Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #26

Spy Hunter

If you take a look at any list of gaming's all-time classics, you'll notice an obvious trend: A great many of the entrants, you'll observe, are closely associated with specific pieces of hardware. They're intrinsically linked to the platforms that birthed them. Invariably they highlight the strengths of and define said platforms.

Pac-Man, for instance, is and forever will be recognized as a pure-blood arcade game, and it'll continue to serve as one of the best examples of what arcade gaming is all about. Super Mario Bros. is synonymous with the NES and perfectly describes what the console was in 1985 and where it was headed. The first three episodes of the Commander Keen series are the very picture of the early-90s DOS scene. Tetris started out as a computer game (on the IBM PC), but for the majority of its life, it's been most strongly associated with the Game Boy, and thus it has served as the prime of example of what a "portable game" is. Sonic the Hedgehog is the Sega Genesis.

Most classic games, you'll find, are of this type.

But as you continue to examine the list, you inevitably start to come across some games that, in curious contrast, don't at all fit into that category. You come across the rare crossover hits--games like Ultima, Elevator Action, Kung-Fu Master, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns and Karateka, all of which were, conversely, omnipresent. They were ported all over the place and managed to find success on multiple platforms. And they were able to do that because their titles, alone, were the draw.

If a game was said to be making waves, people would seek it out. They'd get a hold of it any way that they could and play it on any platform that was available to them.

That was the nature of the multi-platform classic.

And one of the most ubiquitous of their kind was Spy Hunter, which I'm focusing on today. It was one of the first multi-platform classics I'd ever discovered.

Spy Hunter was a game that everyone knew about and had experienced in some form. A lot of kids I knew played it on a daily basis in arcades. Others regularly played it at home on a number of different computers. And there were even a few poor saps who played it on the Atari 2600 and inexplicably swore by that version.

In those days, I was playing my brother's Commodore 64 version of Spy Hunter. That was the one I knew best. It was my preferred version of the game.

To be honest, though: When I say that I "played Spy Hunter," I'm providing a very loose interpretation of what I actually did. If I want to be accurate, I have to say that I "played Spy Hunter" in the same way that Ed Wood and Coleman Francis "directed movies."

Basically I had no idea what I was doing.

In all those years, the only thing that I was certain about was my fondness for the game's main theme, which had an amazingly invigorating energy to it. It only played until you suffered your first death (which was likely to occur within 20-30 seconds), but in that time, it made you feel as though you were a superhero on wheels. It was the most rousing theme in all of gaming.

I knew that it wasn't an original theme because I'd heard it elsewhere. The problem was that I just couldn't remember where I'd heard it. "Isn't it one of those James Bond tunes?" I'd usually think.

I could never put my finger on it.

Really, though, I didn't care that Spy Hunter's creators had ripped off the tune in question, no. I approved of it. I did so because I thought it was a great match for the game. It was the perfect example of "spy music." It told you everything you needed to know about the game's story. It conveyed to you that the hero was a calm, cool secret agent who was on a mission to take out some terrorists and save the world.

I didn't even need to read the manual to find out what the story was (and I couldn't because we didn't have the manual). The game's sterling musical theme, alone, did the job of perfectly explaining it to me.

That theme, for me, is the game's best, most-enduring aspect, and it's always the first thing I think about whenever I see the name "Spy Hunter." (Likewise, I think about Spy Hunter whenever I hear the Peter Gunn theme, which is what the game actually borrowed.)

But otherwise, Spy Hunter was an unsolvable puzzle for me, and I never had a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing!

I mean, I understood what an arcade-style driving game was, and I knew that one of the core elements of such a game entailed accumulating points by shooting other cars and otherwise bumping them off of the road, but that knowledge didn't help me here. Whenever I was playing Spy Hunter, I had no idea what the ultimate goal was or what my choices were dictating. I didn't know if my choosing one route over another was causing me to miss out on some greater experience.

The problem was that I couldn't stay alive long enough to find out the answers. And what bothered me the most was that there was, seemingly, no rhyme or reason to the lives systems. It seemed completely arbitrary. Sometimes the game would allow me to crash multiple times without consequence, and other times, it would hand me a Game Over after a single crash--even if it was the case that I'd only crashed two or three times previously (rather than the usual 15-20 times).

I just didn't get it. (I learned later on that the game provided you a 2-3 minute grace period at the start.)

If I drove too quickly, I'd crash within seconds; I'd be sent flying off of the road after making the lightest of contact with another car, or I'd violently collide with a tree the moment the roadway began to narrow. And if I drove two slowly, the white-striped blue cars (which I identified as "rubber bouncy cars") would come up from behind and then proceed to hyperactively bump into me and ultimately bounce me off of the road, or the cars with the buzz-saw hubcaps (the "berserk forky dudes," as I called them) would appear and immediately take me out with highly precise ramming attacks.

I'd successfully board a specially labeled red truck (if I didn't accidentally shoot it beforehand) and earn myself an oil- or smoke-spewing ability, but then, invariably, I'd lose control of my vehicle as I was activating my new attack and consequently veer off the road, to my death.

No matter what I'd do, I'd crash. I'd crash, and then I'd crash, and then I'd crash again.

If, somehow, the goal in Spy Hunter was to find new and creative ways to crash your vehicle and die as often as possible, then surely I was the champ.

That's how it always was with Spy Hunter. No matter which version of the game I was playing, I'd always have that exact same experience.

I could reliably reach the first water section, and on a good day, I could make it as far as the first desert segment, but that was about it. I could never get any farther.

And I haven't made a single bit of progress since those early days.

In the years that followed, I started gravitating more toward the NES version of Spy Hunter, and I did so for a really weird reason: It allowed me to extract a unique form of entertainment from Spy Hunter's action. It gave me the power to spark what I liked to call "The Red Truck Conga Line," which was an event that could be triggered only during the opening 60-90 seconds--during the grace period, when lives were unlimited.

So when you died in Spy Hunter, you returned to action via a red truck, which drove in from the screen's bottom, parked on the road's right side, dropped off your next car, and then departed. If you died immediately thereafter, you wouldn't be dropped off by the same truck. Rather, another red truck would arrive and perform the action, and it'd do so even when the original red truck was still onscreen.

I took note of that.

And once I realized that you could prompt red-truck appearances almost perpetually, I immediately started to look for ways to mischievously abuse the game's respawn system. That's how The Red Truck Conga Line was born.

What I'd do was drive a screen's-length ahead of the truck that dropped me off and then proceed to purposely crash. This would cause a second red truck to drive in and do so in close proximity to the original truck. Then I'd repeat the process and thus prompt the arrival of a third truck, then a fourth, then a fifth, and so on. And if I was able to properly execute my movement-manipulation tactics and establish the correct sequencing, I'd get what I desired: an endless conga line of red trucks!

At that point, the conga line would sustain itself. The red trucks would be so closely packed together that a particular sequence would be forced to repeat: After my car was released by a red truck, it would instantly be bumped off the road by the next truck in line, and this would necessitate an appearance by yet another red truck! And thus a never-ending loop would be formed!

And I didn't even have to participate in the action! I could just put the controller down and enjoy the show!

That's how I chose to spend my time, yes.

I mean, what else could I do? I liked playing Spy Hunter, but I just wasn't any good at it. I knew that I was never going to find out what the game's second half contained, and I felt safe in assuming that I wouldn't survive long even if I somehow managed to make it that far. "I'd probably burn through all of my lives before I could advance three screens," I thought.

So I decided that it was better for me to not even try to advance and instead have fun with the game in a different way--in my own unique way!

That's what Spy Hunter was to me: a classic game that I was able to enjoy in my own way. I turned its world into a sandbox and freely shaped it. I made my own rules. I invented my own style of play. And that's where the fun derived.

Spy Hunter was, in my interpretation, a game that was all about intentionally crashing into trees and consequently forcing red trucks to form endless conga lines and repeatedly send the a hapless hero crashing to his death.

And by God, I was the best at it.