it lead to a different room and one that happens to be exact same size as the other one?" I'd wonder with a look of perplexment on my face. It just didn't make sense.
Now, sure--the game only had two of these "spatially impossible alternate routes," but a confusing mechanic used even sparingly could go a long way toward making its world feel impenetrable to me.
Still, I very much liked Zorro, and I enjoyed exploring and interacting with its uniquely constructed environments. In particular, I was fond of its puzzle-solving mechanics because they were quite similar to The Goonies': You locate and procure an item, and then you travel about the world and try to find a use for it. So what you'd do is grab a bottle of alcohol, take it over to the bar, and give it to a lazy bar-goer; by doing this, you'd render him dead drunk, and while he lied there, you could bounce on his beer gut and thus reach the otherwise-inaccessible platform upper level. Or you'd obtain a branding iron, take it over to the blacksmith's shop, place it atop a furnace, heat it up by bouncing on the adjacent bellows, and then jam it into the nearby bull; and when the resentful bull moved aside, and thus removed itself as an obstacle, you could access the room's bottom-right portion and grab the next item!
Your actions could have a real effect on this world--you could reshape whole parts of it--and, really, I found that to be kinda mind-blowing.
I never gave much attention to the game's secondary goal, which was to achieve the highest score possible. After you procured an item, the "Bonus" timer seen in the screen's upper-right corner would begin counting down from 9,900, and after you correctly used the item, you'd be awarded a points bonus that was equal in value to whichever number was left on the timer. Usually I'd get the minimum (1,000 points).
What caused me the most pain, though, were the game's jumping controls.
The control scheme, itself, was simple: You push up on the control stick to jump vertically, and you push diagonally on the control stick to jump horizontally. But getting the jumping controls to actually function fluidly was impossible because they were both clunky and laggy. I'd have such an awful time trying to execute diagonal jumps while nearing ledges because the game seemed unwilling to recognize the jumping commands unless they were input when Zorro's walking animation was currently in a specific frame. So what would happen, usually, is that the input would be eaten, and I'd instead helplessly drop down several levels. And then I'd have to circle up and around to get back to where I was!
Let me tell you: It was never fun to drop to a screen's bottom, for the fifteenth time in a row, and then have to spend two to three minutes sloooooowly walking, platforming and climbing my way back to the ledge in question. During that time, I'd try to keep my mind busy by thinking about things that were actually fun, but it wouldn't work because I'd be unable to fight off the self-defeating thoughts of how badly I was going to fail the next time I attempted that jump. So by the time I got back to the ledge, I'd be so full of anxiety and thus so shaky that it was almost assured that I'd screw up yet again.
In Zorro, platforming sequences that required long diagonal jumps were the absolute worst.
During my travails, I had the company of Zorro's lone tune, which started playing at the title screen and continued playing all of the way through the game. And I was fine with that because I really liked the tune and considered it to be the game's most defining element. It was a spirited, enlivening piece, and I was able to feed off of its energy in the times when I was stuck trudging my way through the same sequences over and over again and I needed a boost. In those moments, its presence would help to ease the pain and remind me, instead, of all of the things I liked about Zorro: the visuals, the setting, the creative platforming elements, and the style of interactivity.
That tune kept me engaged at all times, and it had the power to shape my every thought. And for those reasons, I saw it as the perfect accompaniment.
Well, actually, there was one other tune: a subdued, gloomy-sounding variant of the main theme. It played in the game's bleak, shadowy underground area, and it served to up the intimidation factor in the place I feared the most. I hated having to go to that underground area because it was one big maze--a Lost Woods-style labyrinth that would loop you back to an earlier room if ever you broke sequence. So if you hoped to escape, you had to navigate the maze in a very specific way. The problem was that I could never remember the correct room order, so I'd get lost for what felt like hours. I dreaded this part of the game.
In my earliest experiences, I didn't understand the point of the underground area and saw it as something that existed only for the purpose of wasting my time. What I didn't know--and what I figured out later on--was that you needed to procure a trio of items (a horseshow, a trophy and a boot) in order to remove a specially emblazoned barrier found somewhere within the maze (I didn't know where, exactly, the barrier was, so I'd have to keep exploring until I randomly stumbled upon it); then you could move on to the endgame.
So I assumed that the true goal, instead, was to collect all of the points-awarding money bags and then promptly escape the maze any way I could. That's what I did while I was there: run around collecting money bags. Though, even doing that was a trial because the maze was filled with aggravating platforming challenges--the type that required you to jump across series of horribly sequenced disappearing-and-reappearing platforms and do so with near-pixel-perfect accuracy. As you can imagine, I spent most of my time falling helplessly.
The gloomy-sounding musical variant only made worse for me, since it tended to further dampen my spirit. While I was standing there like a goon, for 30-40 seconds, waiting for slowly-scrolling boney-looking ladders to loop back around to the ground level so I could finally climb my way back up, the music's depressive vibes would envelope me and instill within me a sense of hopelessness. "I'm never going to get out of here," I'd think. "I'll just never be good enough to capably handle these types of platforming challenges."
Really, I just wanted to get the hell out of that place and do so as quickly as possible.
That was the thing about Commodore 64 games: Their visuals and music had a way of evoking from me such deep emotions. They weren't the best-looking or the best-sounding games, no, but still they had such a power to them. Their imaginatively rendered imagery and wonderfully whimsical music could and usually would combine to create amazingly distinct, utterly unforgettable worlds--the type I'd think about often; and when I'd do so, I'd be overcome with the same emotions. I'd be instantly transported to places where wonder and mystery were the norm.
No other platform could create worlds quite like the Commodore 64's.
Though, their being wondrous didn't necessarily preclude them from committing heinous crimes against the rules of good game design. In fact, most of the Commodore 64 games I played contained one or more challenges that ranged from questionable to downright unreasonable. I began to think that it was a requisite or something: "Put at least one inexplicably awful thing in your game or we'll refuse to publish it!"
Zorro, as I've said previously, committed a number of said offenses. And, for the purpose of telling the full story, I have to talk about the worst of them: a terribly designed well area that would do me in almost every time. This room was so awful that I had to invent a new term to accurately describe what it was. I called it a "rough spot," which (as I said in Vampire Killer review) was any space in which the platforming challenges were so tricky that you were likely to lose all of your lives and/or continues to them. That's what would happen to me whenever I entered Zorro's well area: I'd quickly dump all of my lives and thus throw away all of the work I did in the previous half hour or so.
If you wanted to reach either of the well's rightmost exits, you had to do a little platforming: If you wanted to reach the lower exit, you simply had to bounce your way across the reserve's three floating logs. And if you wanted to reach the upper exit (which was an alternate entry point into the underground area), you had to bounce high off the first log, grab onto the middle ladder, and then climb across the overhanging rail.
Pretty easy, right?
Well, no, it wasn't. Not at all. Bouncing your way across the logs wasn't simply a matter of pressing the jump button and holding left on the control stick, no; there was no such natural flow to it. Rather, there were a number of tricky steps: First you had to land on a very specific part of a log, then you had to bounce straight upward to build momentum, and then, only after building up an exact amount of momentum, bounce forward. And if you were lucky, you'd travel the required distance and land in the intended spot.
My problem, of course, was that I could never get the proper amount of momentum, and so I'd repeatedly plunge to my death. And if ever I did get the proper amount of momentum, I'd forget to hold upward and thus fail to grab onto the ladder's lowest rung, and then I'd fall helplessly. For me, falling into water was a theme with this place; it's just about all I did here.
What made it worse was that you were required to pass through this room multiple times and do so in both directions (and the return trip was even worse because there was higher potential for head-bonking). That was simply asking too much of me, and I'd be lucky if I got through this room even once. Usually, at some point, I'd Game Over here, and then I'd wonder, "What's the point of spending an hour (or what felt like an hour) doing all of this work if it can all be thrown away in a matter of seconds because I can't capably make a couple of jumps in one questionably designed room?"
And in the instances when I did somehow manage to survive the well area's challenges, my prospects would still be shaky because I'd be low and lives and stressed to the point where I'd be mentally unprepared to deal with suddenly-appearing swordsmen, who would likely pick me off.
I didn't know how to define this type of game structure, no, but I knew how I felt about it: I disliked it immensely. I couldn't stand the design philosophy that dictated that all of the most perilous challenges should be packed into the game's final 10%. So many games did that garbage: The first hour or so would be comprised of well-designed, very manageable platforming challenges, but then the final five minutes would be packed with unfair, insanely stupid do-or-die platforming challenges! So if you wanted to take on a game's final challenge, you'd first have to endure its comparatively undemanding, and now entirely tedious, opening-hour-plus. And if you screwed up at any point during the final five minutes, then everything you did beforehand would be rendered completely meaningless!
All I can is that it's a damn good thing that game developers have since wised up and shunned such archaic game-design philosophy. Isn't that right, guys who made 1001 Spikes?
I was fond of Zorro because, like I said, it had immersive aural and visual qualities, an imaginative setting, and a lot of cool gameplay mechanics. But when it came to the game's other aspects? They were some of the worst. When I'd think about them, the only word that would come to mind was "yikes"!
In those early days, I wasn't able to beat Zorro. It was too hard and too laborious, and at I just didn't possess the mettle necessary to overcome its challenges. Still, I played it a lot and did so because I enjoyed exploring its world, observing and examining its imagery, and listening to and interpreting the meaning of its music. Those are the types of things I'd do when I had a fondness for a game but didn't possess the skill necessary to beat it; I'd derive enjoyment from it in other ways. And with Zorro, I'd always find a way to have a fun time, even when I was failing miserably.
As is the case with other Commodore 64 games that seemed to be impossibly difficult to my younger self, I only recently beat Zorro for the first time, which is to say that I willingly subjected myself to Zorro's soul-crushing brand of torture and somehow managed to emerge victorious. And when I finally arrived at the top of the fortress' bell tower and saved Zorro's beloved, I was overcome with feelings of relief and satisfaction, for I'd finally completed a mission that began so long ago!
I learned some hard lessons along the way. First, in a cruel twist, Zorro's beloved will reject him if he doesn't arrive with a rose in hand (apparently there's a "proper" way to rescue damsels, and it entails showing up with flowers). So if you don't have a rose in your possession, you have to turn back and re-traverse the world in search of one. Mainly, you have to go all of the way back to the couch room (which is basically the game's "hub"), complete a tedious platforming sequence, get the rose, and then head all of the way back to the fortress' bell tower (and in in the process pass through the excruciatingly awful underground area again).
And you do all of this just to earn a 20-second ending in which Zorro and his beloved embrace and thus spawn symbolic hearts that fly all over the screen. That's it. There's no congratulations screen or "Thank you for playing!" text or anything even minimally rewarding.
Oh, you do get points, though. Lots of 'em. So that's kinda exciting. I guess.
You know: Had I not been using a walkthrough, I would have assumed that Zorro's being rejected was in fact the actual ending; and it would have been one that was appropriately allegorical, since "being rejected" was basically the game's theme. I mean, that's how I used to feel every time the game would unceremoniously dump me back at the title screen after I failed. "You ain't good enough yet, pal, so do me a favor and scram!" was what it was constantly telling me.
So for the sake of creating the most poetic of endings, I should have accepted her rejection and then immediately jumped into the moat below! That, I think, would have been a more appropriate capper to my decades-long Zorro journey.
So it begs the question: If I was as unadventurous as I say I was, then why did I instinctively gravitate to all of these foreign-feeling Commodore 64 games?
Honestly, I still can't come up with an answer to that question (an answer that sounds logical, at least). And I don't know if I ever will come up with one.
So instead a present a theory: Maybe it's that calling my younger self "unadventurous" is a bit of misnomer. Maybe it's that there was actually a duality to my being. That is, I lived in a bubble, yes, yet still I was filled with adventurous spirit. It was just that I needed to be in a certain space if I wanted to eagerly put it on display; I needed to be in a place where someone like me, who relied so heavily on his imagination, could feel inspired to dream--a place whose environments were so wondrous and so imagination-stirring that I just had to give myself over to it and thus unleash the explorer within. And the Commodore 64's ecosystem was such a place.
Maybe.
All I know for sure is that Commodore 64 games opened my eyes to new possibilities, and I was always happy to let them take me to new places.
Zorro, in particular, showed me the true power of the action-adventure genre and helped plant the seeds for my future love affair with both side-scrolling action-adventure games and point-and-click adventures. Playing Zorro made me realize how immensely satisfying it was to solve complexly designed puzzles and unravel the twisted cords of a world that was seeped in mystery. That's why I was so fond of it. It's why I was so inspired by it. You could say that Zorro did much to shape who I was an an enthusiast.
And it was all because the Commodore 64, that wonderful machine, inspired me to open my mind and eagerly take the plunge.
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