Shades of Resonance: Emotional Scars - Memory Log #30

Raiders of the Lost Ark

So let me start by giving you some context: I have, for almost all of my life, been a huge fan of the Indiana Jones series of movies. I consider it to be my favorite film franchise. I regard each of Spielberg and Lucas' swashbuckling, serial-style adventures (well, each of the first three adventures, at least) as one of the best action movies ever made. And, in what is of course the norm for me, I have a completely weird history with the property in question.

It all began in May of 1984.

One day, late in that month, my father took me to the theater to see the latest big release. It was an adventure movie that had been heavily advertised in the prior weeks and months. At the time, I didn't know much about it. I was familiar only with its title character, who was apparently an adventurer of some renown.

The movie was appealing to me because it contained everything I loved about the adventure genre (in games, books and movies). It had it all: the wondrously authentic replication of the world as it existed in earlier times, an adventurous search for mysterious artifacts, mystical and supernatural undertones, and a bristly, capable hero who was inspirational because he could solve the great mystery and best the bad guys with both his brain and his brawn. It took all of those elements and combined them together in a spectacular way, and the result of its effort was one of the most fun, captivating movies I'd ever seen. It instantly became one of my all-time-favorites. I loved it.

The movie in question was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and it was memorable to me not only because it amazed and inspired me but also because it served as my formal introduction to the Indiana Jones series, which I came to adore.

Up until that point, I was, as I said, only vaguely familiar with the property. I'd known about it since I was four years old, but I never delved into it until that day. Because that's how it was for me: I was always late for the party. I was always largely oblivious to what was going on in the pop-culture space.

Now, you would think, dear reader, that Temple of Doom's having impacted my life in such a profound way would have motivated me to adapt a bit. You'd think that it would stirred me to break out from my bubble and seek out the series' progenitor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and engage in an effort to discover the series' roots and thus gain a greater appreciation for its ideas, themes and motifs and learn about the ways in which they influenced Temple of Doom's creation. But if you did that, you'd be seriously overestimating me. Those simply aren't the kinds of things I would have ever done at that point in my life.

Rather, I didn't take the time to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark all of the way through until sometime in the early 90s--long after I'd seen both Temple of Doom and Last Crusade. (And I remember thinking that it was a regretfully idiotic decision for me to wait that long considering that there was never any obstacle to my viewing it. It was right there, in our movie cabinet. It'd been there since the mid-80s!)

Before then, I had little knowledge of Raiders' content and subject-matter. What I knew about the movie--or, rather, what I thought I knew about the movie--was limited to what I'd seen and heard in the Atari 2600 video-game adaptation, which I'd been playing since 1982.

So, really, I knew next to nothing about the movie.

Well, OK--that's not entirely true. There was one aspect of the movie that had become very familiar to me during that time-period: its theme song--John Williams' Raiders March. It was the game's title-screen theme.

That theme became burned into my memory not because it was a particularly memorable digital rendition of Raiders March but because it was pretty much all that my family and I heard from the game in the first couple of months!

For us, you see, Raiders was a different type of game. It didn't fit into any existing categories. It wasn't a sports game, a shoot-'em-up, an adventure game, a racing simulator, or a maze game, no. Rather, it represented something new--an emerging game type whose genre classification was best termed "entirely inexplicable electronic product."

Raiders was a standout in this new genre.

What made Raiders such a standout was its very first challenge: its title screen! Not a tricky jump, a reflex-testing enemy attack, or a brain-teasing puzzle, no. The friggin' title screen! We couldn't figure out how to get past it!

We got to know that title screen very well. In a short time, we became intimately familiar with its two most notable elements: its animation of Indiana Jones being lowered down onto a pedestal via a lift and its accompanying musical theme--the Raiders March. And we especially familiar with the latter because we heard it hundreds of times!

We just couldn't escape that title screen. Nothing we did would ever allow us to move us past it. Any action we'd take would invariably restart the title sequence, which would welcome and re-welcome us in an all-too-familiar way.

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-dooooo ♪

No matter what we'd do, the title sequence would reset, and the music would restart.

We'd press the joystick's action button.

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-doooo ♪

We'd press the action button while pushing the joystick in a specific direction.

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-doooo ♪

We'd toggle the console's Game Select switch back and forth, believing that we'd inevitably hit upon a combination that would allow us to continue.

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-doooo ♪

We'd mess with the Difficulty and TV Type switches and try arranging them in every possible configuration.

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-doooo ♪

Anything we'd do...

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-doooo ♪

It was only by accident, after several weeks and numerous failed attempts, that one of us happened to find the solution: To advance past the title screen, that person learned, you had to press the action button on the second controller!

"Now how were we supposed to know that we needed to do that?" we collectively wondered in that moment.

I mean, no other 2600 game had ever required us to do anything of the sort, so we had no way of knowing that a single-player game could recognize second-controller input. And thus it was our shared sense that he had just discovered the most unnecessarily confusing, stupidly arcane game mechanic ever.

Well, that was until we saw what was waiting for us beyond the title screen.

At the time, honestly, I wasn't really all that interested in playing Raiders. I didn't know or care about the movie on which it was based, and otherwise I was intimidated by its gameplay systems, which were arcane as hell. They made absolutely no sense to me.

So what I'd do, instead, was watch my brother, James, play the game. I'd park myself on his bed (in the early days, the 2600 was always in his room) and watch him struggle to solve the game's puzzles. As per usual, he made the situation worse for himself by throwing away the game's box and manual immediately after he removed the cartridge from the packaging. Consequently, he had no understanding of the game's systems or mechanics and put himself in a position in which had to intuit them. He had to learn via experimentation.

After a while, though, I finally mustered enough courage to try the game for myself. James helped me out by teaching me how to advance past the first two screens. He demonstrated for me that you could use the grenade item to blow open a hole in the starting screen's right wall and then proceed to access a new area that consisted of four rooms.

And, well, that was it. That was as far as he had gotten. It was as far as either of us would ever get (back then, at least).

Our problem was that we weren't sure what most of the game's visual elements were meant to represent. We were able to identify that the squiggly gray creature was a deadly snake and that the red-checkmark-looking item was Jones' whip, sure, but that was only because they had obvious form. They were recognizable. Little else was. Most of the other visual and environmental element were entirely indiscernible. So we rarely knew what we were looking at.

Take the room below the starting screen, for instance: It was supposed to be a "market," but I never saw it as anything close to that. Rather, I thought it was a "sports field" because it contained "scoring baskets" (which I labeled them after I noticed that one of them looked exactly like a basketball net) and two floating heads that were probably "referees." And all I could wonder was, "Is this Jones character a sports star on the side?"

The only thing I understood was that you could walk over the baskets and remove their contents and thus filly my inventory with a grenade, a gun, and a key, which were pretty much the last of the game's identifiable items.

In my alone time with the game, I pieced things together as best I could. The whip and the gun, I learned via a process of experimentation, were useful for poking small holes in the walls of the blue room's bottom-left compartment. When you'd do this, the walls of the room's opposite-side compartment would, strangely, sustain the same damage, and thus the compartment would become accessible.

Though, neither weapon could help me to repel the room's guardian--an amorphous red entity that I called "the Kryptonite" because it closely resembled Superman's twinkling Kryptonite enemies. Bullets and whip-strikes couldn't phase it, so my only option was to evade it.

If I made contact with the Kryptonite, I'd be sent back to the room's entry point--to the bottom-left compartment, whose walls would magically repair themselves in following. I'd be sent back to the entry point, also, if I made contact with any of the room's constructions, so I necessarily had to tread carefully and learn how to move with precision.

To the right of the blue room was a black room. It contained an item that appeared to be a pile of hay or perhaps a sideways Atari logo. When I'd touch it, I'd obtain a "basket" and otherwise trigger the appearance of one of four random items. Those items were, in my interpretation, a "camera," a "bridge," a "chicken," and what looked to be a "deformed baby." (Just what the hell is this movie about?" I might have wondered at the time.)

It was just too bade that I couldn't find use for a single one of them. I couldn't find use for the majority of the items, for that matter.

Most of the time, also, I was afraid to switch to a different item because doing so required specific second-controller input, and usually I'd forget what it was. You had to use the joystick to cycle through your inventory, but quite often, instead, I'd try to move left or right with the button, to which the "discard" input was mapped. So I kept accidentally throwing items away! And every time I'd do that, I'd have to start over and repeat the process of collecting chickens, baskets and one-eyed babies.

The only other accessible location was the yellow room that stood south of the sports field. Though, from what I could tell, it was nothing more than a trap room. Any time I'd enter into it, I'd instantly trigger a transitional scene in which Jones would helplessly drop down a large abyss that had a tree branch (a "stick holding a green basket," as I identified it) jutting out from its left side, and he'd land in a similarly designed green room.

And as soon as I'd regain control, I'd be rushed and double-teamed by an incapacitating fly swarm and an indistinct bipedal creature (the "black devil," as I called it), which would steal one of my items each time it touched me and eventually kill me.

There didn't seem to be any escape from this room. I fell into it hundreds of times over the years, and in each instance, I desperately and futilely attempted to find an exit point. There just didn't seem to be one. So eventually I came to conclusion that this room represented the game's "inescapable Hell" (which explained the existence of the black devil), and I decided that it was in my best interest to avoid going anywhere near it.

And, well, that was pretty much it. That was the limit of my early-80s Raiders experience. For the entirety of my young life, the aforementioned rooms and items represented all that I ever saw of the game. And they were, I was certain, all that the game contained. The only thing that I was missing, I thought, was an elusive endgame screen. "That screen surely exists," I kept telling myself, "and it has to be connected to one of these 7 rooms!"

And that was how I'd play Raiders: I'd make my usual rounds and collect the same set of unidentifiable, seemingly useless items, and then I'd spend the next ten to twenty minutes fruitlessly searching for the mythical "endgame screen." And in the end, I'd give up and move on to better games--games that actually made sense.

I'd return to Raiders every couple of months or so with the intention of finally unraveling its mysteries, but each time, predictably, I'd hit the same dead end and eventually give up. And about, oh, a half a decade later, when it became apparent to me that Raiders simply wasn't meant to be understood by mortal man, I gave up on the effort. I turned away from it and didn't look back.

I didn't look back, that is, until the mid-2000s, when the emulation scene was burgeoning. At that point in time, Internet video was also on the rise, and thus I was able to get the opportunity to watch a full play-through of Raiders and find out what, exactly, you were supposed to be doing.

I remember being amazed at how truly inexplicable the puzzle solutions were. They were far wackier than any of the theorized solutions that I dreamed up as a kid, and mine were usually along the lines of, "Maybe if I tie the whip to the chicken, I can fly over to the green basket and then safely hop down to the crevice on the left!"

So you can imagine how bad they are.

The solutions are so unfathomable, in fact, that my younger self wouldn't have been able to figure them out even if Atari had supplied him the era's smartest AI assistant and ten thousand lifetimes to work with. It still would have been a hopeless effort.

And in the mid-2000s, I knew that beating Raiders blind would still have been the same impossible mission. That's why I decided to follow a video walk-through. With its help, I was able to beat the game for the first time. I was able to meet my goal of seeing the game in its entirety and finally finishing a quest that began 20 years earlier. It was all about gaining a sense of closure.

The only thing that bothered me was the game's ending scene. To my great displeasure, it was a direct duplicate of the game's intro: Indiana Jones is lowered down on a lift. "You can't do that!" I said as I pointed at the monitor and scowled. "You can't use an intro as an ending! That's just lazy and stupid!"

So, really, my quest concluded the same way that it had began: with me watching Indy descend via a lift as the Raiders March played. In that moment, it was as if I had accomplished nothing and had been consequently time-warped back to 1982--to my brother's room in that house on 83rd Street--and placed into what I feared was a never-ending loop.

Thankfully, though, that wasn't the case. It was just my imagination running away with me. I actually did beat the game, and obviously I remained in the present time-period. I know that because I'm here, today, talking to you guys and writing about my experiences with Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600!

R-right?

[clicks "Publish"]

♪ Doo - doo - doo - doo - DOOOOOOOOOOOOO - doo-doo-doooo ♪

Oh dear.