Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #18

Friday the 13th

No, not that one.

What I'm going to talk about today is the Commodore 64 version of Friday the 13th--the version I grew up with.

So I discovered Friday the 13th sometime in 1985, on a day when I was casually thumbing through the games in my brother's Commodore 64 disk case. In the previous days and weeks, I'd somehow never come across it.

That's usually how it would go when I was looking through my brother's Commodore 64 game case. New games would just suddenly appear within it and do so without explanation. Every time I'd open that thing up, there'd be three or four new games inside of it, and I could never figure out how they got there (my brother, James, was always mum on the issue). And after a while, I started to think that the case possessed a magical property that caused its contents to multiply whenever they weren't being observed by human eyes!

So anytime I was looking through that case, I never knew what I was going to find. There'd always be new surprises waiting for me.

And one of its biggest surprises was Friday the 13th.

When I came across the label bearing its name, I was taken aback. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. "They made a video game out of that?!" I skeptically questioned. "Some company seriously made a game about a brutally offensive movie series that stars a supernatural serial killer who preys upon helpless campers?!"

In the following moments, I started to wonder about the nature of the Commodore 64. I thought to myself, "First this platform hits me with games that have cursing kids and strip poker, and now it's presenting me one about a mass murderer? Is this a trend or something?"

Whatever the case, it was clear, once again, that the Commodore 64 didn't have the same boundaries as the Atari 2600 and arcade games, neither of which would dare to explore such questionable themes (well, as far as I knew). Apparently it had no boundaries!

So I was intrigued by Friday the 13th, yes, but I wasn't sure if I was ready to experience whatever it was that was going to display on the monitor after I typed up the loading command and pressed the Enter key.

The first thing I remember is how terribly startled I was by the game's title screen. I was discomposed by it not because I was disturbed by its unsettling depiction of a bloody hockey mask with a knife sticking in its left eyehole, no, but because of its accompanying sound sample: a blood-curdling scream that was about, oh, ten decibels higher than any sound I'd ever heard in a game. My ears simply weren't prepared to handle it. "A little volume control would be nice!" I thought to myself as I frantically searched the Commodore 64 hardware for a mute button. (I'm sure that my neighbors were also a bit concerned.)

During my first session, I wasn't sure what the game wanted me to do, so I spent the majority of my time exploring its top-down-style world and taking in the sights. After exiting the church (the game's starting area), I traveled in random directions and wound up wandering my away around a cemetery, a decayed forest, a barn, and one of those ridiculously oversized houses that you only see in video games (would even the largest family need twelve 50'-by-50' rooms?).

As I was traveling along, I noticed that there were weapons and tools lying around everywhere. And when I finally started interacting and experimenting with them, I learned that each of them fit into one of two categories: bludgeoning-type and throwing-type. The best part was that the game allowed me to freely swap one item for another; this guaranteed that I'd never wind up getting stuck with an item that I didn't like--an item like, say, the short knife, which I immediately (and correctly) suspected to be useless.

At first, though, I didn't have any real preference, so I was keen to indiscriminately test out each item and get a sense for how it operated. I tested the items, of course, on the other campers, who could be seen aimlessly wandering around the map and randomly entering and leaving buildings. I'd just walk up to one of them and then begin clubbing or chucking away. "It's safe to do this," I felt, "because I'm not the villain, and thus I'm probably not able to actually hurt them!"

I soon discovered, though, that this wasn't the case. You could actually kill a camper if you pummeled him or her enough, I learned. It was cool that you could do this, I thought, but I was afraid to continue doing so because my sense was that each camper death was only serving to bring me closer to a Game Over. So I ceased beating them over the head with every item I could find.

Well, for a while.

I became aware of the campers' true function when the title screen's blood-curdling scream repeated in-game and suddenly one of the HUD's representative character sprites was replaced with an image of a tombstone. Clearly they were prey, as they were in the movies. They were being hunted by Jason Voorhees and picked off one by one. The only problem was that I wasn't sure how he was doing it or where he was at the time.

Looking for clues, I turned my attention to the HUD's bottom-left portion, which contained a number of unique displays. Unfortunately, though, none of its displays made any sense to me, and because we didn't have a manual, I had no way of easily ascertaining what they were. I had no clue what the character's mugshot was supposed to signify or why it was growing more disheveled-looking over time; what the "barbell scale," as I identified it, was measuring; or what was being communicated by the white lines that were slowly being rendered in the open space beneath the score (later on, it became obvious to me that these lines were forming an image of Jason's mask, though I wasn't sure why they were doing that).

I was completely lost. So I did the only thing I could do in that situation: explore further and try to find answers elsewhere.

During my search, I became increasingly invested in Friday the 13th's world--in large part because of the power of its surprisingly striking music. Its soundtrack wasn't at all what I was expecting; it completely diverged from the source material. It didn't contain digital versions of the movies' quiet, eerie tunes or their iconic "chi, chi, chi - ha, ha, ha" (or whatever) sound effect, no; rather, it contained several deeply engrossing renditions of stock- and classical-music pieces and works that were taken from the public domain.

All of the tunes had an adagio-style tempo and baritone instrumentation, and thus they were able to generate a tense, uneasy atmosphere and evoke feelings of desperation and impending doom. Such qualities permeated every screen and created the sense that each of them was being haunted by some unseen force. There was a palpable air of apprehension, and it could be felt even in rooms whose music was somewhat cheery-sounding.

And this music was married to environments that were already spooky enough on their own (in fact, I'd placed all of them among the spookiest and eeriest I'd ever traversed). Each was darkly hued and gloomy in tone and able to generate a uniquely depressive atmosphere.

So yeah--this was a pretty unnerving game.

But its soundtrack was by far its best aspect. It featured amazing renditions of J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (from The Phantom of the Opera), Beethoven's Marcia Funebre: Adagio assai, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, Bridal Chorus, and Teddy Bear's Picnic. Though, my personal favorite was its rendition of Bach's Sleepers Awake, which was all at once powerfully enchanting, melancholic, and creepy. It was an emotionally rich piece, and any time it'd play, I'd feel compelled to stop and listen to it and examine all of the strong feelings it was evoking and figure out why it was evoking said feelings. It did more than any other, I felt, to define the game's spirit. I loved it. Hell--sometimes I'd load up Friday the 13th just to listen to it!

Normally Friday the 13th would shuffle its tunes during the course of gameplay, but there were specific instances in which an associated, appropriate tune would suddenly trigger. If you were hanging around the barn, for instance, it was likely that Old MacDonald would soon start to play. And this mechanic was ideal to me because it allowed me on-demand access to another of my favorite tunes: Teddy Bear's Picnic, which would play when you were in the woods. It was a peppy little piece that always provided me a boost. Whenever I was feeling strained or distressed, I'd head over to the woods and listen to this tune, and invariably its cheerful energy would put me at ease and help me to feel more optimistic about my chances.

But sometimes a normal tune would suddenly get cut off by and surrender to a concerningly dire-sounding piece. This ominous shift would dampen my mood because I interpreted as a sign that Jason was in the process of killing one of my fellow campers. In those moments, I'd be overcome by a feeling of instability, and my anxiety-level would raise significantly. I'd know that the world's quiet and undisturbed nature was now a distracting illusion and that something terrible was happening somewhere, silently. And then I'd get stressed because I wouldn't know where to look first, and I'd be aware that the longer I dawdled, the more time Jason would have to finish the job and then flee the scene. So I'd move quickly and desperately.

No other game could play with my emotions that way.

In my first session, Jason was able to kill off most of the campers, and I only located him by chance. I crossed paths with him randomly as he was stalking one of the remaining campers. And I was really perplexed because the character in question didn't look anything like Jason. His was one of the most unfaithful portrayals I'd ever seen. He had no hockey mask, he was dressed in all black, and he was sporting a healthy-looking pompadour. These physical qualities made him look less like a demonic killer and more like the Fonz. Really, I was half-expecting him to conjure in Danny Zuko and the T-Birds and perform an 8-bit rendition of Grease Lightning (which honestly wouldn't have sounded too out of place in a game whose soundtrack was so weirdly eclectic).

Though, fun time quickly ended when Jason finished striking down one of my buddies and then turned his attention to me.

At first, I tried fighting him with the powerful-looking orange axe because I suspected that bludgeoning-type weapons were far stronger than throwing-type weapons and would allow me to get the job done quick. But it didn't work out like I thought it would. Jason wouldn't go down no matter how much I beat on him.

Also, even though his machete (which looked more like a steel club) was comparably shorter in length, it somehow had more range than the axe (and all other bludgeoning-type weapons, for that matter), so there was no way for me to strike while maintaining a safe distance; I was always in counterattack range. And trying to exchange shots with him was, I learned, a bad idea because he had more health than I did. In fact, every strategy that entailed getting close to him proved to be too dangerous.

So I decided to stick to throwing-type weapons (mainly the spear and the short axe). These weapons, conversely, were capable of traveling an entire screen's length, and thus they allowed for you to attack Jason out from a much safer distances. They inflicted a lot less damage than bludgeoning-type weapons, sure, but their enabling you to take Jason out from far across the screen more than compensated for their lack of strength. Really, any run played with a throwing-type weapon was practically "easy mode."

One game element that originally escaped me was Jason's mimicking ability. At any time, he could take the form of any of the existing campers and inconspicuously move about the world. This is how we was able to kill most of the other campers undetected. I didn't discover that he had this ability until I assaulted a random camper (just for fun) and observed that the strike caused him or her to change in form, which, obviously, was a signifier that the camper in question was actually Jason in disguise. At the least, this discovery gave me the perfect justification to continue smacking other campers over the head!

(Right about now, you're probably reassessing the situation and thinking that maybe it wasn't Jason who was the game's biggest villain. And, really, I can't blame you for doing that.)

Friday the 13th's world was comprised of a mere 40 screens, yet still it seemed enormously large to me. I enjoyed exploring it, examining its spooky environments, and drinking in its haunting atmosphere. As I did with other Commodore 64 worlds, I saw it as a playground in which I could create my own rules and have fun in any way I desired.

The game's actual goal was to continue slaying Jason with successive campers and complete five cycles, but that was never a priority for me. I mean, I'd take Jason out eventually, yeah, but in the meantime, I'd do whatever I wanted to do. I'd wander around and have some fun with the game's mechanics and funny glitches.

I had the most fun with the "resurrection glitch," which I discovered accidentally. I learned, while messing around, that you could bring dead campers back to life by standing over their corpses and tossing any throwing-type weapon. Doing this was akin to applying the use of a defibrillator. And it'd always get a different result: Sometimes a camper would rise up but then promptly fall dead again (signifying that he or she was a lost cause). Other times, he or she would spring back to life but then simply stand there and remain in a state of suspended animation (the good news, though, was that you could kill a nonfunctioning camper and then resurrect him or her and potentially get a better result!). And if you were lucky, the camper would fully resurrect and thus resume functioning normally. I engaged in such activity not just because it was fun but also because it was an effective way to stop Jason from winning.

Otherwise, I'd create my own goals. I'd, say, try to hoard all of the game's weapons into the church, house or barn and do so within a certain amount of time (usually before Jason could claim his first victim). Or I'd attempt to kill off all of the other campers before Jason had the chance to!

What?

It's only recently that I learned about the inventory displays' actual functions: The mugshot is a "fear meter" that builds up over time, and if it hits its limit--if the character's mugshot becomes fully frazzled--then death will occur (I somehow never experienced this type of death). The barbell (as I accurately identified it) represents your health; the lower it is on the rack, the more injured you are. And the mask-rendering display is a timer; if you allow it enough time to fully render the mask, you'll die; though, the game, for some reason, takes an ungodly amount of time to render the mask, so it's unlikely that any player will ever come close to losing via time-limit expiration (I never did, and I'd sometimes spend upwards of a half an hour roaming around the game's world).

Honestly, I'm happy that I didn't know about any of this back in the day. I liked that HUD's displays were cryptic in nature. Their unclear messaging helped the game to feel so much more mysterious; they gave me the sense that Friday the 13th's world contained other types of occupants--unseen forces who were operating all around me in silence.

It wasn't unusual that I was ill-informed about the game's mechanics, no. Most of the time, I didn't understand half of the things that were going on in my favorite Commodore 64 games. My being oblivious to their primary systems and mechanics was a standard aspect of my relationship with them. And, really, I wouldn't have had it any other way!

And even though Friday the 13th's world was a mere 40 screens in size, it wasn't always easy to navigate. Something about how it was designed made it hard for me to memorize its layout. No matter how many times I traversed it, I could never reliably locate any specific screen, and I'd usually wind up looping around the same set of spooky woods over and over again. The game had a way of making me feel as though I was hopelessly lost and probably miles away from the target, and this was one of the qualities that made its world feel much bigger than it actually was.

Though, I didn't mind traversing the same ground over and over again, no. I liked doing it. I liked having yet another opportunity to engage in one of my favorite activities: exploring Friday the 13th's haunted world and taking in the wonderfully eerie sights, sounds, music and atmosphere of a game that had no right to be as compelling as it was.

My only regret is that I wasn't able to stop Jason from killing off so many of my wonderful friends.

Damn you, Jason. :::Lloyd Bridges voice::: That was my job!