Completely off on my own here but this game right here made middle-school me hate and fear RPGs and I still haven't shaken it off, honestly. I hit some kind of point where I believed I needed to grind to progress and it hit me like a punch in the stomach. Then I realized that I dreaded the prospect so much because I fundamentally and deeply hated the whole tedious menu-battling character-optimizing system that every battle was — that is, what I was dreading was having to suffer ANY MORE of the actual gameplay part of the game. Up to that point, I hadn't even thought if I was enjoying myself or not, just killing time. It's not like I was particularly invested in the story. It occurred to me that a quicker way to not have to do any more battles was just to stop playing, so I did, and wrote off the entire RPG genre.

From my blog, Arcade Idea

When Philo T. Farnsworth first demonstrated his all-electronic CRT television to anyone outside of the laboratory where it was invented, he said "here's something the bankers can understand" and turned it on to produce an image of a dollar bill. When Thomas T. Goldsmith was trying to come up with a way for the user to directly interface with the CRT for trifling amusement rather than a practical use-case, he made a game where you shoot down planes. These are eerie portents of the future — no, scratch that, full-on curses invoked that the respective mediums have not yet recovered from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBgvS2OuFwI
Stan Kenton Orchestra (composer Bob Graettinger) - Thermopylae [1947]

Television and video games are, to my mind, siblings. They're cursed and compromised mediums, and art within it has to come to terms with the attendant formal inertia. They were born in the same wave of technological innovation. A console is functionally an extra TV channel. Artworks in both mediums often pointedly aspire to cinema, a tendency long-present but especially pronounced in the 21st century. This is in obvious compensation to the stench of disposable disrepute that dogs them. Both mediums are restlessly oriented towards the future, perhaps owing to their history of technological advance, and thus have a largely tenuous, fraught relationship with its own past, where nostalgia has had to balance against shame over how primitive, corny earlier works. So even as it tries to excite the audience about the next thing, it's constantly repeating itself in ways both small and large. Both have murky, obscure, protracted technical origins in laboratories decades before being ready for consumers, and then they ascend to being a dominant — arguably the dominant — mass medium of their time.

World War 2 put a serious damper on the entrance of television into mass popularity, but at the same time, the US government pumped a lot of money into the research and development of television technology for military purposes. The whole American television industry, which had never yet lived up to its own decades of hype and been able to profit by manufacturing and selling a real product to consumers in any substantial quantity, pivoted instead to the lucrative prospect of war grants. We all know about radar, but there were also dreams of infrared night-vision & sniper lasers, and of TV-guided precision missiles. This latter endeavor directly led to the creation of the image orthicon, which would become the very linchpin that made commercial television practical from 1945 to 1968, the "Immy" for which the Emmys are still named.

So when Goldsmith in the DuMont laboratory 2 years out from the war was trying to think of a fictional context for his Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device [1947], it cannot really be considered surprising that his mind leapt to a combination between radar and the TV-guided missile. In CRT Amusement Device, the player adjusts a lobbing arc drawn across a radar-style circular screen from the bottom-left up and to the right, and they also get to brighten the beam at any point of their choosing within that arc. All interface is via dials. A transparent overlay is physically placed on the screen: images of planes that are targets for the player to hit. To make this task a challenge, there's a timer, entirely separate from the rest of the equipment. Despite being so simple, this immediately raises a number of questions. Firstly, is this a video game?

That's a tricky question, because here in 2022, we're still not totally sure what video games are. The progenitors of television knew their goal exactly and set out to make it happen. It's a bit strong to say that video games were conversely invented by accident, but it was a slow process of conceptual evolution that never really stopped. Roughly speaking, the world saw Pong [1972], came up with a phrase for "things like Pong", and then that phrase gradually stretched to include everything on this blog and much more. That's exactly what's interesting about these early, pre-commercial years: people are working out what video games are and what they're for for the first time with no preconceptions, and little-to-no knowledge of any predecessors in the field whatsoever. CRT Amusement Device, in my book, is definitely conceptually in-line with Pong: not only does it look and play a bit like Tennis For Two [1958] (also from DuMont's lab,) it manages with its "overlay" technology to bear an even stronger resemblance to the Magnavox Odyssey [1971] that inspired Pong, enough to eventually surface as a trump card against the legal claim on originating and rent-gathering on the Television Game concept.

There's a documentary on YouTube called "The First Video Game" that I sincerely recommend as an inventory and exploration of extremely early video games. However, I must respectfully disagree with its prescriptive approach, in particular its final criteria:

"A video game must:
1) Exist in a practical implementation
2) Generate some kind of video signal
3) Have interaction that alters this signal
4) Be principally intended for entertainment
5) Be playable solely through the video display(s)"

quibble with points 1, 2, 4, and 5, which means I reach different conclusions.

-- To point 2: Games like The Oregon Trail [1971] were originally developed for teletype machines with a printed display, did not change their very nature by transferring to monitor display, and there have been experimental audio-only games as well. The presence of the word video in "video game" is historical accident, not a determinant. "Computer games" or "digital games" would probably be more accurate, although one objection to CRT Amusement Device not covered in this list is that it's not running on a digital computer but an electronic series of wave generators and variable resistors, without even so much as a transistor, semiconductor, or memory. This is a fair point, but I don't think the underlying technicalities of construction makes a lot of difference to the end experience.
-- To point 5: Many games rely on external knowledge or input beyond the bounds of its visual display. Any game that requires mapping, or for you to read the manual, or, as in the case of the Magnavox Odyssey and CRT Amusement Device, for the player to impose external constraints on their own technologically-unlimited behavior. I think this item is principally intended to exclude electro-mechanical games like pinball machines and shooting galleries, which is fair because they rely on real-world unsimulated physics, even though the story of those games, their creators, and their social position so seamlessy leads into the story of arcade video games in the 1970s.
-- To point 4: There are video games not principally intended for entertainment.
-- Most interestingly, to point 1: What counts as a "practical implementation" in a medium that is largely digital? Sources are unclear if any CRT Amusement Device prototype ever physically existed or not, but either way that object doesn't exist now. What we're left with is the patent documentation, which are instructions sufficient to build our own replica if inclined. As covered in the post on Hamurabi [1968/1973], the "type-in" game was a common distribution method throughout the 70s where you would print the source code to the game on paper for the end-user to manually re-inscribe on their own machines like a monk. Indeed, any video game that isn't a hardwired unit really is fundamentally distributed as instructions for building itself.

This is the whole problem with defining things that are out there in the world, they're so easy to problematize with annoying exceptions and objections drawn from the ranks of things we would common-sensically include in the category. I could and maybe might quibble with point 3 some more, like when I get to the "kinetic novel," which are perhaps culturally video games despite being non-interactive. For now though, let's accept that a video game must respond to input from the player.

When I wrote about the Magnavox Odyssey two whole years ago, I compared it to shining a flashlight on a board game. A recent article by Doc Burford, on the art of how to be making your players give a fuck [2022], reminded me of this. Early on, it makes a point that a flashlight is interactive electronics: You press a button and the light turns on or off. So point 3 alone is clearly insufficient for thinking about video games. Marshall McLuhan made a similar point about lightbulbs in general in Understanding Media [1964], that they were a medium without content and with an effect. But you can assemble the lightbulbs into letters or make them flash in morse code, and now you have a whole semantic grammar as well as those original effects, and that's how McLuhan approaches into television. They sharply diverge from there. McLuhan tells us about that the medium is the message, above whatever its semantic content happens to be. Bruford tells us that without content, we don't really have a medium at all. A television with no content isn't television, it's a white noise generating appliance. (Arguably, much or all of the content on television does not move beyond this status.) Likewise, an interaction with a computer or other electronic device does not become a potential art medium until the player gives a fuck in their minds about the lights being on or off, usually by how that interweaves with other lights and your choice of on or off in a legible pattern. He specifically exempts Tetris [1984] from this, but surely for all its abstraction, Tetris is a language and you give a fuck how it's arranged.

CRT Amusement Device is barely more than a flashlight itself, or more accurately, an oscilloscope. Drawing an arc on the screen isn't a game. Drawing an arc on the screen that gets brighter at a particular point in the arc isn't a game. It's maybe a toy, or a tool if you can find a good use for an arc on the screen. It's the imagination that makes it a game. Games didn't have much in the way of storytelling before 1980, but they almost always had a premise. The timer just gives it friction. The earliest computer game I know of is actually Nimatron [1940], a Nim-playing computer. But I'm not interested in video games that just replicate older forms of games here, I'm specifically interested in games like this, games that explore original concepts for computer space. And this is the earliest attempt at that that I know of.

In the patent documentation itself, the player is simply hitting targets, and airplanes are just a sole example of what those targets might be. This is in contrast to the Magnavox Odyssey's passionate desperation to make its lights represent as many different things as they could think of, in many different play-styles. While the gameplay of CRT Amusement Device could be easily reskinned to not be airplanes, it wasn't, and it's not flexible like that. It's always target practice. It's always a World War 2 fantasy of radar and the guided missile, even if you pretended it was the spray from a hose, or needles into Bloons [2007].

Shooting targets has always had an insistent central prominence in video games, regardless of actual popularity and commercial success. It's got a gravitational pull. When the video games industry was called up before the United States congress for its own "vast wasteland" moment, it wasn't for low quality, it was for the worry that they were training the youth to be violent like at war but at home. Video games were born of war. Trajectories, competition, elimination, drilling over and over again to improve performance and self-discipline. That's not every video game, but it's never far away.

From my blog, Arcade Idea.

As wont as I am to call everything some kind of "adventure game", citing the enormous and cross-genre influence of Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77], this is pointedly trying NOT to be an adventure game, for all its resemblance. You can tell, because it has an adventure game inside of itself, which exists to parody adventure games and thereby define how this game is something else on a parallel track. This parody is a maze to fumble around in, bumping into various generic fantasy creatures (elves, pixies, and whatnot) who all block your path further into the maze until you bring them the item that will satisfy their varied and peculiar demands. It's a anthropomorphication of the classic "lock-and-key" inventory-management puzzle solved through complete exploration of every nook and cranny of a convoluted space that we see all over the place. It's quite the stretch to call this business "puzzles" at all, despite customary lingo. The "puzzles," such as they are in your usual adventure game, are not actually that mechanism but the obscuring of that mechanism, the creation of ambiguity around which well-hidden key goes with which lock and how you are meant to turn it, but it's here delivered with barebones set dressing which may be charming and witty but which does nothing to obscure its simplistic functioning to the player, rendering itself as dumb brute force that only tests patience and persistence — which is something you very often see in the usual non-parodic adventure game, too. Other than in this parody, there is actually no inventory system in this game, despite it having the bog-standard adventure game premise of collecting 14 treasures.

---- MUSICAL INTERLUDE: LL Cool J - My Rhyme Ain't Done [1987] -----

Like Sokoban [1982] or Tetris [1984] or Chain Shot [1985] (aka SameGame), The Fool's Errand [1987] brings to my little ad-hoc canon of video games a whole new idea of what a "video game puzzle" even can be. Unlike those games, it doesn't just give us one great puzzle mechanic, it brings us dozens of bespoke minigames, such that it's structurally reminiscent of art games like The Prisoner [1980] or Lifespan [1983]. It gives to the history a whole philosophy and tradition from outside video games, mixed with its own novel concepts that could only be done in video games. It is a digital work inspired by those magazines full of brain teasers you see at supermarket checkout stands and their more sophisticated and upscale sibling, those analog gamebooks that give its puzzling some kind of overarching throughline and cohesion through things like a narrative scaffolding or a meta-puzzle or even a real-world treasure hunt. This idea will stick with video games (see: The 7th Guest [1993], Professor Layton and the Curious Village [2007]) but rarely, if ever, will it be done quite as well as it is here (see: The 7th Guest [1993].)

(This isn't a review, but that's showing my hand: this is flat-out one of the best games I've ever played, hasn't "aged" a day for as much as I resent that framing, and I heartily recommend you play it if you're reading this and it at all intrigues you. It's free from the original creator Cliff Johnson now and one of the easiest to get running that I've ever played for this blog. Also, there was no natural place to note it in the body of the text, so here in the praise aside: this has its visual aesthetics totally on lock and is one of the most strikingly gorgeous games ever made, certainly made by 1987. I know I say that about every Macintosh game I play but I really really mean it here. I believe, though I'm not sure, that the beautiful artwork may have been the handiwork of someone named Brad Parker.)

The remaining puzzles not coming from that storied paradigm, which I'll address first, are instead highly interface-reliant. The Macintosh the game was made for has a mouse, and in the 80s this is still a bold novelty to experiment with, reminiscent of the way Nintendo DS games could get very excited over ways to ask the player to use the touchscreen. The Fool's Errand will ask you to move your mouse in specific choreographed ways, or to scan your mouse over the screen, or to keep your mouse still. The puzzles in this category are actually either tests of physical performance or, like the good versions of the lock-and-key puzzles it parodies, actually a puzzle of figuring out through its ambiguity and obscurity what exactly you're meant to do and then is no puzzle at all after.

This philosophy also shores up the more traditional-seeming puzzles. Some of the rules to various puzzles are plainly stated to the player, but others are quite deliberately not. Instead, the player finds themself already digitally bound by these rules and sometimes must deduce what those restrictions even are through experimenting within the interface, in a way that could not be replicated in print. Sometimes the game doesn't even tell the player the ultimate goal to be working towards.

If "an adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative," as Graham Nelson wrote in 1995, then in The Fool's Errand the crossword wins possibly too handily to qualify. Many, perhaps most, of this game's puzzles revolve around some form of wordplay. Not as in puns and rhymes and such, but things like anagrams and cyphers and word searches and literal crosswords which attune you not so much to the sense or sound of the words but call attention to the particulars of its actual constituent letters. Often, The Fool's Errand will provide you with mere nonsense that the narrative transparently and comically strains to manufacture a half-logical pretext for using in a sentence, or literal gibberish to which you are to subject the same rigors as the perfectly cromulent words that are mixed right in with it.

Which brings me to the game's regard towards text, a subject on which I'd be tempted to call it "agnostic" if it wasn't so darn gnostic. As indicated, it structurally doesn't care about the "meaning" of text, and I mean that in the extremely basic "See Spot Run" sense where to "interpret" or "comprehend" the text is to firstly process the concepts of things like "run" and "see", and then secondly to pay attention to how these concepts one by one connect and build on one another through grammar into something that makes sense, typically something with some nominal weight of real-life apprehension underpinning its semiotics somewhere. The Fool's Errand has long passages of witty prose that operate on the level of comprehensibility perfectly well. There's a narrative about a peace between the four kingdoms of the realm that, under pressure of famine and petty grievances and misunderstandings and magical schemes, is threatening to curdle right back into war unless The Fool can stop it through collecting treasures and counterspells. It just is rarely interested in the various kinds of textual interpretation afforded by that approach; it's there, I could readily perform a deeper exegesis of it, but it's not the one that is incentivized and prized.

This is one crucial thing separating the player and the Fool, who they are aligned with but certainly do not directly control nor embody: The Fool thinks his world is real and approaches it as such, taking the information he is given as if it is has some weight of fact behind it, and when it does not seem to have such a significance, that this is a failure or malfunction. Other characters say things to The Fool that only make sense to the player who has access to the actual game bits, and The Fool "gets weary of such confusing talk and [does] not wish to consider [it] at all," or conversely he'll seriously entertain the aforementioned strained justifications for using silly words. He misapprehends a giant symbolic totem which then has to explicitly tell him that it is a symbol and what it is a symbol for twice over before he recognizes the pattern. This may be the very thing that makes him a fool: He has no access to nor awareness of the true nature of his universe — maybe you can see now what I meant by "gnostic" — which is apparent to the reader as fictional, linguistically-constructed, gamified, and dense with symbolism.

The kind of reading The Fool's Errand is more invested in is a pseudo-esotericist one. The whole game is tarot-themed, with all of its characters and events and many of its items drawn from the tarot traditions. This cues the reader to not read its prose so literally. A layperson with only the vaguest knowledge of tarot still knows that when they see objects in a tarot context that that object is not to be understood as just plain-and-simple being that object. A sword isn't a sword, it's a metaphor for... something (the layperson won't know what,) and even part of its own system of metaphors parseable only by those who have trained to parse it. But The Fool's Errand, as best as I can tell, doesn't much leverage the traditional divinatory significance and readings of, say, The Empress, or the actual contents of any of The Book Of Thoth it invokes repeatedly. The Fool's Errand's usage of the things on tarot cards seems to be uniquely its own takes, self-contained, self-explaining as much as they need to be, and only lightly and occasionally informed by pre-existing tarot usage, such as The Fool himself being the wandering protagonist. And thank goodness, for my sake. I don't know much about tarot, and did just enough research hitting the books to realize it wouldn't be terribly relevant for properly reading nor playing this particular game. (Though then again, I can hardly be terribly confident in that conclusion. If you're more steeped in tarot than I, please play the game and tell me that I'm wrong in the comments section below!) Thank goodness for its sake, too. The game casts The High Priestess as an outright cackling villain to be defeated triumphantly, which would be quite thematically alarming and even bizarrely misogynist if she were meant to represent the mysterious half of femininity, but she's not used that way.

Its engagement with the symbols of tarot is ultimately similar to its engagement with the symbols that constitute the alphabet. While esotericist reading strategies are often posited as a way to get beyond surfaces and see a deeper reality than even the one we think we are familiar with, The Fool's Errand instead playfully focuses its attention right in on the surface, steadily devaluing the idea of even an knowingly-illusory reality effect. The narration is mostly a veiled pretense that, like the game's many anagrams, needs to be unjumbled and deciphered for information that can then be instrumentalized for the purpose of organizing a big sliding image tile puzzle and sorting syllables. It encourages the player to plunder its prose for encrypted data in search of not secret knowledge but secret treasure. The game and eventually the player is far more concerned with the deft interplay of these symbols qua symbols connecting and collecting within its own systems than the things the symbols usually gesture at.

Folks, we might have ourselves a hypertext here. It's borderline, but it's striking to me. Structurally, while there's no direct hyperlinks from one page to the next, the game's story is conceptualized as pages to be approached in arbitrary order. There is a final and proper canonical order, but filling in its gaps is itself a major overarching challenge. The classic logic of this-then-that narrative order and causality is invoked but obscured and its discovery is gamified. Pages are locked off by puzzle completion, and the pages you start with unlocked aren't all the first pages. Instead, the minigames pitch you hither and tither across the text, most often to the next page but just as likely clear into a different chapter. The narrative's been fragmented into episodic vignettes, and they often seemed to me to make just as much sense in that secondary order as in the primary order, like when I had a hard time with a puzzle and the next page unlocked began with The Fool also feeling exhausted from effort. You can read the last page right from the start, and the best straightforward explanation of what's going on and what you are to do is found in the similarly-available second-to-last chapter. Spiritually, there's also a distinct bent to the game where it's majorly concerned with connections and greedily gathering data points up, and delighted by the sheer architecture of its own semiotic house of mirrors, with only light concern if any for what it all adds up to or points at that ultimately makes it feel to me more "postmodern" (and hypertextual) than esotericist.

It's interesting just how much of a boom there is for node-based narrative here in the late 1980s. Partially that's an artifact of my selections, but I know for sure they're actually surprisingly sparse in the early 1980s. We've sadly seen the last Infocom game we're going to see on this blog already, but as the little-disputed critical and commercial leading light of text adventures recedes, we see not only the market but the texts themselves fragmenting — if you're even going to be considering this sort of thing as occupying the same aesthetic and niche that that sort of thing does as well at other times, which has become a fundamental guiding principle of the concept of "interactive fiction" but only as it was formulated through controversy. The parser norms of interactive fiction will reassert themselves in an Infocom-derived renaissance in the mid-90s, but then around the turn of the 2010s it zags back to hypertext again, possibly for good. Alternatively, if you see hypertext as something wholly separate from and even defined against the parser adventure game tradition, as The Fool's Errand suggests it to be, this was a savvy move from the parser camp to rhetorically capture and encompass a now-more-popular genre entirely within its own tradition. Either way, that makes this little interregnum feel like foreshadowing, all the moreso because a lot of these games are being made by people who come from backgrounds outside of gaming working solo or close to it who thereby have more offbeat perspectives and tones than the programmers we've been used to.

-------------

Thanks to Monkeysky for getting inspired to play the game at the same time as me so we could talk about it. Thanks to hypodronic for the recommendation of Lon Milo DuQuette's "Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot" — didn't bear much fruit for this article but did give me some sea legs.

This is the exact video game that inspired a NASCAR racer to ram his car up against the wall in the middle of the turn for an extremely video-game-in-real-life style speed boost a couple weeks ago. I remember coming to the exact opposite conclusion when I was a child: Every AI racer takes the outside of the curves, going up on the bank, because that's what you try to do in real life. That left the inside curve wide open, which even a 10 year old could tell you was geometrically shorter and thus a quicker route. Once I figured this out, I never once ranked under first place. I always figured that the reason this worked in the game but not in real life was that the game's physics weren't very realistic in some way with regards to banked turns, but the AI was programmed to behave as if it were to sell the illusion. Shows what I know! Apparently this game's physics in banked turns were more realistic than real life! This is why I'm not a NASCAR driver. Or maybe it's because I played PS2 and he played Gamecube...

(Content warning: Plague.)

The Sumerian Game [1964-1967]/Hamurabi [1968/1973] [sic], as that dating indicates, has a particularly convoluted and amorphous release history that I’m going to have to spend the first few paragraphs here just walking through. There were more or less three variations by different authors, although I could expand that all the way into the 1980s. The first variation is The Sumerian Game [1964-1967].

---- MUSICAL INTERMISSION: The Michael Yonkers Band – Puppeting [1968]. “Computers do no wrong.” ----

The Sumerian Game is really only comparable to The Oregon Trail [1971/75]. They’re both edutainment games made for a young child’s classroom history module on a mainframe printer-only computer with a rudimentary narrative. (You can see why I initially cut it for redundancy.) By all accounts I know of, The Sumerian Game was the first video game to ever have any explicit narrative scaffolding at all, thanks to female writer, designer, and schoolteacher Mabel Addis. The Sumerian Game wasn’t just its computer code, it was a whole three-act theatrical experience with a 20-minute slideshow that went along with a tape recording that the player would watch before touching the computer, staged only a few times for a few years for a few 9- and 10-year-olds. It wasn’t a product to be packaged, it was a fleeting moment. Today, naturally, it is lost and we can only hear its echoes. It’s another one of those games that survives only through documentation.

The ways that The Oregon Trail and The Sumerian Game survived into the following decades were down two very different routes. The Oregon Trail became a discrete plaything of an increasingly corporate world of video gaming. The Sumerian Game, though initially a collaboration between massive institutions, IBM funded by the US Department Of Education, became instead diffused as essentially public domain, adopted by the “anyone can code” crowd of utopian computer liberators.

That’s where Hamurabi comes in. The 1968 version, called The King Of Sumeria, was designed by Doug Dyment as a tech demo, this time for the programming language FOCAL and on a PDP-8 instead of a PDP-1. He did this entirely based off of having The Sumerian Game verbally described to him — I’m not being in the slightest metaphorical when I talk about games spreading like folk songs in this era. A man named David H. Ahl then ported this game from FOCAL to BASIC, added a couple things, and moreover popularized and distributed the game, from his position first as essentially a computer salesperson for DEC (creators of the PDP series of macrocomputers) then in the 1970s as a magazine-running personal computer evangelist, with two hit books full of BASIC games that you the consumer could type into your own machine to learn to code and have something to do with your new machine, which contained the version of Hamurabi played by most (including myself.)

To me, this whole convoluted chain seems emblematic of the entire pre-lapsarian era of computer gaming that came to a close around 1977 with the home computing boom, not just largely forgotten today but shrouded in the fog of forgetfulness even within itself. We will never see video games under a distribution model anything like this ever again. Most obviously, we are now long beyond the era when it was expected that to use a computer you ought to be able to program, with all the implications on the idea of a fixed product that implies. In the Mainframe Era, computers were often a solution looking for a problem and it was an open question what computer games were even for, and initially many were aimed at some higher utility, such as education, business simulation, military simulation, or simply demonstrating (and thereby selling) computers. Pong [1972] was the future, though: Games came to exist primarily to sell themselves to the consumer, as a discrete and portable unit, whether rented by the quarter or eventually owned outright. They were there to be profitable. And almost the entire idiom of video games, and its focus on entertainment and aesthetic values instead of some utility, evolved from this paradigm. Free games today and in a hypothetical post-capitalist future still exist in the shadow of this legacy, and are often conceptualized as competing in some variety of abstract market anyway.

All the more fascinating then that Hamurabi, a quintessential artifact of this pre-commercial games culture, is literally about projecting and naturalizing modern commercial relations all the way back to the dawn of civilization itself, Ancient Sumeria. The Fertile Crescent has been traditionally regarded as the birthplace of modern economics, with interstate trade to support logistically impressive infrastructure projects, and not just interest and debt but debt jubilees, and an urban class of artisan craftspeople, and careful accounting of stock and ownership with cuneiform. The Sumerian Game had a firmer concern as an educational game with representing actual history and a wider variety of commodities from which more complexity arose. While an alternative 1968 name for Hamurabi is King Of Sumeria and it carelessly slaps the most famous Sumerian in there irrelevant and misspelled, in The Sumerian Game you are a succession of temple priests in a specific city (Lagash) performing middle-management, representing the actual economic structure of Sumeria in finer detail.

The Sumerian Game makes a few noble and active efforts to de-financialize its economy. As the postmortem says twice, one of the key lessons is that “the real cost of anything is what we must sacrifice to get it,” and by this it means that costs are not money but labor and resources and even deaths. One of the key innovations in Ancient Sumeria was its use of silver as a universal unit of exchange, aka money, but silver itself was rarely actually used in transactions, instead it was chiefly for the convenience of bureaucratic accounting. This brought the society probably as close as any historical pre-coinage society to the mythical “barter system” dreamt up by Adam Smith, which is just a money system that inefficiently and inconveniently doesn’t have money but somehow does have some concept of universal quantifiable value and tidy, prompt tit-for-tat exchanges. But The Sumerian Game probably leans too far into barter, especially in the interstate trade phase, because as a computer game, built out of math, it simply cannot express an economy or indeed a world that at some point doesn’t reduce to universal quantifiable value. Hamurabi, conversely, simply does not care about such fine distinctions and dives right in — for its purposes, “bushel” is another word for dollar.

The Sumerian Game took as its model works such as The Carnegie Tech Management Game [1963] or the AMA Top Management Decision Simulator [1955], business simulations. Due mainly to technical limitations, these were themselves rudimentary compared to simulations where more complicated and involved mathematical operations could be performed with pencil, paper, and a person. The advantage it did present was a mimetic, theatrical aspect: presentations with fancy special equipment for a limited time only, an invitation for you the player to act a part that most likely is not available to you in real life, and the computer laundering an illusion of steely objectivity to the proceedings. Accentuating this aspect is probably from whence the narrative scaffolding came.

Hamurabi also has a narrative, one completely original to itself, which is one of its most compelling qualities and one that I’ve never actually seen remarked upon. A game like this, you would expect it to be random. The Sumerian Game is. The Oregon Trail is. But it isn’t. In Hamurabi, the same things happen in the same order every time you play. As in HUTSPIEL [1955], all of the player’s inputs have strictly-deterministic and easily-divined corresponding outputs, with the only variation in outputs coming along fixed and predetermined order. And the order in which these variations are deliberately laid out clearly constitute story beats, but to explain that I have to explain the basics of the gameplay, since it’s a story told with its gameplay.

Every turn, you get a status report on a few numbers: The year (turn number), the number of people who starved, the number of new citizens, the population, acreage, harvest rate, loss of bushels to rats, bushels in storage, and the current asking price of acres. Then, you get three questions: 1) How many acres you’ll buy? (And if none, how many to sell?) 2) How much to feed to the people? and 3) How many acres you’ll seed? All of these prices are expressed in bushels, even though you don’t seed an acre with processed bushels of the harvest. Maybe it’s just payment for labor.

The first part of the game is just figuring out the basic shape of the numbers it’s asking for by guessing. How many bushels does it take to feed one person for one turn? (20.) How many acres can you harvest? (10 times the population then subtract 1.) How many bushels to seed an acre? (1.) If you typed this game’s source code in, you may have just been able to know this going in, but me I can’t read code. If you’re just playing, you repeat the first turn or two turns over and over again to hone in on these figures. This, like The Oregon Trail, is essentially a survival game, where you have resources to manage optimally and if you do poorly, you die. Except instead of dying to the elements or to zombies, you die to popular revolt.

The Prisoner [1980], one of my all-time favorite games, contains a game-within-a-game where the main character gets to pretend to be The Caretaker of their prison. It’s a hard game to win because practically everything you can do smacks the simulated prison irrecoverably out of balance, and then when you fail you are told that maybe now you understand how hard the Caretaker has it. The whole game is satire, and this minigame cuts to the heart of its point about ideological indoctrination. It might have been inspired by Hamurabi, or something else inspired by it at least.

In any case, Hamurabi and by extension The Sumerian Game (remember it?) have the same dynamic. It uses its initial difficulty, survival mechanics of penny-pinching resources immediately underlined with an overpopulation-panic scenario to shake you loose of any idea that farming alone might sustain humanity, to convince you to roleplay, to buy its mimesis, to make you empathize with the position of a managerial ruler, to naturalize it, to explain its logic, make it seem eternal and inescapable. When you win, that is, maximize acreage without the ugly business of doing it at the expense of your population, Hamurabi tells you “Charlemagne, Disraeli, and Jefferson combined could not have done better!” An odd assortment — the famously religious feudal emperor and the secular slavedriver revolutionary republican, with a Victorian imperialist conservative prime minister in the middle as if a bridge. It’s all the same to Hamurabi’s broad strokes. Charlemagne, Disraeli, Jefferson, and the real Hammurabi were all statesmen. They all had to deal with the most fundamental political question of them all: who gets what.

The trick comes once you’ve got those ratios down and can start to intelligently calculate things. (This game begs to be played with a calculator at-hand and maybe some scratch paper.) If you only use the resources at hand at the start of the game, feeding everybody and then feeding them again the next year is unachievable, you’ll find yourself in an unwinnable tailspin right away. Maintaining is not an option. You start the game in the toughest position you’re likely to be in the entire game. You’re on the backfoot, you’re overextended, there’s too many mouths to feed and not enough grain stored up to be a cushion.

There’s only two working solutions that can get you to year 4: First, you can willfully starve the population to death, so long as you don’t kill so many people in one fell swoop that they kill you. This reduces the demand on your supply to a manageable equilibrium where you can reliably feed people by the sweat of their brow, sometimes pulling a surplus when the harvest is very good and sometimes dipping into that surplus when the population rises overmuch from immigration, for the rest of the game. You muddle along from one year to the next and end up at the end either pretty close to where you started if you let off the throttle once you could and stopped throwing like 20 people a year into the engine, or with a comfortable budget surplus if you keep cosigning the population to death year after year. This austerity strategy is both morally hideous and clearly sub-optimal, though.

Second, you can commit to feeding everyone and immediately sell the 200 acres that you don’t even have the capacity to farm. In year 2, not only will you have enough barley to feed all your people and seed everything you have, but also to buy back what you just sold the year prior and then some if you want, not because of a particularly good harvest, but because you now have about two and a half times the liquid capital you started with and the price of land has fallen precipitously this year. Congratulations, you just played the real estate market and won big. You sold high and bought low. This is the winning strategy. With either strategy, you can get through to the end of the game.

As a gameplay arc, this is notable because it’s on-boarding the player by deliberately putting the most difficult circumstances right up front, such that you can’t even see most of the game if you don’t first learn how it works. The concept of on-boarding the player through their staged interactions with the game was, in my experience, really very rare before Super Mario Bros [1985] popularized it. But unlike Super Mario Bros’ gentle tutorial introducing things one by one, Hamurabi has a sink-or-swim attitude afforded by not just its simplicity and ease of quick replay but most importantly its complete transparency. The players don’t need things laid out one by one by the game, they can test things one by one for themselves.

As a story, this is fascinating to me. In this game, the market saves lives, flat out. Market speculation is here not some optional layer entirely alien to the process that produces commodities. Rather, it is forcefully shown to be absolutely central to keeping the social machine running smoothly. Without its financial input juicing it, the system breaks down and people die from poverty, that’s the trade-off this game leads with. What it makes me wonder is: Who are you buying the land from and selling it to? What is this market? There’s a historically-grounded answer, but clearly Hamurabi isn’t fussed about accuracy, and there’s obviously no textual answer either.

Land prices are random, not in the sense that they’re not the same in the same order every time you play, but in the sense that there’s no apparent logical correlation between it and any of the other information that you have, no apparent push and pull of supply and demand. If anything, there’s a vague inverse correlation between years with good harvests and years with low land prices, where you might figure it should be the opposite way around, because your neighbors must have had a good harvest too, thereby demonstrating the fertility and thus value of the land to their owners while also pushing the bids proportionally higher among other buyers who likewise struck it rich this year. Instead of working according to their own independent logic, the convolutions of the market are scripted for the benefit of the player.

This is all to say that the real estate trade, while integral to the system, itself exists outside of the boundaries of the system. Think of the thermodynamics of a natural ecosystem, with grass and a moose. The moose is fueled by the grass, but the grass can’t subsist on moose turd pie alone. It needs the power of our yellow sun, which obviously exists external to whatever happens on our planet, but nevertheless its juice feeding into the system is necessary for its continued operation. If the sun stopped shining one day, things here on Earth would immediately enter a brutal death spiral, where the only way to survive for even a little bit would be to burn up all the already-stored energy that exists within our system and die a little slower. That’s exactly how getting money out of the market works in Hamurabi. Immigration, too, is modeled as input from outside that fuels the inside, and that replenishment of the labor force (oddly the only way your labor force increases at all) is the only thing that keeps the strategy of deliberately starving your own people to death temporarily viable for the 10 years you play through.

Though this is a highly simplified model, real-world capitalism has the same need to feed from outside its own system to sustain itself without cannibalism, hence its endless thirst for expansion into “new” markets, but with the added consideration that in trading, every gain is fundamentally someone else’s loss. On a global scale, there’s no net profit, you’re just moving things around. (There are things that aren’t zero-sum in this capitalist world, but I don’t want to go on for several thousand more words right now, I’m already on a tangent.) Which brings us back to who you’re buying the land from. Whoever they are, they must be operating under the same fundamental constraints as the player. They also need to eat. And your gains are their losses. Eventually, if you’re playing towards the good ending of the game, you will have more land than you can possibly farm with your workforce, just sitting around completely fallow and feeding nobody, because it’s more profitable in arbitrage.

The beginning of the game is not the last crisis your regime faces, just the most severe, especially because you’re not prepared. It deploys further crises with delicacy: for the first 3 years, rats aren’t a problem, but in the 4th year they are a severe problem. However, this is mitigated by it being the best harvest yet in the game, such that it works out to about the same return you got last year. It could maybe catch you out if you somehow got through the first 3 years just by selling acres for food. After that, there’s another 3 years with no incident to recover from crises, though land prices are kinda high for a while. In year 6 they drop back low, real low. Now’s the time to buy! Oh, but it’s just lulling you into a false sense of security… In year 7 the rats strike again, and they bring their friend, a horrible plague! Fully half the population dies!

…We’ve done a lot of thinking about plagues these past couple years, haven’t we? I think this game that’s generally completely derelict on its ancestral educational mandate can still teach us a little something, though. Because the plague killing half the population might sound bad… but from this perspective, the capitalist manager staring at numbers, it’s secretly nothing but a boon. The plague is profit. You even get a second one in year 10 after another break to lick your wounds, which lets you juice your numbers one last time. Remember that deliberately killing your own people is a valid strategy in this game. This moment allows you to taste the benefit of sacrificing the population without having to get your hands dirty. Land prices are way up in year 7, even though if we reasonably assume our neighbors also caught the plague, that means they would suddenly have a lot of excess land that they don’t have the labor force to work, so supply should be up and driving prices way down. But you also suddenly have a lot of excess land you can’t work, on top of the excess land you bought on the cheap last turn. And you can sell every scrap of it for astronomical profit, then buy it back the next year when prices are low.

People don’t matter. They’re not even commodities to this game, they’re just numbers, a mathematical operation that chews up 20 bushels a head a turn, and if you throw another 10 bushels down on top of that for a total of 30 bushels per person, you get between 10 and 50 bushels per head in return. If you consider the 20 non-negotiable, then that 10 looks like a good deal, because it always gets made back at a minimum. But taken as a whole 30… a year with more than a break-even 3 per acre yield is an exceptionally good year. Playing the market is way more profitable. An acre farmed can only yield 5 bushels per acre at maximum, which is nice to accrue as like an interest rate on your portfolio, but an acre bought low and sold high can yield up to 11 bushels per acre. I put the strategies in opposition earlier, but there’s no reason you can’t combine both austerity and speculative trading and kill as many people as you can get away with to cut the cost of supporting their lives whilst trading fallow land back and forth to REALLY maximize your profit at the direct expense of everyone’s well-being.

It’s all an artifact of a hastily-balanced game, a trifling toy really, with no reflection on the real modern systems it’s imitating.

(Originally posted on my blog, [https://arcadeidea.wordpress.com/2022/02/21/hamurabi-1968-1973/](Arcade Idea).)

More people have walked on the moon than have beat Takeshi’s Castle [1986-1990], the TV game show which involved about 100 people attempting to win every single episode, for 131 episodes. Rumor has it that this game show was directly inspired by Super Mario Bros [1985], which I cannot find a reliable and direct source for, but which seems extremely plausible just from looking at how the show works. It’s all physical challenges of the kind Mario faces all the time, jumping over walls, swinging on ropes, clearing gaps, et cetera. (Because it was an international success in export, it was the show responsible for the anglophone world’s idea of a generic wacky madcap Japanese game show and may or may not have either originated or codified and popularized the concept, though the fad it began seems to have ended in Japan around the 2000s, while its influence kept percolating elsewhere around the world in shows like Wipeout [2008-2014/2021-2022].) The hundred contestants must get through this obstacle course without failing once or they will be disqualified, showing a conceptualization of the lives system not as like, the same Mario across alternate timelines, but as separate individuals making their own attempts, slowly filtering out until statistically someone is finally good or lucky enough to succeed against these obstacles which are extremely difficult but not quite impossible.

I see it said a lot, as basically a truism, that most or all video games are a “power fantasy.” I’ve been thinking about it and I very much disagree. There are surprisingly few games that offer up little-to-no resistance to the player enacting their will and therefore having maximal power over the game world. Rather, conventional game design is always throwing caltrops and obstacles and restrictions in front of the player. They are disempowerment fantasies, offering surmountable challenges to stimulate the player like a predator in a zoo hunting a pumpkin full of ground beef.

In Super Mario Bros, Bowser is the level designer. Takeshi Kitano cast himself as Bowser, as the villain, the bad guy in the castle. Takeshi Kitano played a lot of bad guys in movies in the 1980s (a serial killer, a cult leader, hitmen,) as his way of bucking against the unhappy confines of his newfound celebrity as a comedian and fairly ubiquitous TV light entertainment presenter type and establish himself as a serious artist, though this strategy of his would only pay off for him in the 1990s. In Takeshi’s Castle, the oppositional relationship between hero and villain is all just transparent kayfabe, it’s just for fun and really for the benefit of the hero. Really, it’s the obstacle course itself that gets to be the star of Takeshi’s Castle, it simply has more screentime than Takeshi, his castle, or any given contestant or cast member. Each anonymous contestant primarily expresses and defines their on-screen character through their relationships to the castle and how each unique approach contrasts with the ones we’ve already seen. They’re always reacting.

There’s 2 different stories of how Takeshi Kitano came by his showbiz success. There’s the short version, where it was all a fluke and he was incidentally working as a busboy and then got thrust up on stage, and the longer less-abridged version where he dedicates himself to a career in comedy through hard work and apprenticeship, deliberately working as a busboy in a particular circumstance in order to create his own luck. These stories are technically not contradictory, but they paint very different pictures and accordingly get deployed in different rhetorical circumstances. This slipperiness of mythology both allows the public character of Takeshi Kitano to be different things as the situation demands, and also suits his brand of being a multifaceted chameleon and jack-of-all-trades. It does make my life hard, though, because I’m not a very good researcher and can’t read Japanese, so the most I can do is skeptically position rumors and legends. As best as I can tell, Takeshi Kitano has written at least four autobiographies, none of which have been translated to English and most of which seem to focus on his life before fame, with various spins, such as Takeshi-Kun, Ha! [1985], which is a lighthearted children’s book about getting up to kiddie hi-jinks, or Akasuka Kid [1988], the aforementioned long version of his rise-to-fame tale, both of which got adapted to TV miniseries.

Takeshi Kitano got that start in showbiz as a “manzai” comedian in the 1970s, in the group The Two Beats (hence his nickname Beat Takeshi.) Manzai is a kind of stand-up comedy with two comedians, a funny guy and a straight man ala Abbot and Costello or a vaudeville routine or a Socratic dialogue. Usually in this sort of set-up, both participants get punchlines one way or another, but not in The Two Beats. Beat Takeshi’s routine was to be a verbal steamroller, going up there and essentially doing a solo stand-up set where he took all the punchlines and happened to be standing next to another guy. Beat Kiyoshi could never get much of a word in edgewise against Beat Takeshi’s rapid-fire onslaught of ridiculous statements, only eking out semantically-empty obvious statements as set-up, unacknowledged rhetorical questions, and ignored chastisements. He didn’t do nothing, though. He pulled big faces with bugged-out eyes, restlessly moving around from one foot to the other, getting increasingly frustrated, expressively playing the part of the audience like a horror game streamer with a facecam. He was always reacting.

The other important thing to note about The Two Beats for my purposes is that they were, reportedly, edgy. They needled society in some manner and rode controversy over their offensiveness to greater fame. 1986 was a big year for Beat Takeshi in that department, too. In December — right around the same time his video game was being released — a tabloid magazine called Friday published something about him having an affair with a college student. Angry, he got together with 11 members of his “Gundan” group of hangers-on and broke into their offices after hours to vandalize it, spray fire extinguishers around, and ultimately get arrested. It’s not clear to me if he did actual jail time for this or just got banned from TV, but regardless, they made episodes of Takeshi’s Castle with a big paper-mache Takeshi head for a while and then held a poll to see if they should bring him back that revealed that that after this whole scandal he was more popular than ever. Takeshi Kitano has remained a prickly curmudgeon in interviews his whole life, someone with perhaps a slight conservative bent who doesn’t like modern society, its phoniness and its media and its technology… such as, famously, video games.

------ MUSICAL INTERMISSION: Killdozer - Hamburger Martyr [1986] -------

Takeshi’s Challenge [1986] was not actually made by Takeshi Kitano, though, despite the title and the way people talk about it. We humans like to think of artworks as having authors regardless of how accurate a proposition that is or isn’t, largely in my view as a way of anthropomorphizing artworks because it’s awkward to speak or even think of inert objects as having intentions and acting on the world. The authorship function here is being absorbed by the celebrity tie-in branding; we want to believe that Takeshi left his fingerprints on the work as the driving auteur. The concept of the celebrity auteur game designer, contrary to belief that it is a recent development, was already well-established by 1986 and Beat Takeshi is being slotted into that archetype.

The legend goes that Kitano found out there was to be a licensed game based on himself, injected himself into the process, got super drunk over one long night, came up with all the ideas for the whole game, and the programmers dutifully took notes on every ridiculous thing he said and tried their darndest to implement it all. The original public source for this tale is the first episode of GameCenter CX [2003-2022], where it is a rumor proffered by an employee who was entirely unrelated to producing Takeshi’s Challenge, and he does say it was multiple nights unless that was a translation error. I also have heard second-hand that Takeshi himself claims to have done it over one dinner but stone-cold sober, though I don’t know the source for that claim at all. Indeed, I can’t surface any instance of Takeshi Kitano talking about this game ever at all, at least in English. I can’t even find direct support for the commonly-circulated claim that he hates video games (which I deployed right before the musical intermission,) which seems to be a key part of this whole creation myth, but which sits weirdly up against the keen-eyed enthusiasm with the novelty of Super Mario Bros implied by the design of Takeshi’s Castle. Although I did find him saying “I hate anime, and Hayao Miyazaki most of all,” for whatever that’s worth to you.

Implementation of ideas does not simply happen, and details that Takeshi Kitano could scarcely have come up with himself over dinner matter. Takeshi’s Challenge is obviously not the work of a first-time outsider to the video game form taking their first swing at it. The bulk of the game was actually made by anonymous designers and programmers at Taito, the company that brought us Space Invaders [1978] and a gaggle of other acclaimed classics clear up through and beyond 1986. It is professionally crafted, with no more in the way of bugs than Super Mario Bros, and its design shows a fairly sophisticated knowledge of video gaming as it has hitherto existed in the 80s. My best guess is that Takeshi came up with some broad strokes and the most off-the-wall bits, and the rest was made by a team that knew video games well and realized the most suitable schema at-hand in which to coherently contain those ideas was the adventure game.

A good point of comparison for Takeshi’s Challenge is The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy [1984]. They’re both high-profile collaborations with a creative celebrity author figure and industry insiders. They’re both adventure games with a notably open structure that find their own heightened and frustrating obtuseness fun and funny. They keep the punchlines to themselves but invite the player to be the frustrated comedy partner reacting to their onslaught of nonsense.

However, Hitchhiker’s is made with love for adventure games… while Takeshi’s Challenge seems to boil with something like hatred for the player, itself, and games that resemble itself. Takeshi’s Challenge is a cornerstone example in the world of “bad games.” It fits strangely in with its companions, because most infamous bad games get that regard through some kind of failure of implementation. Takeshi’s Challenge, by contrast, is an unambigious unqualified success on its own terms. It’s just that those terms are alien, grotesque, and hostile. It’s tweaking the nose of video games as an established medium, riffing on conventions, and its understanding of what it thinks “normal” video games are can be partially reverse-engineered. It is a funhouse mirror portrait of a genre I hold dear in a diseased, deranged, and almost necrotic state. It is an indictment.

Let’s review a history of adventure games in Japan. It starts with Mystery House [1980] because the focus on big pictures and minimal text made it easier to translate. (More specifically, it starts with a Japanese clone called Mystery House 1 [1982].) This is unfortunate, because Mystery House is a terrible game. Its parser is lousy, its world and story is incoherent, and half of the things the player does don’t really make sense even after you do them, nevermind reasoning things out beforehand! It’s hard to imagine that translating to another language improves this condition.

By the time we get to The Portopia Serial Murder Case [1983/1985], the manual explicitly and directly tells the player that they are going to have to systematically brute force solutions to progress sometimes. This is plainly just the expectation people have for how these types of games work, and it’s certainly not exclusive to Japan. It’s not brute force 100% of the time, but often in Portopia you gotta do everything you can everywhere you can do it, and then do it AGAIN multiple times in case you need to do it multiple times for it to have any effect at all, and AGAIN every time you accomplish anything on the off chance it might have silently advanced the game state one tick forward. Or sometimes, when you don’t have any reason to think you’ve accomplished anything because there’s no feedback. Slowly, you gather information and produce an idea of the optimal run through, learning from failures as late as the last frame of the game and gladly reloading from scratch. “Save scumming” is fully expected. You don’t just need to learn to play like this, you need to learn to LIKE doing this.

There’s a shift away from this sort of design for large games just now beginning in the late 80s, with Japanese adventure games in particular just about to take as hard a pivot away from this sort of thing as can be imagined. I believe this creates for the moment a bit of a generation gap between the adult designers of games for the Famicom/NES and their still-in-childhood players, leaving this an era of transitional pubescence that means the likes of Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest [1987], a game that strongly resembles Takeshi’s Challenge at least on a surface level, will not “age well”. (Sarcastic quote marks because I hate that thinking.) But it’s this design paradigm that Takeshi’s Challenge sees and extends to absurd lengths.

There’s actually a rocky escalation from a pretty normal baseline of confusion to batshit bullshit. A good example of reasonably-traditional design of an adventure game puzzle is the one involving the shamisen (a Japanese musical instrument kinda like a banjo.) Towards the end of the game, once you’ve passed through two and a half one-way gates that you need to optimize your run around, you need to play the shamisen to convince someone not to kill you. You’re given 5 choices and that’s the only one that works. It also requires a two-step process in the early game to get and learn to use, which makes it look more signifigant for appearing in two menus, but then again, all of that also goes for the shakuhachi (a Japanese musical instrument kinda like a flute,) but then again, you can bring both and reload to try them one after the other. It’s still trial-and-error where you have to return back to the beginning if you’re not luckily prepared for, but it’s not total guesswork because you have an enumerated list of everything to try. This stuff isn’t a nose-tweak, it’s just normal game stuff.

It’s not just the shakuhachi, this game is actually mostly red herring by weight. The first half of the game is the part that often gets it comparisons to the 3D Grand Theft Autos, because what you do is wander aimlessly and behave more badly than you could get away with in real life though the down-to-earth setting of urban city that serves as a comedic foil for jokey signs, vulgar people, and comically incongruous but extremely video gamey violence with gangsters and cops. There’s tons of things to do and places to be, but most of it is completely irrelevant to the critical path and exists for flavor, like the candy store or barber shop. They exist seemingly mainly for the sake of their own existence, to flesh things out into a better approximation of a real city center. They also mean that you can play Takeshi’s Challenge just by poking around and existing in its space for a while instead of doing anything to progress.

But there is a plot to this game, a narrow path to follow to the end of the game. At the beginning, your boss is chewing you out for not performing well at your job, and you are absolutely not on a mission to perform better as a salaryman. While technically you shouldn’t quit right away for optimization reasons, the whole game to follow has big “freshly unemployed and at loose ends” energy. To progress, the player character has to become a complete derelict, divorcing his wife and closing out his bank account and quitting his job and leaving his kids behind, and a loud drunken hooligan regularly making such an ass of himself that he incites bar brawls. At least he pays his alimony and gets himself some adult education at the culture center. Otherwise, you’re consistently encouraged to command him to act anti-socially. There’s literally no mechanical reason not to set his speech to “threatening” at all times because that’s how you get most of the in-game hints. Binge-drinking tequila heals his. It’s progression-vital to impotently wail at pachinko to annoy people and thereby attract them in to kill ’em and steal their stuff, like a siren but more pathetic.

Unless there’s something in the manual (which is likely,) it’s only the two-time reoccurence of a treasure map in the bookstore and pachinko parlor menus that clues you in to your eventual goal. Getting this map is where the game really shows its teeth for the first time. I’ll fully outline the process: You have to do karaoke, but if you try, you are told that the machine is broken. You’re not to fix it, though. You are to do the causally unrelated action of getting a little drunk off two drinks at the bar before you will be invited to do karaoke. Then, you need to select one of five particular possible songs. You can figure out which song it is by talking to random people anywhere in town, and they’ll sing it. But not only do you need to pick the song, you need to nail it. In real life, to the game’s satisfaction. You have to sing it into the Famicom microphone on the controller, and even the microphone-free alternative which seems like a debugging tool is finicky. But not only do you need to nail the song, you need to nail it three times in a row. Nothing at all suggests this course of behavior, just sheer bloody-minded determination about how this song seems significant. Once you do that, you’ll summon a bunch of yakuza to beat down. Do that and an old man with a robe and long mustache will give you a treasure map that is blank. You have a few options for what to do with it, and some options instantly fail. Oh, and by the way, when you do fail at revealing the treasure map, the earliest you can rewind to with the password save system brings you all the way back to the very beginning of this sequence to do it all over again. But it’s not as simple as just trying every option. You also have to wait. There’s two viable options: #1, you can soak the paper in water, wait more than 5 minutes but less than 10, then shout at it through the microphone to clear it up. How are you supposed to figure out the timing without a guide? Why does shouting at paper dry it up? Beats me. You just gotta be psychic. Or, #2, you have to expose it to the sun and then wait a real-life hour without touching the controller. Your only hint to do this is that you don’t immediately fail, but if you press any button, at which point you get a failure message where the old man chastises you for wasting your chance. Same thing happens if you choose to merely stare at the map, but without the possibility of success. Once you have revealed the treasure map, you must kill the old man who gave it to you, otherwise he will show up at the very end of the game having used the map to beat you to the treasure. I’ve seen that part get flack, but it’s honestly the easiest thing to figure out what to do next about out of this whole entire sequence.

That’s not a fucking puzzle! That’s absolute god damn nonsense! It’s not even something you can brute force, it’s just so open-ended and arbitrary! I’m not even sure how the person who figured out that’s what you have to do and passed it down to us figured it out. And yet… and yet… go read a strategy guide for Tower Of Druaga [1984] or read the way Jason Dyer beat Time Zone [1982]. This sort of rigamarole was barely exaggerating the way games around it actually were, and Takeshi’s Challenge thinks that’s miserable and ridiculous. Takeshi’s Challenge isn’t setting up quite-difficult-but-surmountable challenges, it quite seriously wants you to not to persist but to give up and stop playing. When you beat it, a tiny little floating Takeshi Kitano head tells you:

"YOU ACTUALLY BOTHERED TO FINISH THIS CRAPPY GAME? SUCKER. DON'T TAKE IT SO SERIOUSLY."

And it’s snotty, but he’s right. If you played this game without a guide it must have been a full-time job for you. Even with a guide it’s many stupid hours. Getting the map’s not even the hardest part of the game, it’s just the bottleneck. There’s the infamous hang-gliding, where you have to dodge and shoot birds while not being able to move up for 2 and a half minutes. It’s not actually that hard — it’s an easier side-scrolling shooter section than Gradius [1985] or Taito’s own Darius [1987]. But it’s a totally different kind of game difficulty, going from a test of persistence to one of reflexes. I suppose that’s what makes it Takeshi’s Challenge and not Takeshi’s Patience Test. It’s almost a tautology that any hard swap from one mode of gameplay to another is a sudden switch-up of required player skills, and you’re going to filter out players who are good at the main mode of gameplay and not the other type. Here that’s exactly what Takeshi’s Challenge wants, but other developers who do this will think they’ll somehow attract both types of players by doing it. Believe me, this kind of thing is gonna be all over the likes of Manhunter: New York [1988].

The grand finale manages to ESCALATE on the level of inscrutability of the map quest. You have to essentially comb through 3 large caves pixel hunting for random completely unsignalled hotspots and then duck there to get to the next lower level. While you do that, you’re gonna be constantly swarmed by beasties. This part is even more Tower Of Druaga. It’s undoubtedly expected that you use a guide or some other community resource to get through here, but either somebody has to have actually done it the hard way at some point, unless the creators themselves told people how to do it. Famously, though this doesn’t tell us about how it was made one way or the other, the original strategy guide for this game was incomplete and had to be republished.

Here in the back half of the game, where you’re actually embarking on the treasure hunt, the game turns from a goofy version of daily life more and more into a video game-ass video game. You cross a threshold into a fantasyland, first passing through a brief waystation of tourist amenities that rub in the well-trod manicured artificiality of your journey and its destination. In fact, if you haven’t completely divested your player character of attachments and obligations to the everyday world, you will get forcibly dragged back into it and lose the game after the hang glider segment. The plot to this game is actually itself a bit of an allegory for turning your back on real life to disappear into a video game. You’re not just a derelict of your responsibilities and a piece of shit, but you’re doing it to go seek a place where platforming and violence and optimization actually matters, where there’s fake buried treasure to be found at the end of the rainbow.

Dedicating the only two buttons you get to “jump” and “attack” were, in the first half, essentially a diffuse joke about how those aren’t things that you do very often in real life but do constantly in a video game, where situations like being attacked by like 5 yakuza members and fighting them all off have to be transparently manufactured. Now, those once-odd manufactured situations are normalized to the point where you legitimately gotta use the trick where you despawn every enemy on screen by checking your inventory just to get by. You’re getting attacked by snakes and armadillos and monkeys dropping coconuts from above. You have to jump to get to places you need to be. All of a sudden, the game looks less like an adventure game and more like Adventure Island [1986]. The timeline works out such that it might literally be a parody of Adventure Island specifically, since both it and the back half of Takeshi’s Challenge both take place on fictional islands in the South Pacific.

One thing I’m downright shocked that I’ve never heard anyone say, probably because so few people make it very far into the end game, is that the back half of Takeshi’s Challenge is obviously racist. On the tourist island, the hostile mobs you learn to recognize as inherently violent on sight aren’t wearing blue-and-green costumes but instead are the only ones in the whole game that are brown-skinned. The island with the treasure is heartily littered with classic ooga-booga tribal caricatures: bones in the noses, big cannibal cooking pot, grass skirts, the works. This is extremely well-trod territory for games in the 1980s, to the point where it’s basically luck I haven’t run into quite so blatant an act of racist caricature yet. It even threatened to show up in A Mind Forever Voyaging [1985], where it doesn’t reasonably belong at all! And no, I don’t think it’s part of the parody and satire here, not that that would be an excuse but it would be something. It’s not particularly heightened or subverted or critiqued, it’s just there. Like the shamisen puzzle and such, it’s played exactly as straight and thoughtlessly as you’d find in a normal game. But just because it doesn’t mean to doesn’t mean it doesn’t still damn the grotesque ugliness of things common in video games by making itself the ugliest version.

It’s a common and intuitive thing to marry the common treasure-hunt gameplay with the classic treasure-hunt theming and plot. When we enter the back half our salaryman character even dresses up with a classic ’40s pike hat outfit just so you really know how traditionally colonialist this is about to get. You are here to steal the natives’ treasure to claim it as your own. To do so, you must first impress their spiritual and political leaders with worthless trinkets and stupid tricks in exchange for their holy item. Colonialism is such a common thing that gets circled around that I ran out of fresh things to say about how bad I think it is the last time I wrote about an infamous bad game.

So here’s the too-cute counter-reading for this one: the first half of the game is actually the more colonialist one. You, the player, are colonizing the salaryman character’s life. He’s not a blank slate, he’s got a whole life with a career and savings and a wife and kids. And then you possess him, like a demon. You destroy every way that he relates to his community: his family, his career that may give him purpose and a sense of structure and role, you even destroy pro-social behavioral norms in general. You map out his whole society and determine for him what’s worthless (books, candy, flowers, personal grooming) and what’s not (like drinking.) You plunder his life for all it’s worth, liquidating all his hard-earned assets for maximum short-term extraction, and then set him down the path of getting even more money far beyond what’s useful for him. It’s significant that the player character is a salaryman at a loan office, because the whole plot ultimately comes down not to video game metacommentary but to greed, a bottomless greed that ultimately consumes and destroys all other possible meaning there is to be found in life.

(Originally posted on my blog, Arcade Idea. I was wary to do this sort of cross-posting, because my critical style is orthogonal to the star ratings and I always feel weird about anything that smacks of self-promotion. I think some of the people I like to read here would like this, though. If my anxieties are founded and this sort of thing is not welcome here on Backloggd, please let me know!)

No rating yet because I've only just started the game, but I feel like anyone looking at this page should be prepared because I think this game has genuinely the least helpful tutorial I've ever seen in ANY video game.

First thing you need to know is that this is an Active-Time Battle game. At no point does it tell you that that's what it is, or explain it if you're like me and have never played an ATB game before. Do not conceptualize of this game as in any sense "turn-based," everything's super-asynchronous and you're gonna hurt yourself trying to think of when "turns" are. It also goes for a real minimal interface where you have one button to make each character in the party act, and what that button does changes when you hit the "Next" button, rotating around the functions that correspond to the gear you've equipped in sequential order, so if you wanna keep on the same move you can just wait for the cooldown timer. The only thing the game ever tells you about the "Next" button that the entire battle interface hinges on is that it skips the cooldown timer, so that you can use it to spam your moves! Like, it's telling you how to exploit its mechanics and not telling you the basics that would allow you to craft your own strategy. And the "Next" button also changes to the "Fate" button every time you make one full rotation through your character's available moves, not just whenever the hell it feels like it, which is how it feels if you have no idea why buttons keep changing what they do on you.

Also, it DOES tell you this (in the item upgrade menu,) but your healing magic only actually applies during battles, and as soon as the battle is over the healing goes away again. Watch out for that. But you can heal at prayer statues at gas stations.

I had to ask friends across three separate Discord servers to be able to piece all that together, because to me who has never played a game structured like this, it all just seemed truly random and inexplicable. You can get through this game's battles on rapid, blind button-mashing alone, like when I was 6 playing Virtua Fighter 2, but it's unsatisfying and I imagine eventually you'd hit a point where you eat insurmountable curb.

Oh, and the other thing the game won't tell you that every player should know is that it REALLY REALLY wants to be played on a controller instead of a keyboard. It almost seems designed to make keyboard users suffer. First, its incredibly awkward default W-Z-A-X layout that makes you turn your hand or keyboard sideways and makes you jam your fingers on top of one another anyway. (Even QZAX would be better!) Second, it combines the "next dialogue" button with the "make Grace do something in battle" button so that you're likely to skip through dialogue by accident during its rapid-fire battles... ONLY on keyboard and not on controller, despite, you know, the preponderance of available keys on a keyboard.