garote | Top ten most influential: Games 3

As a writing exercise, I've chosen the ten books, albums, movies, and games that were most important in defining me as a person, and challenged myself to explain why.

Some of these set my artistic tone or left huge imprints on my personality, others changed the course of my life or career. With each item I can say, "if not for this, I would be someone else right now." But why? It's a surprisingly hard question to answer. A strong feeling would compel me to put something on the list, and then I'd realize I had no clue how to unpack that feeling.

The last three:

(Unlike other sections that are chronological, the games are listed in increasing level of influence, from least to most.)

3. (Age 15) Nethack

The name Nethack isn't very accurate, especially nowadays. It creates a vision of hackers doing kung-fu in The Matrix. WHAA-CHAAAH!!! The 'hack' part of Nethack is actually short for hack'n'slash, like what you would do to a bunch of monsters with a sword, and the 'net' part just means that you can play it over a network, sitting in front of one computer while the internals of the game are percolating away on another one. It's not even multi-player. In fact, it's astoundingly crude-looking, and would probably not even qualify as a game to most people. At first glance it sure doesn't look like one; it looks more like what a typewriter would see if it had eyes and someone stuffed it inside a termite mound.

But in the 80's, it was legendary. And though it's not much to look at, it's deep and sophisticated, and wickedly old-school hard. You will die a hundred times before you even understand half of what's going on.

I wrote an epic, multi-part essay about my adventure finishing the game - or at least, beating it one time. It was the only way I could convince myself to stop playing it. The central idea of the essay is that Nethack is the ultimate game for stimulating the imagination. Nethack is also appealing to me on a personal level.

I grew up in a house surrounded by redwoods. The space between the trees was dark, quiet, and eerie. I used to go walking around there at night, and it was like entering an enormous cavern. If you've ever been camping in the redwoods you've had a taste of this. Get up and walk away from the campfire, well away from any other people, away from the voices, and shut off your lantern. You are instantly lost in a silent, vaulted space like a cathedral. The sky is erased by branches. The heaps of fallen redwood spines devour all sound. Now your imagination starts to fill in the vacuum. Wraiths come drifting silently around the tree trunks. Wolves and huge wildcats come padding towards you. Hungry demons, deranged undead things, reach long arms out to touch the back of your neck...

Yes, that's the deep woods. It creates an instinctive reaction. And it translates easily to the setting of Nethack, with its deep caverns and underground rooms, where you do not climb a mountain or drive through a city or cross a sunny landscape to get to the next level ... you go down. Down, into the dark, and down some more, and the creatures you meet get a bit more unnatural and vicious with every staircase, until eventually you're fighting eldritch monsters and confused beasts from different mythologies, and after that, the denizens of hell. With all kinds of one-off surprises on the way.

So it was, that the deep caverns of the redwoods I grew up in and the deep dungeons of Nethack got cross-wired in my imagination, and walking the terrain of one felt like walking in the other. Once in high school I got the bright idea to combine the two directly: I ran an extension cord and a very long phone cable out of the house and into a tent I set up on the edge of the forest, and connected an old WYSE-50 greenscreen terminal and a modem. Then I spent the whole evening and night in the tent, dialed in to a local BBS, playing Nethack inside my real-world Nethack of the redwoods. It was an act totally unique to Santa-Cruz-area 1980's computer geek and fantasy nerd culture, and it's long gone now, but it's so throughly planted in my psyche that it might as well be in my genes.

Some distance down, the dungeons of Nethack branch off into the Mines of Moria and you can go tooling around in there. I had quite a thrill when Peter Jackson showed us that place on a movie screen years later -- it was like seeing old vacation photos. I wanted to prod the fellow next to me and say "I've been there!!"

Anyway, I blather on for pages and pages about Nethack in the essay I mentioned, so if you're geeky enough to want more, check it out.

2. (Age 14) Gauntlet II

This silly little arcade game is threaded deep into my subconscious mind. After almost 30 years I still have dreams about it.

You choose one of four characters. Then you get a top-down view of a twisty maze, and your character appears in the maze with a puff of smoke and is immediately beset by monsters. At the same time, a timer appears on the right side of the screen, and counts slowly down to zero. When it hits zero, you die. The only way to delay your death is to go charging through the maze and find helpful items. If you have friends standing around, they can choose a character and grab a joystick, and they get plopped down into the maze right alongside you.

The game has a mean streak. When your timer drops below 200, a snide voice announces your imminent death. "Green elf ... is about to die!" it says, or "Blue warrior ... your life force is running out!" or perhaps most famously, "Wizard needs food ... badly!" That one became a catchphrase for a while and is still drifting around in pop culture.

If you manage to stave off death and finish the maze, you get about four seconds to catch your breath. Then you're dropped instantly into another maze just as twisty as the last one. More traps, more doors, more dead ends, and more monsters, crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, itching to beat you down. That's Gauntlet II. Round after round of twisty mazes, with no end, until you die.

Also, you're punished for having a high score: The more treasure you pick up, the faster the monsters get, so if you fight through the mazes without taking any loot you can see a whole lot more of the game. Just like many things in life, there's a way you can play to maximize your score, and a way you can play to maximize your fun. The difference is even more obvious with two or more players on the board. You'll trip over each other, fight over food, shoot each other by accident (or maybe on purpose)... You're guaranteed to die faster with friends. But you're guaranteed to have a blast before you do.

I played this game for hours and hours as a teenager, usually alone, in the tiny beleaguered arcade that opened for a while in my home town. The sounds and visuals are a part of me, but even deeper than those, the feeling of fighting through an endless maze is carved into my mind like the necropolis under a cathedral.

Life is an endless series of rounds. Some go your way, some don't. Either way the rounds continue, and the only thing you can count on - no matter what - is that eventually you will die in the maze. In the meantime, you have choices to make that will shape the next round. Those choices are your treasure. They are everything.

1. (Age 16) Super Merryo Trolls

Less than ten people on Earth have ever played this game -- because it was a little project that I took on with two of my friends in high school, and we never finished it.

Yes, we were geeky enough that we thought it would be fun to code up a computer game together. And it was! We had a shared base of source code. We wrote special tools to manage art and music, and build levels. We had endless discussions, wrote each other documentation, made checklists, delegated tasks. We tried to cram every deranged juvenile idea we could into the design.

This was a time before code repositories and version control, before "open source" had a community, before computing devices came with a software development kit full of tutorials and searchable help and frameworks. Our "shared base of source code" was really a heap of files that we passed around on floppy disks. Our design documents were scribbles in graph-paper notebooks. Yet somehow, the effort found a kind of discipline, and we got pretty far along before graduation and college split us apart.

In the beginning, the code I wrote was a mess of repetitions and non-sequitur variable names. My idea of helpful commentary was stuff like "This part sucks" and "this is the bit I was talking about yesterday". Sometimes I would paste in jokes and ASCII art. My friends complained bitterly when they had to work on it, and slowly I got better. The improvement boosted my confidence. When the ideas I had actually worked out, I got my first taste of that highly addictive feeling of being an innovator -- that feeling people spend their lives chasing in the software industry. The idea that I could have fun with friends solving puzzles, and be productive at the same time, set me up for a programming career. Having fun with it -- that was the key!

The game was an excellent conversation starter at job interviews, and probably helped land me my first real programming job. Much later, a dozen years after we stopped working on it, I wrote a long essay about the experience, and that essay gave a serious boost to my career. I went in for a job interview and the people across the table had already heard of me through the essay! (I have my friend to thank for that actually - he passed the link around before I applied for the job.)

Super Merryo Trolls was never finished, but the experience of building it puts it right at the top of this list. It's hard to imagine a game being any more influential. It means as much to me as those childhood pick-up basketball games mean to a top member of the NBA. It made me.