Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #14

Dino Eggs

In a very short time, the Commodore 64 and its games changed my perception of video games. They showed me that the medium's scope was much larger than I originally thought, and they taught me how to think about video games in different terms.

As I played through daringly bold games like Cliff Hanger, Impossible Mission and The Goonies, I came to see that there was far more to gaming than just running through colorful mazes, leaping over and outracing hyperactive critters, and beating up gangs of mindless thugs; and that there was great appeal in exploring games whose themes and concepts were unconventional, bizarre or strangely evocative.

Games, I learned, could be deep and complex. They could explore serious subjects. And they could capably convey emotion and evoke strong feelings.

They could be like Dino Eggs--a game that did all of the aforementioned.

Dino Eggs was right up front with its distressing tale. After the logo dropped onto the title screen, the harrowing words immediately began to scroll. They spoke of an explorative fellow called Time Master Tim who accidentally caused a catastrophe while experimenting with his new time-warping ability. While exploring the pre-historic past, the text said, he accidentally infected dinosaurs with measles and thus condemned them to extinction! Tim, realizing what he had done, was so overcome with remorse that he decided to return to the past and remedy the situation by quarantining the infected subjects.

The first couple of times I played Dino Eggs, I didn't realize that it had a storyline because, as I was apt to do, I skipped past the intro and got right to the action. I didn't even consider the possibility that such a game could have a substantive storyline. All I knew was that it was a game about going back in time and collecting dinosaur eggs, and games that had those types of absurd concepts didn't have or need complex stories. They were just too silly for any of that.

Eventually I noticed that the title screen had a text scroll, and I decided, probably out of boredom, to give it a read. And when I did, I was left kinda speechless. Honestly, I didn't know what half of that scrolling text meant, but I understood that the situation it was describing was really serious-sounding! And all I could think was, "This is way heavier than any of the stories that are attached to my favorite 2600 and arcade games!"

Before then, I hadn't played a game whose story was heavier than "The enemy has captured your enchanted trophy, and now it's your job to venture out and retrieve it!" And now, suddenly, I was playing a game whose story dealt with serious subjects and conditions like "remorse," "measles" and "extinction." Just the inclusion of measles (which I knew to be a deadly virus), alone, told me that Dino Eggs' world had an air of hopelessness and death to it.

"This is one entirely messed-up backstory!" I thought to myself.

I just didn't know what to make of any of it.

At the start, I was drawn to Dino Eggs because it looked to be an arcade-like platformer, and I loved games of that type. At the time, just about all of my favorite games were simple platformers. "This is right up my alley," I thought.

I quickly learned, though, that Dino Eggs didn't exactly fit that description--that, actually, it was a lot more complex than your standard Mario Bros.-style action game.

Still, I had no problem grasping the basics: To complete a stage, you had to gather all of its hanging dinosaur eggs, some of which were covered by weird-looking shells that resembled candy drops, and bring them to Tim's time-warping device. The only problem was that you could only carry three eggs at a time; after collecting as many, you had no choice but to return to the time-warping device and drop off the eggs and subsequently warp to another part of the stage. And as you warped away, you were awarded points and a "multiplier bonus" (whatever that meant).

But everything else about Dino Eggs seemed arcane to me. I couldn't, for instance, understand or decipher the majority of the information that was being communicated in the bottom-right text box. It kept telling me about my "power" and my "skill level," but I had no idea what, exactly, those terms were referring to or indicating. So I simply ignored such information and did so under the assumption that it wasn't something that a kid was meant to understand. "Maybe it'll make sense to me when I get older," I thought.

Also, I didn't know what the white-outlined objects were (at first, I thought that they were guns, though I learned later on that they were instead planks of wood) or what I was supposed to do with them. And I struggled to understand why the game was allowing me to advance to the next stage anytime I wanted simply by warping while eggless. Whenever I did this, I'd feel bad about it; I'd feel as though I was shirking a responsibility (and this was before I became aware of the game's urgent story!).

It had always been the case that arcade-like games had progressive difficulties. They'd start out easy, and then they'd slowly grow more difficult; and this would continue until their action got so crazy that all you could do was endure. But for at least a little while (for about 8-10 stages), they'd be lenient with you and allow you to comfortably operate within their worlds.

Well, Dino Eggs had no desire to be so generous, no. It wanted me dead as quickly as possible. Hell--in just its second stage, there was already a very concerning amount of dangerous activity occurring onscreen. Speedy snakes were slithering their way across all four of the stage's levels (and somehow they were able to travel over empty space), and large spiders were rappelling down from the screen's top portion and doing so in an endless deluge.

And then there was the biggest, most terrifying threat: the dino mom, which wasn't pleased with the fact that I was messing with her offspring. When she was around, there was nowhere I could hide. The entire time she was present, I'd basically be in a panic.

I thought it was neat, though, how the message box would warn me of her impending arrival and thus create an air of foreboding. Other platformers didn't know how to create that type of tension; they didn't know how to be truly scary.

The warning would always be proceeded by the instruction "Start a Fire," but I'd ignore that instruction because I didn't know how to start a fire (to do so, you had to pick up a piece of wood and then place it down on top of another), and I didn't have time to figure out how to do it because there was so much going on and I was too busy trying to survive the madness. And as a consequence, I'd have to deal with the dino mom, whose huge leg would come crashing down every few seconds. And if I couldn't react fast enough, I'd get crushed. Her presence made navigating the stages' upper levels a far more dangerous task because being higher up meant that I had less time to react; in those moments, all I could do was hope that the RNG system would be kind enough to have the leg crash down on some other part of the screen.

So yeah--surviving all of the snake-slithering, spider-rappelling and leg-stomping madness for more than a few minutes was a considerable challenge.

Really, though, I wasn't bothered by Dino Eggs' high level of difficulty because I didn't give much importance to that aspect of the game. For me, the Dino Eggs experience wasn't really about the challenge. For that matter, it wasn't even about the gameplay, itself (in truth, I never made it further than the fifth or sixth stage, and there was never a point in time in which I aspired to do such a thing). I kept returning to Dino Eggs, rather, because I was so enchanted with its strangely divergent visual and aural qualities.

What made Dino Eggs so appealing was that it didn't look, sound or feel like any other game I'd ever played. It was tonally distinct in the most wondrous way. Its every graphical, musical and presentational element had a fascinatingly desolate, melancholic vibe to it. Its environments were haunting in a very somber way. Its tunes were optimistic-sounding, yes, but tempered with wistful tones that worked to evoke feelings of pensiveness. And its silence created an atmosphere of disquieting seclusion.

Whenever I'd look at or listen to Dino Eggs, I'd enter into a contemplative state, and my mind would become filled with images of lonely journeys to primitive worlds that were unpopulated and tranquil on the surface but in reality crawling with danger. No other game had ever stirred my imagination that way. No other had ever inspired me to think about the emotional state of its world and its characters.

I loved that about Dino Eggs.

I was especially fond of background imagery that populated its stages' top portions. In any (attempted) play-through, I'd always stop for moments at a time and look at them and think about what they were trying to tell me about Dino Eggs' world. I'd examine the magma-stained mountains whose volcanic activity, I was sure, caused the skies to take their dark-hazel color. The oppressive mountain ranges whose unwelcoming peaks were illuminated only by the irrepressibly radiant celestial bodies that were hovering above them. The cloudy, peaceful night skies that spoke of a type of undisturbed serenity that only an ancient world could offer. And all of the other wondrous depictions that did so well to provide texture and context to the earthy environments seen below.

Whenever I'd play Dino Eggs, I'd constantly think about the state of its world and the effect my presence was having. I'd feel as though I was a higher being who was single-handedly shaping history and that all of the planet's activity was centered around what I was doing at any given moment (and this was before I read the story). And I loved to think about Dino Eggs in these terms because I was fascinated with the idea of a sparsely populated, developing world in which even the smallest action could cause seismic change.

That's exactly the kind of place I was visiting whenever I played Dino Eggs.

I also thought a lot about the game's music and specifically its player-death and "Tim's Second Life" ditties. They had, like I said, a curiously wistful element to them, and while I didn't know how to define such a quality, I knew that it was telling me something important about the mission. The way I interpreted it, the tunes' "sad," poignant-sounding tonal element was an expression of how you'd feel if you were stuck in prehistoric times and in a position in which one wrong move could have catastrophic consequences for either you or the world. It was an expression of how you'd long to return home.

To me, Dino Eggs' tunes perfectly captured the essence of Tim's struggle.

Then there was the Dino Eggs element that deeply disturbed me: Tim's death via "devolution."

Whenever you'd made contact with any of the roaming creatures or a recently hatched dinosaur baby, you'd become contaminated, and your life-counter would slowly begin to drain. To heal and thus reset the counter back to 100%, you had to return to the time-warping device and do so in a hurry. It was a stressful process and one that would become exacerbated if you accidentally made contact with another creature while you were making your return; if that happened, the timer would begin to drain more quickly.

What was worse was what would happen if you failed to make it back in time: You'd be forced to witness one of the most unsettling, most traumatic deaths ever depicted in a video game. After the timer hit zero, Tim would devolve into a spider and do so in a nightmarishly graphic animation sequence that made sure to show each stage of the gruesome process! (You can see this animation in the top-left screenshot.)

"What a horrible fate!" I'd think to myself whenever I'd reflect on this scene. I'd replay the scene in my mind over and over again not because I wanted to torture myself but because I wanted to explore the thoughts and feelings that its imagery was evoking and figure out what, exactly, was causing me to feel so disturbed. "What kind of pain would such a transformation inflict upon you?" I'd wonder. "And what thoughts would begin running through your mind once you became cognizant of the fact that the process was irreversible and you were now stuck in the distant past as a helpless spider?"

It was basically a form of death and one that was more horrifying than any other I could ever imagine!

That was the symbolization of my relationship with Dino Eggs: I was drawn to it not because I loved how it played (it was a fine game, sure, but I could only extract a limited amount of enjoyment from it because it got way too difficult way too quickly) but because I was enamored with its evocative imagery, music and atmosphere and the ways in which they inspired me to wonder.

Dino Eggs still resonates with me in the same way. I still think about its world and its coldly-desolate-but-wondrously-serene environments and explore the thoughts and feelings they evoke. I still wonder about what it would be like occupy those spaces. Dino Eggs hasn't lost any of its power. Its imagery, for however crude it looks by 2014 standards, still has the same effect on me, which is to say that it still capably renders an amazing world of wonder.

I've read recently that Dino Eggs' creator, David Schroeder, is working on a sequel called Dino Eggs Rebirth and that it's slated to be released for the PC sometime in the near future. I intend to give it a look if only to find the answer to one question: Does the Dino Eggs world created with technologically advanced tools match up to the one that I've vividly constructed in my head?

I'll share that discovery some other time and within some other page of history.