Game Saved: Rez

It’s nineteen-ninety something--two or three, I think--and I have these glasses.

This is important.

-- CYBERDELIA MUSIC --

They’re made from lurid dayglo cardboard and they came with a video cassette. The video’s called ‘VR Cyberdelia’. It’s a music video, only not the kind they play on Top of the Pops, or the ITV Chart Show. It’s rave music, the sound of the underground, with spaced-out, trippy visuals. It’s not as hard or as good as some of the stuff I like, but the visuals, the sights accompanying the sounds . . .

It’s MTV on acid.

On something, anyhow. Screensavers gone wild. Computer generated imagery flashing subliminal Spectrum loading screens and Amiga demo disks mashed together with soothing waves of plasma and crystalline reflections. It’s like someone pointed the camera lens beyond our physical dimensions and now, in fragments of colours the human eye can see if not comprehend, we can watch the vibrations that tickle our inner ear, sound-waves playing in their own environment, as surely and as clearly as if David Attenborough was narrating the footage.

But those  cardboard glasses, those 3D-looking glasses are in fact 5D, 7D or more-D. Omnidimensional glasses that expand your senses as they expand your mind.

In reality they lenses are prismatic, or some such. They make abundant lens flare, conjure fireworks from light fixtures, and when you slot VR Cyberdelia into your VCR they make TVs appear in your darkened room, eight new screens surrounding one that really exists in a dazzling halo, reflecting its graphics in all colours of every rainbow.

And it’s cool. To a techno kid like me it’s really cool, and I’ll watch that cassette so many times it wears thin and corrupts. Every glitch is like a cat’s lives, refracted nine times over.

-- MUSIC STOPS --

And then . . .

-- REZ MUSIC --

It’s many years later, and onto the nascent and mewling Internet is released footage of a Sega game people claim will change everything.

It’s called The K-Project--K for Kandinsky, the abstract painter whose art was a physical representation of music, of sound. The game is synesthetic, blending sound and visuals, one reflecting the other. Music triggers lightshows, lightshows trigger music. Actions in the gameworld prompt instruments and musical motifs. How it works isn’t entirely clear; it’s a shooter of some kind, but the RealVideos are blurry, indistinct. There’s nothing to latch upon, no characters or designs. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, as abstract as anything Kandinsky painted.

And I watch the videos too often, and they never wear through. Rumour has it The K-Project will have a different name by the time it’s complete and reaches British shores: a name more in line with the dance music culture I adore, that the K-Project sucks in and spits in hallucinatory rainbows.

The rumours prove correct. When released, the game is called Rez.

-- FEAR IS THE MIND KILLER --

I connect the Dreamcast to my sound system. It’s stereo; the cables are white and red. The room fills with swirling ambience, the ticking of one menu option moving to the next . . . but it’s not enough. The controller, rattling with Madkatz Force Pack vibration throbs, but it’s still not enough.

I dim the lights and put on the glasses.

-- REZ AREA 4 --

Squashed between a floor of bass sound and a wall of colour I’m the digital Indiana Jones delving intrepid into the system. Viruses fall with a wave of my hand; I’m sat in lotus position in my protective bubble, encircled by code like a hamster in a utoplastic ball running Straylight. Walls shimmer and crack, the ground rises and falls, mechano-organic lightships puffed on solar winds and solid state tides blot the sky with missiles, and every payload, every stroke and potential flatline is spotted, targeted, and dealt with.

Because I’m in the zone. Heart beating to the bass kick, eyes drying, dusty, fixed to the phantom screens, I’m sat cross-legged as my avatar ascends to the next form: a pulsating, spherical sound wave. From log-in through decryptions, maximum lock-on, maximum hitcount, racking up a high score above and beneath a grid the world of Tron can only dream of. The landscape mutates; it contorts as I melt ICE and unspool code. Towering wormlike monstrosities fire laser beams, curled, surrounded by nautili; everything’s a spiral, a Mandelbrot nightmare, except me, the Hacker, actual intelligence in an artificial world.

Things get serious in Area Five. It’s late--late enough for the neighbours to complain--but I’m too deep into the system to quit. I spin and dive into digital seas, and when I break the surface the sky opens in peach-gold sunset, soon darkened by a viral ship big as an Imperial Star Destroyer. It appears and falls gracefully over. It’s surely too big to move in such a way, but here in the bowels of the system physics operate to the whims of the incarcerated AI. The ship is exactly as heavy as it needs to be, and so it drifts with the ease of a feather.

The music flourishes, that Californian Soul. The ship becomes a dark tower choking space with viral craft. My omega beams move at sharp angles, hunting and seeking and ultimately destroying as I’m taken on a brief tour through history. This is the Earth that was, the game seems to say, and how it came to be.

And this is how things will be from here on in. Life is an aberration, or if not that, a facilitator, existing only to create new virtual worlds in which the next evolutionary link might flourish.

All this and more it tells me as holographic forests grow, fall, and are disassembled.

Security breached. Data analysation 100%.

Past metal falcons with wings outspread and far above the Earth within, every item collected, every enemy appearing only to dissolve in fire. I evolve into 2001’s star child, the ultimate human form, and enter into our final confrontation.

It’s Earth versus the almighty artificial intelligence.

My presence unwanted. Why am I here? What do I want? Our conflict is like a greatest hits compilation of our recent, meaningless skirmishes. Enemy bosses reappear as coarse reconstructions of their former selves. Overextending itself, the system has fractured.

I repel them and plunge deep into the core as some forgotten processor or memory chip begs:

Save me.

I claw back fragments, exorcise the virus and resurrect the ghost in the machine. She--undoubtedly ‘she’--turns to face the dawning sun, reaches for it, examines her half-formed hands, her half-formed form.

Black diamonds give chase, charging like current along an electric fence that seperates us. They open fire, desperately ramming into me, and I unleash my Overdrive, smartbombing them from the sky to claim the polygons scattered far below. They’re final pieces that might complete. They’re the final pieces that will give her life.

In that moment I am not sat on a carpet in a lounge in the South-West of England. I am not wearing cardboard glasses. My legs are neither cramping nor tingling with pins and needles. I do not look ridiculous wearing a relic from the days of VJs and 2 Unlimited.

Her skin is silicon and light. In her hands are cupped the beating wings of a thousand pink butterflies, which she sets free to other networks. She never thanks me--the music, the colour, the joy of it all is thanks enough. And as the game’s eye wanders from her expression and out to the butterflies dancing away from dawn I hear their colour, I see their joy, I feel the music . . .

I remember to breathe.

(This is important)

And mission accomplished, I log out.

-- FEAR IS THE MIND KILLER --

Game Saved: The Handheld War

This is Game Saved. I’m Daniel Ness.

For Christmas my nephew was given a DSi in 3D.

That’s what he calls his 3DS. A friend of his sister’s--Bella, the kind of bossy older girl feared and worshipped in equal measure--had a DSi that she guarded with her life. Whenever she felt magnanimous she let them play with it, and so they both wanted DSis for Christmas, DSis above all else.

“Don’t you want a 3DS?” I said. I explained to them what it was. “It’s like, the new DSi, better than a DSi, better games, better graphics, and--” I played my trump card “it’s in 3. D.”

My niece looked mortified. “No,” she said. “I want a DSi. Only a DSi. Like Bella’s.”

“But why?”

“Because if I have a DSi that’s better than Bella’s, she’ll take it away and won’t let me play on it.”

My nephew is a video game freak. He gets through games faster than we can buy them, largely because he doesn’t understand the concept of saving, and plays through the first levels over and over until he’s bored, starting a fresh game every time. He wants to take his DSi in 3D with him to school.

We tell him he’ll lose it.

“I won’t,” he says.

“Older boys will take it from you. Bigger boys.”

“I’ll beat them up.” He’s six, and short. He goes to ‘kicknastics’ classes where he’s earned a white belt, the belt you get for showing up.

He doesn’t understand that his DSi in 3D is a status symbol. He doesn’t understand there are kids, teenagers and grown-ups who’re all too willing to push a little boy into the mud to steal his pride and joy. He doesn’t understand what separates a DSi from a DSi in 3D, he doesn’t understand what makes them different. He doesn’t know because he wasn’t there when the sides were drawn up, when the opposing forces squared off, when bigger, older boys circled the battlefield like vultures and the Handheld War began in earnest.

But I was.

Paul Winter was our first recruit. My best friend, his parents were on the cusp of going through a messy divorce. Desperate to win his love his dad bought him a plaything so unimaginably grandiose, when he brought it into school, as if wired together, our jaws fell as one.

An Atari Lynx. A full-colour 8-bit handheld back in the days when bits meant everything . . . and didn’t it look at least 16-bit, maybe even 32? It was massive, the size of a tug boat, big enough to fit an entire family aboard, sturdy enough to pull the Titanic. To a class more used to monochrome Game & Watches he might as well have brought an arcade cabinet to school. Crowds gathered, so dense not a photon of daylight could penetrate the huddle. It was just as well, then, that the Lynx had a backlit screen. Paul could play California Games in a power outage. He could play Slime World under the covers, after dark. So what if the graphics were oddly interlaced, with as much of the screen devoted to blank black columns as to the games themselves--he could play Pac-Land on the toilet, even in an eclipse!

The war had begun, and the vultures circled nearer.

Game Boys entered the field, wowing us, every one. They weren’t in colour--they were probably only 4-bit--but who cared about that when you could play Super Mario wherever you went? Kids brought in link-up cables, staged multiplayer tournaments in the lunch hour. Tetris. Super RC Pro Am. The tinkling chime of the start-up screen could often be heard during class, and you’d hope, pray, the teacher didn’t hear it as well and thunder to the back of the room to claim the Game Boy as his own.

More exotic handhelds appeared: the Turbo Express, looking like a walkie talkie, genuine 16-bit graphics processing, imported from overseas. Rare and precious, Lee Clark brought one in and the whole year forgot Lynxes and Legends of Zelda to crowd around and watch. He sat on the stage during a drama class when the teacher failed to appear and we gawped; he was only playing Bonk’s Adventure but he might as well have been delivering the Sermon on the Mount.

Then it was my turn to be called up for action. Having no console of my own but buying copious issues of Mean Machines I was a SEGA kid; of course, I came to own a Game Gear. Sonic, Wonderboy, Shinobi, Fantasy Zone--the full roster of SEGA greats, now mobile, taken with me wherever I went.

“Don’t take it to school,” my parents warned, but how could I not? I had to show this thing off, this badge of honour, this medal on my breast. I had no knives, no paintball guns, no cool older brothers, no WWF wrestling figures. I was nobody; this was my chance to be someone, owning a status symbol everyone in class craved.

So I disobeyed and took it in, and crowds oohed, aahed and gathered, and when Mr. Butcher caught me showing it off in CDT he didn’t confiscate it but asked me to demonstrate this futuristic technology that let me play Columns on the go. “Don’t let me see you taking that out again,” he said, but in a good natured way. He understood what it meant to a kid to show off his status symbols. After all, CDT stood for Craft, Design and Technology.

My school’s biggest fundraiser was the 24-Hour Sponsored Event. A single day and night where kids were sponsored to dress as they wanted and do as they liked. For some, this meant showing up to school in football gear to play sport while kids not participating studied end of term maths. But they’d always tire of tennis and rugby, and end up joining the rest of us in the bowels of the school basement where our war was fought with gusto.

Every computer, every console, every game, hooked up to the school’s electricity, syphoning voltage and current, the music room lit like a Christmas tree, sounding like an amusement arcade. For twenty-four hours we punched, jumped and shot our way through myriad stages, single player, multiplayer, playing in shifts, bleary-eyed, determined to last through to the wee small hours. While those in school uniform slept in their beds and kids who weren’t hardy enough crashed on their desks, we soldiered into the night, playing video games.

John Secker brought in his Spectrum. The games took eight minutes to load, but it was okay, we had time, and we played Underwurlde while the cockerel crowed, unaware we were still awake.

I brought in my Game Gear. Most of the time it stayed hidden in my school bag. I didn’t really want to take it out; I knew the dangers that could befall it, the vultures croaking nearby. Most of the time we were too engrossed in Megadrive or Master System games, or watching Paul Winter playing the Super NES his father had left in his stead--a poor swap for his dad, but an excellent way to play Street Fighter 2.

Some Game Boys circulated, played by kids waiting turns on Tazmania and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles. The school’s dim bulbs were hardly the best light source for the Game Boy’s blurry screens, but with Tetris and Mario Land to tide us over, we muddled by.

And nothing bad happened, no crooks, no thieves befell them, so I figured, what’s the harm? At three in the morning I took out the Game Gear, let someone have a burn. No harm. No foul. I wandered off to play something else.

Twenty minutes later the kid comes up to me. “Where’s my Game Gear?” I ask.

“Somebody took it.”

He wasn’t upset. As far as he was concerned the only thing that had happened was his game of Sonic 2 had come to an early close. But me?

It felt like my stomach had fallen through the floor, and that the floor was the highest floor of the tallest towerblock, and that instead of basements below there was only a pit that ran to the centre of the Earth. There, the Devil waited, mocking me in my parents’ voices: Don’t take it into school.

And I’d disobeyed and now I was paying the price. I could have grabbed the kid who’d so carelessly lost my pride and joy and shaken him until his eyes sank into his skull and his teeth rained to the ground like diamonds at a robbery. I wanted to pick him up and throw him down, and then raze the school to its foundations. Burning this haystack was the only way I could find the needle buried within. My justice would be swift and searing. My vengeance would blaze.

And then I was only a kid again, scared he might never find his favourite toy.

I looked from room to room, in the classes where bigger, older, smellier kids slept and watched smut on portable TVs, and played with flick-knives, and talked about loose girls, barely noticing a scrote like me passing through. I ventured onto the haunted upper floors where, my school being old, and having once been a hospital, innumerable souls had passed away. There were no children and no handheld games consoles. Instead they harboured instead shadows, bats and spectres. I looked outside, across rugby pitches which had once been creeks, under a sky where the sun dared not tread, starless and moonless, cloud-covered, unforgiving. I looked everywhere in my panic, in the off-limits office block, near the cottages with gardens that backed onto school property.

What about my property? I wondered.

But the Game Gear was nowhere to be seen.

I sloped back to the music room, disconsolate, exhausted, giving up hope of ever seeing it again.

And then, a sound: the crystal chime of a hedgehog grabbing a ring.

My console!

I located it at the centre of a committee of vultures, held between them as if they were pecking at its innards. I’d like to say the boys were bigger than I was, or at least older, but while we were more or less the same age the three of them were shorter than me by far.

But they were mean, cruel and twisted by years of people making fun of how small they were. They came from the bad part of town, where no amount of renovations and renaming ceremonies made the roads any safer to tread. They lived on streets we hurried through in the car, doors locked, lest they were opened and we were flung to the gutter.

All of this passed through my head when I saw them playing on my Game Gear.

One of them--the smallest, angriest, hardest--looks up from his game, glaring: a poison dwarf sucking nature’s bitterest seed.

“Wot?” he says.

And in this war, defeat’s claws chill on my back, I decide to fight.

I step forward--stride, really, with a swagger I don’t feel, with a confidence false--and take it right from his hands. “This,” I say in a voice like God’s, “this is mine.” I could have been talking about the tree of knowledge; instead it’s the games console I’m taking--no, winning back.

And the kid--the rough kid, the kid my parents always warned me about--and his cronies are gob-smacked. They don’t say a word as I leave. They don’t move a muscle. They don’t follow or shout--they don’t even drop their hands, but sit as if still holding the Game Gear, now invisible.

My heart hammers and my legs feel weak, but my fingers hold tight to my medal, my toy. I place it back in the school bag and zip it up tight, and don’t let it out of my sight until dawn has come and gone. And when I get home, school over for the summer, I sleep until teatime, bag under the bed below. The war rages on but this battle, I know, is won.

I want to tell this all to my nephew, who insists his toys will be safe. “I just want to show my friends,” he says, unaware he’s skipping through a minefield that might detonate with one false step. He’s too young. He doesn’t understand.

But I do, all too well.

And though I’m older, and the rough kids are far away, there are other vultures circling, hungering for his status symbol: a DSi in 3D.

The battle might be over but the war rages on.

Game Saved: Shenmue

The folly on the hilltop. The towering keep built so high stardust catches in its brickwork. God’s mighty finger, accusing the heavens of neglect and abandonment. The totem of a forgotten tribe, worn but still worshipped, casting shadows the length of midwinter’s night. Forever unfinished.

Shenmue.

Its legacy is too large, its shadow too sprawling. Who can remember what games were like before Shenmue changed our world? No interactive cinematic experiences beyond FMV nightmares and the odd Cinemaware title. It is as important as Space Invaders in the development of our hobby, our culture, our way of life. Bigger, more expensive, and more pertinent to today’s games than Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII combined, Shenmue wasn’t just a game, not a disc pressed into a drive, not software, not . . . code.

It was another time, another place. Another me and you, elastoplast on our cheek, revenge in our soul.

When I think of Shenmue I don’t think of challenges, of levels. In truth, I barely remember the game.

But the world? The emotion it provoked within me?

From a distant land in the East it crossed seas, ended up on shelves, and was so heavily hyped it was a legend before completion. Not set in some steampunk fantasy nor science fiction apocalypse, it took place in the real world of yesteryear--and not in ancient history either, buoyed by ballistas and crossbows and chainmail, but the recent past, captured and digitised. Jet Cola replaced mana potions, and could be purchased from any vending machine. Magic precipitation followed weather patterns circa 1986, transforming Dobuita’s streets overnight. How many day/night cycles, blustering storms, blankets of crystal snow do you take for granted now they’re commonplace and everywhere? How many seamless transitions from area to area, hiking from high countryside through chicken-scratch villages into cities alight with streetlamps and fairy lights and neon? How many Grand Theft Autos and Calls of Duty have numbed your senses to the litter skittering at your feet, the pedestrians passing you by?

In 1999, this was new. So new that watching the original trailer was akin to living a dream. It promised a world that ‘transcended games’ How could we have known it wasn’t lying? So richly detailed, the leafy lanes and sooted docks, the kids in the park playing ball as dusk falls. It still seems unreal that such a game ever existed. The melancholic, majestic score tugging heartstrings as surely as a kitten playing with yarn. It was our first glimpse of an epic story that would pass into myth, the hero’s fate uncertain. It was as though we shared the same dream and started awake too soon.

For too short a time Ryo Hazuki’s life was my own. His furniture was mine--his drawers, his SEGA Saturn resting anachronistically atop his eighties television. The shishi-odoshi spilling water into the koi pond with a sound I’ll forever think of as intrinsically Shenmue.

And our job driving forklifts; Mimi, our kitten; our collection of capsule toys; our friends . . . their number thinning as the snows came and time moved on.

-- NOZOMI QUOTES --

Our investigation to find the man who murdered our father. Our run-ins with his henchmen, our friends now in danger, our way of life under threat, and on the day our curfew--that we abided by for so long--evaporated like mist under morning’s sun I realised the situation had spiralled too far out of control. My days in Dobuita were numbered. My life there was coming to an end.

Shenmue encapsulates nostalgia as no game has attempted to before or since. It’s set on the border between new and old, where cliff lanes meet city streets, and rustic water features give way to industrial cranes. Even the arcade--and was ever a facsimile so redolent of pocket change and sticky carpets?--became neglected as soon as I bought games to play at home.

Nostalgia. The painful yearning to return to a place now passed. Carson McCullers once wrote “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” I knew Dobuita, the largest pearl on a chain leading through the village of Sakuragaoka, up along Yamanose and at its crest, the Hazuki residence, my home for however many days and weeks. I knew it so well I sometimes see it behind closed eyes, coming to me as the dream it always was, and as homesick as I am for the many places I’ve lost, I find I’m homesick most for a place that never was.

Let us not remember Shenmue as the brightest star in Sega’s fallen sky, but instead as the one experience among many that lived up to gaming’s potential. It delivered. It’s as simple as that, and it delivered a world that, like the Dragon mirror, reflected our own, with all the magic and heartache that encompasses. It dared to be different. It dared to be grander. If there was ever a turning point in entertainment software, one not dictated by processing power, but by sheer artistry and immersion then Shenmue divides new from old.

From a distant land in the East it came, and it set gaming F.R.E.E.