Just when I thought that I was done blabbering on and on about how my younger self perceived all of these Commodore 64 games to be so curiously strange and weird, certain images suddenly popped into my head. They were of a game that epitomized the platform's character. They were of a game that was so eagerly embracing of the platform's divergent values that it couldn't help but proudly advertise its surreality.
The game in question was titled "Toy Bizarre."
The first time I saw that title listed on the disk label, I didn't know what to think of it. It struck me as a completely random word-pairing, and I had no guesses as to the type of game it was describing. I wasn't sure if it was implying that toys were "bizarre" or if it was speaking of some obscure child-age mental condition. "In what way could these two words possibly be connected?" I wondered.
Still, "Toy Bizarre" was an strangely intriguing title, and I wanted to know what it meant. So I popped the disk into the disk drive just for the purpose of getting an idea of what the game was about.
And, well, Toy Bizarre turned out to be yet another Mario Bros.-inspired arcade-like platformer. It was a colorful action game whose characters looked like they came out of a Snorks cartoon.
To me, that's what Toy Bizarre was: a game whose brightly colored environments and peppy-looking characters were a facade--a sweet coating that was designed to conceal the sadness that quietly permeated the game's world. The game's curiously silent atmosphere was the indicator. The only images it brought to mind were those of remote, desolate settings whose air and ambiance had wistful, melancholic qualities to them.
The activity that was occurring on its busy title screen also answered the questions I had in regard to its oddly worded title: This game was about toys, and it was bizarre! It was as simple as that. The title wasn't Hulk-speak or some type of weird abstraction, no. It was just a really simplistic descriptor (and also a linguistic nightmare).
Though, this revelation didn't tell me anything about the game's plot, nor did any of the scenes in following. Whatever the game's story was, it was completely lost on me as I played through the first few stages ("nights," as the game termed them). And the game was never interested in providing me any hint as to what the context was. (Also, we didn't have a manual, so I couldn't look up the story.)
So in that situation, there was only one thing I could do: turn on my imagination and come up with my own interpretation of events. And what I imagined was that Toy Bizarre was a game about a maintenance man who was tasked with working weeknights at a toy factory and keeping the place in order.
The game's other aspects helped me to further develop my interpretation and provide it more substance. The most instructive of them was the strangely melancholic stage-opening jingle (my favorite game element), which conveyed to me that the game's events were occurring late at night, at a time when the sky was filled with nothing but stars, and that the protagonist was toiling away at his thankless job during the lonely a.m. hours when everyone else was at home in their beds. The worker, I was inspired to imagine, was the lone occupant of a factory that was placed an isolated, middle-of-nowhere location, and his only company were the toys that were being produced in an endless number. And he was sadly insulated from the sweet chorus of cricket chips that was resounding throughout the shrouded factory exterior's every space.
His only problem, my imagination told me, was that these particular toys were sentient and always managing to break free from their containment and unintentionally cause their keeper further aggravation. They were friendly but compulsive. Within their collective, though, was a bad apple: a self-aware wind-up toy--a human-sized rascal that had every intention of mischievously meddling in the worker's operations.
This was the scenario that I put together in my head as I played through Toy Bizarre. It was the conception that I formed and developed as I examined the game's visuals, listened to its music, and soaked in its atmosphere. Toy Bizarre's world, as I imagined it, was a quiet, seemingly ordinary place in which exciting and wonderful things were happening within the most isolated spaces and in the most unexpected locations. And I loved to think about those spaces and wonder about the types of activities that would likely occur within them. I'd do that when I was playing the game and also when I was hanging out in my den and watching old sitcoms or working on one of my art projects.
Toy Bizarre stirred my imagination in ways that other games simply couldn't. It inspired me to think and wonder in ways I hadn't before. And it was the most unusually evocative game I'd ever played. I mean, the idea of stage-opening jingle being wistful and melancholic--when up to that point, stage-opening jingles were never anything but upbeat and energizing--was just, well, bizarre, and that's why I loved it. I loved the jingle and the powerful story that it told.
And it turns out that my interpretation of the game's story is pretty close to its actual story. According to the manual (which, thanks to the Internet, I'm now able to read), the protagonist is indeed a factory worker who's in over his head, and, and it sounds as though he's being forced to maintain the factory by sadists who have no plans of ever explaining to him what the point is. It's a rather vague description, but I'm fine with that because it allows for some interpretation and doesn't destroy the wondrous conceptions that I've long been carrying in my head; it allows the vivid mental images that I so eagerly formed and developed as a child to retain their validity. (I can't say the same for some other Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 manual descriptions, which, conversely, obliterated my conceptions and mental images and thus permanently scarred me. I'm lookin' at you, Megamania and Karateka manuals!)
The game, itself, is a bit more complicated Mario Bros., but still it's pretty accessible. The goal in each stage is to clear the room of unruly toys, and you can do this by engaging in two processes: acting quickly to pop the balloons from which they spawn; and stunning them when they're resting atop compressed piston platforms by jumping onto corresponding elevated piston platforms, and then physically bumping them off the screen while they're in a stunned state. You can make your job easier by switching off four of the six valves that control the stage's balloon-producing mechanisms and limiting the amount of onscreen activity--rigging it to where you only have to worry about dealing with two toys at a time rather than four or more.
Naturally, the game makes your job more difficult by throwing in a wild card: persistent human-sized wind-up toys (twins who are named "Merton" and "Hefty Hilda") who like to interfere in your operations. What they like to do is hop along the stage and compress elevated piston switches and attempt to launch you off of the screen; also, they can kill you by bumping into you (they're basically more-dangerous versions of Wrecking Crew's Spike). Likewise, though, you can send either of them flying off of the screen by uncompressing a compressed switch right as he or she is passing over it; the launched foe will then remain offscreen for about 20-30 seconds.
You can otherwise help your own cause by grabbing "Coffee Break" icons, which tend to appear when the screen is filled with enemies. This item temporarily halts the enemies' movement and grants you invincibility, and thus it gives you the opportunity you need to get things under control.
And like Mario Bros. and Wrecking Crew, Toy Bizarre has interstitial bonus stages--"Safety Checks," as they're called. If you want to pass the safety check and earn bonus points, you have to switch off all of the room's valves and do so while avoiding the meddlesome wind-up toys, whose numbers increase in each successive bonus stage. And some of the later bonus stages have invisible platforms, which serves to further complicate matters and cause confusion (I couldn't stand when 2600 games introduced these types of stages, and I certainly didn't like to see them in Commodore 64 games, either; I regarded "invisible platforms" as a poor level-design tactic and a cheap way to increase difficulty).
There was one thing about the bonus stages that stood out to me as really odd: Whether you succeeded or failed, the same sad, depressing tune would play! I interpreted this to be a reflection of the worker's sense of hopelessness--of his fear that he might not be able to escape from this thankless daily grind even if he performs really well.
To me, that's what Toy Bizarre was: a game whose brightly colored environments and peppy-looking characters were a facade--a sweet coating that was designed to conceal the sadness that quietly permeated the game's world. The game's curiously silent atmosphere was the indicator. The only images it brought to mind were those of remote, desolate settings whose air and ambiance had wistful, melancholic qualities to them.
Whenever I was playing Toy Bizarre, I'd sense that sadness, and I'd feel inspired to think and wonder about the game's world and try to figure out what, exactly, was causing it to have such a wistful, melancholic atmosphere.
And because Toy Bizarre inspired me to think and wonder in that way, it occupies a unique space in my memory. Most games couldn't inspire me to think that deeply about their worlds. They just didn't have that kind of power.
I didn't play Toy Bizarre very often because I had some problems with it. I found its controls to be stiff and inconsistent, and it quickly grew overwhelmingly different. Though, still, it continued to be one of my favorites because of how much I loved its unique atmospheric qualities. Sometimes I'd load it up just to listen to its highly evocative tunes, which were always great accompaniment in those times when I was feeling contemplative or reflective and needed something to stir my emotions.
These days, I refrain from returning to Toy Bizarre because I sense that I won't enjoy playing it--that I'll be frustrated by its controls and abandon it quickly. Yet still, I don't have any negative feelings for it. I still consider it to be a Commodore 64 favorite. It still resonates with me just as strongly as it did with my younger self. And that won't ever change.
And as I was putting this piece together, I discovered even more evidence of my past obliviousness: Somehow, I never noticed that the game's title screen contained an Activision logo! That company meant a lot to me back then; it was the creator of most of my 2600 favorites (Kaboom, Pitfall, Megamania, Keystone Capers, etc.). It would have been nice to have known that it was behind this game, too (and a couple of my other Commodore 64 favorites).
To be more specific: Toy Bizarre was created by Mark Turmell, who was the brains behind Fast Eddie (which is another of my 2600 favorites and one that has a clear spiritual connection to Toy Bizarre) and legendary arcade titles Smash TV and NBA Jam! And I'd have known that had I been paying any attention.
Though, as I reflect back on the medium as it once was, I'm reminded of how much I miss the days when games would leave me to my own devices and invite me to imagine. The days when they would give me all of the room I needed to think about their music, visuals and atmospheric qualities and figure out what they were trying to tell me. It was that spirit that made the world of games seem so endlessly vast and wondrous. And it was what made strange and curious little games like Toy Bizarre all the more memorable.
Is there anything else to say? Have I rambled on long enough? Do I need to tell you anything more about my Commodore 64 history? I don't know. I've gotta think about it for a while.
Hold on--let me load up Toy Bizarre.
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