I think if I was ever going to podcast, the topic would be “What I’m Obsessed With This Week”. I have these random fixations on things – sometimes they’re satisfied by a quick read on Wikipedia, sometimes it goes much deeper.
I found myself remembering one of the many games my brother and I played on our mighty Commodore 64 home computer in our childhood – Telengard. Telengard‘s original program dated back to 1978, and by the time we were playing with it, circa 1985 or so, its code had barely changed, it merely had more handsome graphics. It was an attempt to create a Dungeons & Dragons-type experience for players where they could roam, slay monsters, cast spells, level up, find treasure, etc.
Given memory limitations of the time, it was impossible to actually design a labyrinth of any appreciable size, so what creator Daniel Lawrence rather ingeniously did was use the puny power available to him to simply set up the mathematical parameters and elements of the dungeon, and then have the computer generate the layout completely at random.
Randomness is the ruling quality of the game, and she is a stupendously harsh Goddess.
Once you “roll” for your initial stats, you’re plunked down in front of one of the game’s “inns” (where you can rest and save your game), and…you die. Probably. In fact, you might die several times before you even get to move off the opening square. The system of encounters, and the threat level of the monsters that roam even Level 1 of this dungeon, is comically unforgiving.
Oh, you wanted to ADVENTURE today? Too bad.
You don’t even have time to think – the game runs unstoppably in real time, and if you don’t make a decision to do something in five seconds, the game interprets this as a decision to do nothing. I think Rush wrote a song lyric about that. Anyway, this probably kills you too.
IF you are lucky enough to roll good initial stats, and IF you survive long enough to advance a level or two (or luck into some good equipment), you quickly find that to venture even a square or two away from that first inn is a terrifying experience. Creatures can appear (randomly) and steal your fancy equipment, and you can basically do jack squat about it. Undead creatures can (randomly) drain your character a level; unless you cast a spell that blocks this, which wears off randomly. You can be teleported without warning to a random (sensing a theme?) spot somewhere else in the dungeon (maybe on a deeper level, where everything that didn’t kill you before just got stronger – because f*ck Nietzsche).
You are going to see this screen a lot. I mean a LOT a lot.
And oh, were you planning on being Mr. Clever Graph Paper-Owning Dungeon Crawly Guy and mapping everything? Yeah, about that – every level of the Dungeon is 200 by 200 squares. That means 40,000 spaces. Per floor. Randomly generated with every new game.
And there are 50 floors. So a programmer in 1978 created a way for a computer to create a 2 Million Square Dungeon. And then rigged it so most of the time you’ll die on the first square. That is straight up Evil Mastermind stuff.
Now, some things are fixed once the dungeon is drawn. Those inns (which, by the way, are only on Level 1). Fancy, color-changing boxes that contain a lot of treasure if you brute-force your way into the code sequence (which then changes every time you successfully open it). Stairways and pits that connect levels. Weird, floating gray cubes that can teleport you to a fixed point on the floor of your choice – unless, at random, they decide to send you somewhere else.
Maybe Telengard‘s second-most ruthless trick – you can save your character to disk at the inn if you actually want to, like, leave your computer and eat. But when you load the character back up, the game erases the record from the disk. So if you die:
Disk? What disk? F*ck you, you’re mortal.
That’s right, I said second-most ruthless. The most-ruthless trick? Take a deep breath:
There is no goal.
That’s what I said. There’s no Princess, no big boss, no final treasure horde, no ending cinematic, not even a damn exit into the daylight. You are transported into the dungeon, where you will adventure until you die. Which will probably be while you’re trying to run your Level One ass away from the Level Four giant that attacked you on your first turn.
In a way, its simplicity now stands as a savage rebuke to all the fancy ways that video games over the years have tried to put perfume on the Sunk Cost Fallacy that hides inside the dark heart of most videogaming. All the fancy graphics and presentation, all the heroic narratives, they are a pretty lie. You’re not really there for them in most games. You’re usually there because How can I stop playing after all the work it took to get to level 60?
Telengard sees life differently. You’re here, it’s probably going to suck, you can’t control most of the things that are going to drive your fate, and no one is going to tell you how to make the best of it. So make up your mind what meaningless thing you’re going to do and get to it, because you’re definitely going to die, pitiful and alone, probably soon.
Life. Don’t talk to me about life.
So why the hell play this game? Well, it’s nostalgic (totally valid). And it’s weirdly-honest in its brutishness. And, with modern technology, I managed to get just the slightest leg up on fate. A downloadable re-creation of the game offered me the option to preserve my saved character. So, if I died, or if too much horrible nonsense happened, I could just zap back to the inn and re-start that leg of the journey.
I got up to level 9, with some good gear, and had mapped out a small loop that (provided randomness didn’t zap me elsewhere) would take me down through levels 4 and 5 to a treasure box on 6 that tended to have massive amounts of gold in it, which I could then tote back up to the Inn to convert to experience points. I was consistently winning the battles along the way, so with this route, I could safely grind myself up a few levels until it came time to map a deeper loop.
And right about the time I realized it, I stopped. Haven’t played the game since. Because really, while that was a pretty effective strategy for accessing more of the game, it was really going to be the same stuff. The same 20 creature types, at higher levels, with bigger prize totals. Each new level would take twice as much experience; that blunt, simple math inside the game’s code just expanding and expanding.
Which brought on the question: “Is this all there is?”
It would be healthy of more video games to bring us to moments like that.