October 30, 2008

The Game Doctor Goes Mad Doctor

Bill Kunkel Goes OT and Digs Up Old Business!

Welcome to the office of the longest running videogame practitioner in the business. On the occasion of Trick or Treating I’m going to answer a pair of questions that I am absolutely making up. That’s the trick. The treat, one hopes, will lay buried like a caramel center in the chocolate crunch of the answers.

Q: If you’re a doctor, why can’t you write prescriptions?

A: I can. They just arrest me if they find out.

Q: So what’s the Doctor’s opinion of the scariest moment in videogame history?

A: My favorite scary moment in recent gaming history (at least until the Japanese make a movie about a videogame that kills a group of young people and some Hollywood studio hacks out an even lamer English-language remake) takes place in Gears of War when you first hear the howl of the blind Berserker. Somehow, the knowledge that the raging guardian beast you and your team are trapped with is sightless makes the impending rumble even more chilling. Cliffy B did a masterful job of creating an immersive experience that generated an almost visceral level of fear.

Of course, as games improve in terms of graphics, it gets easier to generate chills, but back in the day, when bits were fat and pixels were gigantic by contemporary standards, it was a real challenge. In fact, I answered the question about the FIRST genuinely frightening moment in electronic gaming history in this very column in this very publication in 2005. So, since nobody’s going to bitch about the rights, let me reprise that answer:

It's funny, but despite the fact that monsters and Halloween icons have been in almost constant use since the dawn of programmable gaming in the late 1970s, the monsters were mostly no more than non-threatening targets, as seen in the Ghouls & Ghosts series.

The first time a creepy creature actually broke that fourth wall and made us do the joystick jump, however, was in one of the initial games developed by LucasFilm Games (now LucasArts) in the early 80s. Along with the Habitat project for Q-Link (now better known as AOL), the first two games produced by George Lucas ' game development crew were Ballblazer (later Ballblaster, I believe), a futuristic sports game, and Behind Jaggi Lines (eventually released as Rescue on Fractalus).

Unfortunately, both of these games managed to escape the confines of the Lucas labs while still in development and were widely available through "user groups" and other pirate sources once the game reached playable beta status. For Mr. Lucas, who had proven so deft at keeping his pre-release "Star Wars" films under wraps, the far looser security of the game business at that time drove him nuts and he actually threatened to abandon the field and go back to making movies exclusively.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevail, and while Ballblaster proved a fairly entertaining little number, Fractalus was an absolute marvel. Using fractals to create a jagged, mountainous landscape on a far away planet, the game cast the player as the first-person perspective pilot of a ship with two missions: 1) take out the anti-aircraft batteries secreted amidst a strange planet's craggy peaks by the enemy alien Jaggi while avoiding virtual death and 2) rescue your fellow pilots who were downed by Jaggi fire.

The scary part came during the second part of that mission. When you spotted a downed pilot, you had to maneuver your VTOL craft onto a flat section of rock near the crash site. At this point, you would see a pilot running toward your ship. However, before long players noticed something – and if they didn't notice it, it was in their face pretty damned quick.

Occasionally, you see, that "downed pilot" was a fake, a Jaggi dressed in a human flight suit. The only way to distinguish between human and Jaggi was by the slight, greenish hue on the Jaggi faces. Didn't notice it? Then you opened the airlock and almost instantly a monstrous Jaggi kisser was right outside your windshield, its ham-like fists shattering the shield and ending the game in seconds.

In a game world where monsters had never before been seriously frightening, this was the real deal. Everybody who owned the game (either the bootleg or the official version released by Epyx for the Atari and Commodore 8-bit computers) would invite an innocent friend over to play, dim the lights and wait for a Jaggi to pop up and cause their pal's bowels to loosen.

And that's our history lesson for this month.

Q: Let’s go OT, Doc. I happen to know you’re a big fan of horror films. Me too. Name five flicks I may not have seen, but should.

A: Great question! You should see “Near Dark”, a vampire film that was years ahead of its time, has an incredible cast and great direction by Kathryn Bigelow (the then-future Mrs. and ex-Mrs. James Cameron). Abel Ferrara is always interesting, whether directing episodes of the surreal TV show “Crime Story” or creeping you out with his military take on “Body Snatchers.” But in “The Addiction” he hits a real high point.

Then there’s “Prince of Darkness,” which has the honor of being John Carpenter’s last great horror film before inexplicably churning out garbage like “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” and “Ghosts of Mars”. Look for the great Alice Cooper cameo.

This next one could be tough to find. It was part of the fourth episode of the revived 80s incarnation of The Twilight Zone and it’s called “Nightcrawlers” from a story of the same name by the great Robert R McCammon and concerns a speed freak Vietnamese vet who was subjected to experimental pestisides and now shares his nightmares with whoever he’s with. The entire story unfolds in a roadside diner and if the climax does not send chills up your spine, you are chill-proof.

Finally, I’m gonna go offbeat and name a movie that is not conventional horror, but will nonetheless scare you shitless: Darren Aronosky’s “Requiem for a Dream” must be seen to be believed.

And that’s scary, kids!