Following a Twitter discussion about Simon’s Quest:
And also, it’s… like, the game signals very clearly where to go next at nearly every turn. There’s never a point when it asks you to search for some random thing buried somewhere arbitrary. It always flows straight to the next point… unless you as a player complicate things.
MIND YOU ALSO at the time the game came out, everyone also knew the solutions because they were discussed at length in videogame magazines, e.g. that infamous issue of Nintendo Power.
Anyone complaining came at the game later, probably through emulation.
The decontextualization that emulation brought to older games has done them as much of a disservice as the bad faith ranting of early Internet comedy sites.
Like. Instead of earnestly engaging with the game and going, okay, what am I missing here, we get this knee-jerk response of “wtf is this? this sux.”
Simon’s Quest has a really cool design, for the most part. All it might need is a couple of extra clues for the weirder things—even vague clues, e.g. suggesting that the crystals might help with dead ends if you messed around a bit—and I would find it hard to criticize.
(And yeah, that is basically every crucial hint to complete the game right there: if you’re facing a dead end, maybe mess around with a crystal and see what happens.)
There’s other weird, mystical stuff like the garlic in the cemetery and there are illusory or breakable walls that you need to figure out, but outside the mansions that all is optional. It just enhances the game’s sense of potential and mystery, making the imagination work.
The Goonies II is even more opaque, but both games were renowned at the time, and still seem to be by people who played them then and haven’t been plugged into online Gamer culture since, as stand-out, inspirational games that implied so much more than they showed.
The Sublime.
There has been lots of talk about Rebecca Sugar’s dedication to the Sublime, and I think this has always been a key component for me to 8-bit games in particular. It’s inherent in their presentation and the compromises they make to communicate. Add in bugs and deliberate secrets?
Like, minus worlds and Metroid out-of-bounds areas and all these other mystical, reality-breaking glitches, and all the hidden things in Zelda including a whole second quest where the rules of reality are different – they all indicate some greater unknown and unknowable order.
A game like Simon’s Quest or Goonies II, that steers into the skid of the mysterious, it plays into the communicative fabric of the medium and the expectations of its contemporary audience. They weave a bigger spell, of a familiar thread.
The mystical, it gets lost on those who just want to categorize and appraise rather than engage as a participant in a conversation.
This is What Art Is, and why it has historically been considered divine.
It works on one’s imagination and understanding, and encourages one to see what is not but could be.
All of which adds a new angle to that discussion of Goonilikes, a while back.
(I guess also, uh, http://aderack.com/builder/ )
Much of post-emulation discourse has been about reframing pre-SNES games as linear prototypes for SNES games and judging them on how refined their ideas are compared to what would come later, rather than appreciating them by the inscrutable bounds of their original canvas.
It’s a very White Man kind of history.
I am not even an atheist, right. I don’t find religion worth discussing to the point of arguing against it and find that kind of framing absurd. Like, it’s not a relevant question. But it is no mistake that art has always been tied to the divine, in pretty much every culture.
The awe and wonder that people associate with the holy, the very term inspiration, is wound up in this realization of a world beyond the practical, knowable status quo around us.
Art is important, yo.
Art is political.
Art is life.
Art is the future.
Art is compassion.
(And Gamers are anathema to all of that.)
All of which is to say, I now better understand why Vs. The Goonies is to my mind the ideal archetype of 8-bit game design.
And why I’ve always considered it so, for lack of a better frame, holy.
ETA:
Simon’s Quest is one of the best NES games, and one of the best Castlevanias. It has a lot to say. Much of which is in what it doesn’t say. Which is why it’s invisible to people who worship square pixels.