Back in the early ‘80s, Eddie Murphy did a brilliant bit of stand-up, based around his rather blunt theory on female abstinence.
Women, he claimed, will happily withhold certain ‘favours’ from their men, in order to maintain an ongoing sense of loyalty, interest and commitment. Said favours are bestowed only when the men have worked themselves up into such a frenzy of anticipation that they’ve lost all sense of value and perspective... at which point the cage swings shut (he had a name for this theory, which I won’t go into here – suffice to say, it’s a euphemistic variation on the Venus Flytrap).
Basically, he says, it’s like giving a starving man a cracker. “GODDAMN!!” he shouts. “THAT’S THE BEST DAMN CRACKER I EVER HAD IN MY LIFE!! THAT WEREN’T NO REGULAR CRACKER, WAS IT? WHAT WAS THAT, A SALTINE? A RITZ? JESUS, THAT’S THE MOST GODDAMN DELICIOUS CRACKER I EVER ATE!”
And so you give him the whole packet. You give him forty packets.
And then, six months down the line, he reaches that moment of clarity: “hmmm. I just got some regular old crackers.”
Now, when it comes to Ghosts N’ Goblins – my first ever computer game - I can relate to this. It wasn’t exactly like I was ‘starving’, but my best mate had a BBC Micro, and I must have been ferrying home some very excitable stories about Jet Set Willy and whatnot. On top of all this, I was fortunate enough to have some very intuitive parents.
So on Christmas morning, 1988, I tore away the wrapping from my first ever computer, unsheathing the mighty Commodore 64 (albeit a temperamental, second-hand Commodore 64, a machine that was borderline French in its propensity for tantrums and shit-fits). With that computer came two games – Ghosts N’ Goblins, and Summer Games II, which was a tie-in licence with the Seoul Olympics. I may only have been about seven at this point, but I’d long-since cottoned on to the fact that I didn’t like P.E very much. So I ended up popping my gaming cherry with G’N’G.
Now if there’s one thing that’s put a consistent strain on my parents’ marriage over the years, it’s my dad’s refusal to read – or even acknowledge – instructions. Having successfully wired a plug in 1973, he’s since considered the installation / operation of anything electronic to be a combined matter of luck, instinct, and educated guesswork. Under strict orders, he’d been dispatched to my cousin’s house on Christmas Eve to pick up the C64, test it, and find out exactly how it worked: when he did finally saunter his way over at about 8pm, he’d basically spent the whole evening quaffing liqueur chocolates, and playing with their Labrador. “How hard can it be?” he’d have asked, cracking open another beer.
When he finally came home, he’d fallen asleep in front of Jaws.
I can still remember my mum’s lips thinning to the point of invisibility when, on Christmas Day, it wouldn’t work. It was one of the longest days of my life; him hunched for hours in front of the TV, her glowering thunderously at him, and me, riddled with that same kind of idiot anticipation Eddie Murphy had described. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since my first go on Jetpak at Rory’s house: as I sat there cross-legged, building a Lego castle, I’d already decided that whatever Ghost N’ Goblins had to offer, it was going to be awesome. The trap was primed.
In the end, something – be it the Spirit of Christmas, or my mum’s smouldering voodoo ill-will – got it working. There’s few grander moments in life than the snowstorm static of a TV screen cutting to whatever it’s supposed to be showing... and there, suddenly, it was; white words on royal blue, bordered thickly in pastel, the command cursor blinking at us like the drumming of fingers. And so it all began – the cage swung shut.
I’ll be honest here – I was (and am) willing to believe that G’N’G was a lot better than it actually is. In this case, I think, it’s more about what it represented than anything it actually had to offer; that first taste of the primal magic of gaming. It was one of those gateway moments that are so easily identified in hindsight, but don’t always announce themselves at the time. It’s hard to put into words. I suppose it’s a bit like your first football match, or passing your driving test; you know you’ve discovered something that’s going to have an immeasurable impact on your life, stretching far off into the coming years. And even at the age of seven, I clearly remember that thrilling realisation thwacking right into me.
It was all so utterly, completely awesome. The loading screen, the title screen, the solemnity of the music (a rather atmospheric rendition of Chopin’s ‘Prelude No. 20’)... G’N’G lassoed together everything that used to be great about computer games. It triggered an imaginative response, you see; it all hinged on the vibe, which it delivers in bucketloads from the outset. Yes, history and progress can fling their glares down now upon the graphical capabilities of the C64, but to me, at that point... wow. That whole game looked like it had been chiselled from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
And then I actually played it.
Which went something like this:
“OK, let’s see what we’ve got here, I’m this knight guy, apparently, and I can go left and right... ooh, look, I can jump up and d... Oh, I’ve died.
Righto, try again... oh, look at that, he shoots out swords or something, they’ll be useful for killing those zomb... oh, they come from behind as well, do they? Bugger. Start again.
Third time’s a charm... kill him, kill him... jump over this tombst... Hang on, I can go forwards, and I can jump, but I can’t jump forwards. And – ha ha – dead again.
Right, I’m getting the hang of this now. Kill, kill, jump, kill... oh look, a spooky bird, perched impassively atop another tombstone! No, hang on, that’s some sort of surface-to-air mega-crow, I can’t duck it OR jump it, and... oh, for Christ’s sake.
OK, this time, I’m just going to inch my way along, nice and careful, nice and slow, over the tombstone I go... so what if it’s taken me three minutes to get past the first screen, I’m alm... you what? They’re timing this insanity? As if this madness wasn’t enough, they’re putting me up against a clock?!
What do you mean, ‘game over’?!”
And therein lies the problem with Ghost N’ Goblins, the inevitable yin to its yang of new dawns and excitement, and all that good stuff... it’s just unplayably difficult. I mentioned ‘popping my gaming cherry’ earlier – this wasn’t some tender, gentile, twilight fumble with a first love. Breaking yourself in with G’N’G was like being choke-slammed onto a pile of house bricks; like having some towering bondage queen punching you hard in the nuts, over and over again. It’s a perfect storm of unresponsive controls, ropey collision detection, and a prohibitively steep learning curve. It was a wholly unforgiving game... even moreso for a cack-handed 7 year-old like me.
It still didn’t quell my fascination, though. I’m also slightly consoled by the fact that Gametrailers.com have since declared G’N’G to be the second hardest game of all time. I played it again, years later, armed with all the accumulated benefits of age and experience, thinking I could set about exorcising a few demons... a bit like Tom Hanks in Big. It’d been bothering me for years, and so now – as a grown man – I was going to vanquish this insoluble beast of a game, flush it straight to Hell and finally move on. No chance: it dutifully handed me my arse on a plate, once again. Some games tend to soften with time, as your motor skills and your cognitive abilities sharpen up; G’N’G remains one of the most difficult things I’ve ever encountered, and I include within that A-Levels, falling (and staying) in love, negotiating a mortgage, and the pre-entry interview for Cambridge University. From start to finish, the whole thing is an absurd, brutish monument to difficulty; a ridiculously hostile experience.
Games used to be like this, though – there wasn’t the commercial imperative to cater for the incapable and the stupid. The average game of Pacman or Donkey Kong only lasts for something like three minutes; as I recall, adjustable difficulty settings didn’t even come into vogue until the days of 16-Bit. Simply, G’N’G was what it was, and if you couldn’t cope... well, that wasn’t really Capcom’s problem.
That kind of programming comes with its own rewards, I suppose, because (certainly in the C64 days) I never came close to completing at least 70% of the games that I owned. These were the prohibitively difficult ones like G’N’G, the games that rewarded the zealots and completionists, those truly committed souls that made skylines from the teetering columns of tapes stacked against their bedroom windows; I wasn’t one of them, so instead I had a shelf full of games just like G’N’G, all rife with the tantalizing prospects of the things I hadn’t yet seen, or conquered. Each one its own little curiosity, flicking Vs down at me from the bookshelf.
It’s not like that anymore; nowadays, there’s not just a belief, but the actual expectation that having paid your money, you’re going to get to play a game through, from start to finish. Implicit within that is a commitment from the player... and I think that’s partly why it feels like I’m coming to the end of my gaming life. We’ve only got one tele in the house, and I simply don’t have the time or the inclination to muster that kind of investment, to sign up to it all at the very start, not when everything seems to be so self-consciously grand.
But I find myself wondering if it really is a practical issue, or the fact that the games just don’t seem to capture my imagination anymore. I think, for example, of the difficulty I’ve had in getting properly into Skyward Sword; it’s been sat there since Christmas, virtually untouched. Equally, I think back to the hours and the effort and the sheer fascination I committed to this single, curmudgeonly game, back in the day. In a weird way, the developers’ insistence on filling in all of the gaps, on crafting a coherent and completely defensible gaming world, means that we don’t tend to get games like G’N’G anymore; games that were forged within and in spite of their limitations. And therefore, because there’s no gaps, because everything’s so remorselessly logical, we don’t get to imagine anything. There’s no need to paint your own picture anymore - we’ve strayed from the intangibles of gaming. And that’s a shame, in much the same way that The Twilight Zone is always going to be a damn site creepier than the Saw films. Like Alonso Harris says in Training Day, "it's not what you say, it's what you can prove."
Ghosts N’ Goblins... yeah, it’s fine. It’s OK. It probably triggered my subconscious love of ‘things n’ other things’ (Guns N’ Roses being an obvious example), but that’s about it. At the end of the day, it was just some regular old crackers. Representatively, though, it meant so much more than any of that; I finally owned a computer. And I knew then that in the years to come, I would probably own other, better computers, playing – and totally losing myself within – hundreds of other computer games... just as willingly as I lost myself in those first two or three minutes of Ghosts N’ Goblins. I remember going on the Monorail at Disney World for the first time, in 1990 - fun, exciting, and very memorable, if only for what it was taking me towards... And that’s why G’N’G will forever be sanctified in my mind as that first point of contact. The crossing of a threshold.
Or in Eddie Murphy’s world - the bait.
