So the way I saw it, the Commodore 64 was a wonderfully mysterious machine, and its library was filled with the types of intriguingly weird, daringly experimental games that just couldn't be found anywhere else--not in arcades nor on any of the consoles I'd played.
Cliff Hanger, one of my Commodore 64 favorites, was one of many such games that encapsulated the nature of the machine's library.
Consider its premise: You're an actor participating in the creation of a movie. You're not actually a crafty fedora-wearing adventurer trying to stop a rampaging bandit, no; rather, you're literally a performer playing the role of hero in a Road Runner-like production. And each single-screen action stage represents a "scene" that's being filmed--a scene whose setup entails the displaying of scene titles and a clapperboard. You know--the types of things you see when you're on the set of a movie!
So once the actor, Cliff Hanger (and his brother, Coat, if you're playing in the game's alternating-control-style multiplayer mode), takes to the set, he has to successfully complete film scenes that call for him to halt the bandit character's guns-firing charge using comically devised traps that are designed take him out via means of dropping rocks on him, blowing him up, flattening him with anvils, or neutralizing him in one of many other absurd ways.
"A game about making a movie?" I thought to myself as I watched the game's intro play out. "That's just, well, really weird!"
That, my friends, was Cliff Hanger.
Cliff Hanger, like so many other Commodore 64 games, was old-school tough, and I could never advance far into it. I simply wasn't skilled enough. I mean, I understood what I needed to do to win, yeah, but I just wasn't capable of doing it consistently. So Cliff Hanger came to be one of those types of games--the kind that would always make me think to myself, "Man--I'll never be good enough to beat this one!"
Still, I liked the game a lot, and I'd play it quite often.
What kept me coming back to it--more so than its interesting, unique gameplay style--was its inviting mode of progression. Its initial set of scenes, cleverly named "Act 1," was treated as a warmup. In this opening act, you could fail over and over again and do so without ever facing any consequences. It would let you continue playing until you completed every scene. And I was very appreciative of the fact that the game would give me such a fair chance; its doing so enabled me to spend a meaningful amount of time with it. Most other games, in contrast, would try to run me off before I could even figure out how to get past their opening screens!
And after you successfully completed each scene, you'd move on to Act 2. That's where it'd quickly fall apart for me.
Act 2 was different in that it removed most of the fail-safes and penalized you with one life reduction for any failure that entailed falling off a cliff and crashing into the ground, getting crushed or run over, or being otherwise trampled by any of a scene's interactable objects. The kid gloves were off, and now even the slightest miscalculation was enough to cost you a life. And this was a big problem in a game that supplied you a mere five lives and no continues.
It didn't help that the designer mischievously programmed some objects to automatically backfire on you. And there was never any indication that said objects were rigged. You wouldn't find that out until you tried to interact with them! Talk about piling cruelty on top of cruelty!
Now, yes--the game did have a mechanic that allowed you to survive walking off a cliff and thus salvage a life: An air-walking Cliff Hanger could prevent himself from falling by deploying a parachute or by blowing up a balloon and using it to float upward, to safety. Though, because we didn't have a manual (because, as I've said many times before, my brother threw away games' boxes and manuals), I didn't know how to pull off these escape moves. So I'd just mash the button and jerk the joystick around and hope that one such combination of random inputs would result in an escape move being activated. Sometimes it work, and sometimes it wouldn't.
At one point, I was even convinced that there were no viable inputs--that all of my mashing and jerking meant nothing and that sometimes the game would just arbitrarily decide to let me live. "That would make perfect sense for one of these weird Commodore 64 games," I thought.
Act 3 presented more of the same, but since I only made it there two or three times (mostly in the later years) and at most saw one or two of its scenes, I couldn't truly determine its level of difficulty. All I knew was that its scenes' structuring looked complex as hell and that I'd be unlikely to solve their puzzles even with a full set of lives.
(I never knew of the type of horror Act 3 contained until the early 2000s--until the era of emulators and save-states. Even with the advantage of save-states, I learned, it was still almost impossible to complete all of Act 3's scenes. You'd best be a mathematical god if you hope to solve its puzzles.)
I knew that I had no shot of actually beating Cliff Hanger, yeah, but I just couldn't stay away from it. I was enraptured by its silly, playful spirit and its novel concepts. I found it to be fun in such a wonderfully unique way.
And because I wanted to share Cliff Hanger with my friends and let them experience its magic, I'd often recruit them to help me in my ongoing efforts to advance just a little farther into the game. Honestly, they didn't help at all; none of them had any sense of timing, and they'd instead spend the entire sessions being amused by the game's look, by its scenes' funny names and themes, and by its ridiculous failure/death animations (which include crashing through the ground, hammering yourself into the ground, and accidentally taking your own head off with a boomerang).
I recall how my best friend, Dominick, loved the scene-name "Chuckie Bomb." He'd say it all the time in humorously syllabic way, and often I'd say it back to him; sometimes we'd spend minutes dopily repeating it to each other. "Haha! Chuh-KEY bomb!" we'd say. Because we obviously had brain damage.
That my friends couldn't help me didn't really matter. The most important thing was that we had a good time and shared a lot of laughs.
But I can't stress enough how unique Cliff Hanger was. It was a game that asked you to do several challenging things in a very short period: (1) study a scene's environment, (2) identify its interactable objects and subsequently figure out how their mechanics worked, and then (3), using careful calculation, time your actions so that the resulting strike hits the bandit right as he's passing through the sweet spot--the one or two pixels that represent the only intersecting point in which hits will register.
No other game had ever challenged me in that way. And no other game had ever made me realize that, yes, I desired to be challenged in that way. That's why I wouldn't quit no matter how many times I failed to make progress: I wanted to learn how to trust my gaming instincts.
I got better over time, of course, but still I couldn't make it to the final act. Each session would usually play out the same way: I'd capably complete Act 1, usually with five lives in the tank, but then struggle with and ultimately fall apart in Act 2. There'd always come a point in which I couldn't figure out how to time my strikes or survive for more than a few screens; even if I knew the correct methodology for scenes like "The Seesaw's Revenge," it didn't matter because I just couldn't consistently hit the sweet spot. Then there were scenes like the utterly mystifying "I Can't Breakaway," which seemed to be designed specifically to kill the player; I knew I'd be out a life the moment I saw its name on the scene-intro screen (in truth, its solution required some special direction input that I didn't know about).
So the only thing I could do, each time, was strive to complete more puzzles than I did in my previous attempt. And for many years, that's how it went: I'd load up Cliff Hanger; have some fun completing all of Act 1's cleverly designed scenes; and then do my best to solve Act 2's puzzles and finally make it to Act 3.
Sadly, I was never able to make it to Act 3 (outside of those two or three times in the mid-90s, which I don't count because they happened so much later). It was just too high a mountain to climb. Though, still, mine wasn't a story of failure, no; rather, it was one about learning. Because of my experiences with Cliff Hanger, I now knew how to calculate movement-speed in my head and rely on visual and aural cues. "I'll jump from the higher cliff three seconds after the bandit disappears over the hill," I'd say to myself, "and then I'll activate the cannon when the top of his head lines up with the cactus' left arm!"
Those are the types of important skills Cliff Hanger taught me. And I'd put them to great use over the next 30 years.
Like Impossible Mission, Goonies, and so many of my other Commodore 64 favorites, Cliff Hanger was one of those that taught me that I didn't need to be able to beat a game to have a great time with it and learn a lot from it. Also, it showed me that you could make a supremely difficult game and get away with it if the power of your content and presentation is such that it stirs the imagination, makes you laugh, and evokes feelings of joy. Failure was no obstacle to the enjoyment of its world.
So yeah--Cliff Hanger epitomized what was so unique about the Commodore 64, and thus it left me with many fond memories. Certainly the indelible images of boulders flying around circles, giant anvils being pulled by magnets, cannons backfiring and running me over, surface-smashing cliff-dives, and brothers Cliff and Coat hammering themselves into the ground will forever be the first things that come to mind whenever I think about Cliff Hanger and why I adore the Commodore 64.
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