It would be years
before I consciously realized just how heavily influenced my gaming and
creative life had been by one game series.
If you asked me in high school or the first several years of college who
my favourite video game characters were, I would always give the same answer:
Pit, Mega Man, Link, Tails, Toad, and Kirby.
Similarly, I'd have cited those characters' six series, plus
Squaresoft's Final Fantasy, as my
favourite game series. And yet, the
whole time, I was failing to give due recognition to another game series that
had managed to hold me in its thrall time and time again, dating back to one of
my first few exposures to the Nintendo Entertainment System.
It was a new
chapter. My aunt, uncle, and cousins had
moved, leaving behind their old house and finding a new, larger home in a new
neighbourhood. Their former house was
one of a great deal of memories for me: curling up in their empty fireplace
(which I never saw used), swimming in their pool, playing with the dog, and, of
course, my first exposure to the NES, Super Mario Bros., and—most importantly
for the purposes of Videoland—Kid Icarus.
After all, to a six-year-old, the memories of even one year ago were all
huge, significant milestones.
There was plenty to
love about their new home, however. It was spacious; with plenty of room for
entertaining. My aunt would go on to
become the host for most of the family gatherings on my mother's side, and the
new house was perfect for it: large enough to contain the chaos of a large,
exuberant family and still give people breathing space, but not so large as to
leave people feeling lost.
When we went to
visit, the older of my cousins had several friends over. The NES had yet to find its permanent home,
and was currently sitting in what would later become a home office, next to a
cardboard box full of games.
The system was
plugged into a monitor, and it was running something new, a game I had never
seen before.
Red. That was my
first impression. The walls were made of red stone, and a man in yellow and
brown was trying to navigate a fairly straight candlelit hallway, a seemingly
simple task that was complicated by a swarm of flying blue heads—with
snakes?—that swooped through the hall in a sine wave pattern.
One of the very
first things I noticed, besides the graphics, was the music. A rich base line (well, as rich as could be
produced by the NES's little sound processor, anyway), thumped away a moody and
enthralling rhythm, a piece I would later know as "Stalker" and call
my first favorite piece of game music.
My cousin's friends
were crowded around the system, watching as the man in brown swung a whip as he
attempted to make his way down the hallway.
In the middle of the hallway, a small window was set near the ceiling, through
which the indigo night sky could be seen.
The man jumped, whacked the candle in the window, and a dagger fell
out. Now the man had two weapons to use. Midway through the hallway, a small raised
platform was set in the floor. The man
stood still on it for a few moments, and a treasure chest rose from the ground,
while beyond the platform, knights in steel armour patrolled stoically back and
forth.
Upon seeing this
intriguing new game, I asked what any sensible young child would ask:
 |
| Stage 05: My first exposure to Castlevania |
"Can I
try?"
The request was met
with groans from my cousin's gaggle of friends.
Of course the little kid would want a turn. But then one of them grinned wickedly.
"Sure, let him try. He can have one
life." Slow smiles appeared on the
faces of the rest of the group, and the controller was thrust into my eager
hands.
I didn't even make
it down the hallway. No sooner had the
stage started than my hapless vampire hunter was swarmed by the flying medusa
heads, and I, unused to the game's idiosyncratic whip timing, was helpless to defend
myself. Snickering, my cousin's friends lifted the controller back out of my
hands as I stared woefully at the crumpled body lying on the stone floor.
I would become used
to seeing that crumpled form over and over again, because, while I had no idea
what I had just transpired in my ill-fated 45-second visit to those haunted
halls, I was hooked.
And so, Stage 05 in
Block 2 became my first exposure to Simon Belmont and Castlevania, and both character and game would go on to become
among my all-time favourites.
I came away from the
experience with nothing more than the name of the game: Castlevania, but it made an impression. Left without a game to play and with my
beloved cousins both occupied with their friends, I went down to explore more
of the new house, and wandered into the basement.
My aunt's basement
would eventually become beautifully furnished, the new home of the extended
family's joyously chaotic Christmas Eve parties after my grandparents sold
their house, but for now, it was simple and gray, with a cement floor and
exposed insulation in the walls (which used to terrify my mother, who was
convinced we would inhale fiberglass shavings whenever we went down there). As
I looked around, however, I spied a single small window, set high up near the
ceiling of the basement, through which just a little bit of the pale outdoor
light could be seen.
Instantly I was
transported away in my imagination to that gloomy hallway in Castlevania, dodging around bobbing medusa
heads, whipping the candle in front of the window and grabbing the dagger that
it somehow managed to contain.
It wasn't much to go
on, but for a little six-year-old's overactive imagination, it was enough. And it was all I would have, at least for a
while, until a few short months later when my brother and I earned a NES of our
own for his birthday (and, by extension, mine, which followed his by a month
and a half).
The decision of what
to buy was my brother's. Rather than get
a fancy system with the pack-in games of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt, or
the even more expensive option that included the endearing R.O.B (Robotic
Operating Buddy) and an additional software title, my brother successfully
argued the merits of the simpler option, just the basic system. No toy robot,
no light gun, not even an included game. Just the system, two controllers, and
something called the Official Nintendo Player's Guide. He then made the reasonable request to my
mother that, with the money saved by buying the less expensive system, he
choose a first game of his own: he selected the Namco-created and
Sunsoft-distributed Skykid, a phenomenal game about which I could (and should)
easily devote an entire post.
There are a number
of stories to tell about when we first got the system--how my brother's friends
pooled their money to surprise him with Konami's Top Gun on his birthday, how
my mother came home one day and presented us with Super Mario Brothers because
we had played so well together with Skykid, and so on--but the important story
for today's purposes is how my brother, upon opening the big box with our NES,
magnanimously handed me a thick black book and said, "Josh, this is for
you."
The Official Nintendo Player's Guide.
I was already a fan
of video game manuals, having pored over the documentation for Kid Icarus, Super
Mario Brothers, and the handful of games we owned on the Commodore
64. This, however, was something
different. A product of the partnership
between Nintendo and Japan's Tokuma Shoten Publishing that would produce Nintendo Power Magazine a year later, the Official Nintendo Player's Guide had in-depth
information about a select 24 NES titles, plus brief summaries of the 90 games
available on the NES at the time of its publication, and a quick 11 more
mentioned briefly as coming attractions.
I of course wasted no time in diving into the guide, and got into the
habit of carrying it around with me.
The summaries of
games like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and (of course) Kid Icarus were ones that I read over and
over, but perhaps the one that got the most attention from me was the section
on Castlevania—the book was opened to
the Castlevania section so often that
the spine eventually split at the beginning of the section.
The guide described
the game's mechanics in detail, including screenshots of each of the title's
items and monsters. The Castlevania series would eventually become a
sprawling, genre-bending franchise, but so much of the game's core mechanics
were firmly established right out of the gate. Simon had his whip, which could
be powered up to a lengthy chain whip through strengthening items, and a set of
five subweapons, requiring hearts as fuel: The Dagger, fast but weak, with a
strength equal to that of Simon's unpowered whip; the Axe, a very strong weapon
which flies in an awkward high arc; the Firebomb (really Holy Water), a glass
vial of consecrated liquid that hits the ground with a satisfying crash and
immediately bursts into flames upon contact with any part of the unholy castle;
the Boomerang, known always in Japan simply as the Cross, a pair of blue
pointed stakes lashed together in a cross shape, which flies slowly through the
air like a boomerang; and the heart-hungry Stopwatch, which freezes all action
on the screen for a precious few seconds, but is completely impotent against
most of the game's stronger monsters.
The monsters! Many of the big ones were there right from
the beginning: the bobbing, infuriating medusa heads; the swooping bats; the
stoic, spear-wielding armour knights (a favourite of mine) and their bulkier,
shield-bearing axe-knight cousins; the fire-breathing dragon skull cannons; the
not to mention the grim-reaper himself.
The game set the tone for the series, a kind of who's-who of haunted
houses, pulling in monsters from every B-movie available and tossing them all
into one giant castle, headed up by the Count himself. It nailed the concept right from the
beginning—every single item and enemy from that first game has gone on to appear
in subsequent games in the series, and even the format of the first long
entrance hall appears again and again throughout the series.
That last bit is an important point, because the game's title is
well-chosen. The game is not all about
hero Simon Belmont (in fact, neither the game manual nor the Official Nintendo
Player's Guide even identify Simon by name in that first game; he isn't named
until the game's ending, and then with the surname of "Belmondo", by which the vampire-hunting family came to be known in Japan), nor is it focused on Dracula, who doesn't make an
appearance until the end. This game is
about the Castle, which is the real star.
Even the Japanese title 「悪魔城ドラキュラ」
translates literally as "Demon Castle Dracula", giving as much focus
to the Castle as to its Count. Later
games would even ascribe the Castle a degree of agency, identifying it as a
creature of chaos, but the groundwork is laid out here, where every stage takes
you to new, creepy surroundings, with each stage having an distinct character
and feel.
The Official
Nintendo Player's Guide only covers the first three blocks of the game, each
containing three stages, covering exactly half of the game's content. By the time I got my hands on the
castle-in-a-grey-cartridge (my cousin eventually let me borrow it), I knew
those first areas inside and out. There
were plenty of secrets—life-giving meat hidden away in the walls, places to
stand that would cause treasure to appear, which in turn would put you closer
to important, point-earned extra lives—and if it was called out in the player's
guide, I knew of it.
Just because I had
the maps memorized, however, didn't make me actually any good at the game.
Castlevania has a learning curve. It might
seem steep, but with only 18 stages, the curve had to ramp up quickly to pose a
decent challenge. And that it does—in spades. The game mercifully offered
unlimited continues, but using one would boot you back to the beginning of
whichever three-stage block you were on, giving you a lot of ground to make up.
And, truly, that was one of the things that made the game so memorable to me.
Castlevania was the first game to really give
me a concrete feeling of getting better at a game.
Other games I had played at the time had shortcuts (like Super Mario
Brothers) or had some way to save your progress when you were stuck and come
back later (like The Legend of Zelda and Kid Icarus). Castlevania,
however, had none of those things: turn the game off, and when you turn the
power back on, you're right back at the Castle gates.
That was part of the
game's strength, however, and the feeling of improvement when you can breeze
past early parts of the game that were once painfully difficult is
palpable. The early entrance hall was
always a straightforward experience, but those bobbing medusa heads in Stage 05
took some getting used to, especially when there were small platforms to
traverse. Eventually I was able to get
to the blue-hued walls of Block 3, but making it to the end of Stage 09's
bridge and beating the pair of pink mummies at the end of the stage proved an
elusive achievement for a very long time.
When, on a subsequent loan of the game, I somehow managed to survive the
mummies by a hair's breadth, my brother (who was providing moral support on
this particular excursion) and I watched in horror as Simon plummeted into a
cavern beneath the castle.
This was new,
uncharted territory, the first stage of the second half of the game, unmapped
in the Official Nintendo Player's guide.
The dark,
claustrophobic colour scheme and spooky music stood in stark contrast to the
bright blue hues of Block 3's open-air bridge and upbeat theme tune, Wicked Child.
I dodged swooping bats and slimy mermen and jumped onto a floating
platform, only to immediately see Simon bonk his head on a stalactite and
plummet into the murky lake below.
My brother and I did
the only thing we could do: burst out laughing.
Near the later parts of a lot of early NES games, nearly everything
becomes variations on a theme. Castlevania,
however, continuously throws new things at you: new monsters, new obstacles,
new environments. Every step of the way
brought a new challenge, and required new skills to overcome.
I wound up playing
the game's sequel before I managed to crawl out of that pit, and it would be
even longer before I managed to survive the fleaman-dropping eagles, bobbing
skeletal dragons, and Frankenstein's Monster and his mad cohort Igor who
guarded the remainder of Block 4.
The rest of the game
worked in a similar pattern. A month or a year would pass, I would borrow the
game again and again, and I would eventually find myself good enough to pass
through another Stage, reach another Block.
One day, I somehow managed to get past the Grim Reaper, only to be
thwarted by the swooping bats that guarded Dracula's clock tower. When I finally did make it to the Count, in a
boss battle that I find challenging even today, he soundly defeated me again
and again. It wasn't until sometime
after playing the third game in the series that I defeated Dracula and his
bright blue monstrous alter-ego and finally saw the end of the
very first Castlevania title. By then, the series had firmly rooted itself
in my consciousness, and it has never left.
There are a number
of things I love about Castlevania, but
one of the dearest things about the series is its treatment of its subject
matter. I was a very fearful child,
plagued by relentless, chronic nightmares that persisted into my teens and made
the prospect of going to bed at night and sleeping a fantastically terrifying
ordeal. Anything could set me off—a
particularly gory VHS jacket at the video rental store, a Halloween episode of The Hogan Family where a character dreamt the
everyone turned into zombies, or even a pair of eyes in the darkness, stalking
the cast of Scooby Doo, Where Are You? Something would root and fester in my
imagination, and manifest itself when the lights went out, tormenting my sleep
and causing me to bolt awake too terrified to even call for help.
At the same time,
however, I was utterly fascinated by ghosts and monsters. My love of Halloween
rivalled my love of Christmas (and still does); Jack Prelutsky's It's Halloween was one of my absolute
favourite books, I watched The Rescue of Pops
Ghostly that worked with our VHS light gun system Action Max over and over again, even without
the gaming peripherals attached.
And
Castlevania was a perfect game for me. Often
creepy but never scary,
Castlevania's
monsters weren't hiding and stalking you; rather, you faced them head on, whip
in hand.
Even the later titles I played,
like the deliciously atmospheric Nintendo 64 offerings, chose action over
terror. The series, too, always had a dose of lighthearted humour, from the
monster movie actor name parodies in the first game's credits to the crazy
in-jokes and outlandish creatures dotting the later titles.
Konami is a company that isn't afraid to
laugh at itself (just look at the
Parodius
series), and
Castlevania is no
exception.
It was the perfect exercise
in empowerment for a terrified little boy like me.
No surprise, then, that where my brother had
a collection of toy guns in his closet, I kept a self-fashioned whip made from
an altar-robe tie in mine.
After all,
nothing keeps the monsters in line like a whip-crack to the face.
The game's premise is extremely simple. The main character is Mick, or 「ミッキー」(Mickey) in Japan, described in the game's manual as
"the normal-looking guy in the blue shirt" in spite of his
conspicuous pointy ears, which resemble those of Sega's mascot at the time,
Alex Kidd. Mick has inherited the family jewels, which is good, but those
jewels happen to be in the possession of Dracula, which is bad—and which also
raises a bit of a silent question about Mick's pedigree. Mick, brave boy that he is, goes unarmed into
Dracula's mansion to retreive the jewels, apparently confident that he can
punch his way through whatever comes at him (which, suprisingly, he does a
decent job of doing).
That is, more or
less, the crux of Ghost House. The game
is made a more compelling by challenging the player to be constantly observant:
hidden pitfalls abound, detectable only by subtle differences in the brickwork;
passing a candelabra causes a knife to be thrown at Mick from off screen, which
can then be jumped on, collected, and used as a weapon; passing a brass
genie-like oil lamp similarly causes an arrow to be fired, while jumping on
enough arrows lends temporary invincibility; jumping and hitting the overhead
lights causes all action on-screen to freeze; and, finally, the little
"?" boxes dotting the area give a random number of points and cause a
random amount of life to be replenished.
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