Rare Bits

No, really. It is. Or rather, it’s one of the greatest. Allow me to explain.

If you’ve been on this website very much, you probably know already that I like old games. Yeah, part of it is nostalgic – I make no apologies. Nostalgia only makes bad games better, but it doesn’t mar the reputation of a game that was always good. People forget that sometimes. But I also love classic play styles – mechanics pared down to bare essentials and pushed to the limits of what can be accomplished. It takes a lot of skill to create works of art with a surfeit of limitations placed upon you, and the eight-bit era of gaming certainly had it’s share of limits placed on game designers. (At this point, it would be good to draw attention to the obvious parallel at play here – my own work is mostly in the four-panel comic strip format. Limitations, indeed.)

But this didn’t stop the games of the time from having compelling stories. It just happens that most of that story took place within the gameplay. Yeah, you got a set-up most of the time – though not always in the game itself…often enough the only narrative given was in the game manual. Blaster Master happens to be one of the few to give you a real intro, with motivation to work your way to the end and everything. You see, it seems that Jason Frudnick’s pet frog Fred has had an accident with some…well, just watch this:

That shit’s AMAZING. You bet your ass I’m going to go through the bowels of mutant hell to get my frog back. Fred didn’t deserve to be the victim of carelessly discarded radioactive waste, and you can damn well be sure it was Jason’s neglectful parents that dropped that barrel in the backyard. Idiots. I respect Jason’s responsible nature. “Hell yeah I’m going to jump down this hole to get my frog back!” and “WTF? A Tank? Shit, I can roll with that. Gonna make the job easier. I’m coming Fred!”

Seriously. That plot’s no different than The Protector. Sorry, Tom Yung Goong for you purists.

But that’s all you really need. No overwrought protagonist caught up in an unintelligible conspiracy involving robots or A.I. or George Washington or whatever the hell the Metal Gear series is about. No Umbrella corporation. No world saving emo-teen with a sword that is also-rather inexplicably-a gun. There isn’t even a blue hedgehog with an insanely bloated cast who likes to kiss human women.

Because — and this is the important part — the story is the game. Who woulda thunk it, right?  All those hours you spend with the sound effects, and the music, and the repeated repeated repeated repeated attempts to just get one single pixel futher. The screaming frustration followed by nervous intensity and body melting relief as you go though the wash, rinse, repeat cycle of death, attempt, success inherent to games of this nature. Because, admit it – we all have a story from the trenches of old-school videogame warfare. Whether it’s the level with cloud-thing that throws those spiky turtley bastards in Super Mario Bros, a particularly manic session of tetris, an entire month lost to multi-player Goldeneye, or playing Blaster Master for twenty years and still never beating it. Those are the stories behind the games that supposedly have none. And I think it’s a perfectly valid way to tell a story – and one that’s unique to each player.

Maybe that’s why bad old games have such traction on the net. They create compelling narratives in the Sisyphean task involved in just playing them.

Anyway, here’s your closure:

Yeah, he saves the frog. But it turned his hair blue. Shit happens when you find a jumping tank in an underground cavern filled with mutants in process of saving your irradiated pet frog from someone called the “Plutonium Boss”.

Aaaaanyway, later.

Jason.