This is part 2 in an ongoing series I've started on my life in games. It was originally going to be titled "Gamoires" but I thought fewer people would get that.

Anyway, episode one is HERE.

On to part 2.

Jumping Through the Walls

I'm indoors. Outside, pelting the pop-tents and white trailers is the echo of rain, a splattering rattle of beads. On TV I can watch the last Beijing leaps and rolls and I'm thinking nobody has ever worked out how to make a proper Olympics game. It's just not that easy. You're taking a swallowed whole childhood of precision, the smallest hints of wrist and movement and synthesizing it into a few keypresses or an Active Time Event. Simulating the chalk-dust lifts and pommel-horse spins with an X Square Triangle Triangle.

The Olympics this year are in Beijing, but in 2010, they'll be at my virtual doorstop, Vancouver, Canada. The snow Olympics. This is therefore a summer story of snow.



Far from this Austrian campground near the off-season ski-lifts, is China. A setting, but also a symbol. It's our world. It's the familiar poverty, the steel gates of the law, the power flow through the barrel of guns. It's the lifts to nowhere outside the campground, it's the ice broken from the tips of Whistler, 1000s of kilometers away. But right now, it's just this: TV. Games. Flags. Handstands and breaststrokes, dead lifts and dives.

If anything the old tinny SID sounds and 8-bit pixels of the Commodore were more on point than this PSXBOX360 stuff. At least cranking that creaky joystick, shuttling that red handle oar-like with long even strokes (yeah, alright, but we weren't aware of the symbolism at the time) at least took some muscle. Some sense of exertion in our immersion.



Olympic games sell on play of the "role" variety not mainly of the "game." There was a kind of plastic patriotism seeing about 7 double-wide pixels atop a podium, gold glinting, national anthem in computer talk through grainy speakers. Take off your greasy baseball cap and sing along. Although my country was always EPYX, flag rustling in the wind.

I'm talking about the floppy EPYX Summer Games and Winter Games of course, games I did not own. Or rather I did own, but by laziness more than anything. Of the "Yeah, I'll return it tomorrow" variety.

Winter, 1986. We'd left the group-home finally. My folks drove North, where the social work was. For a good reason. They needed social workers like they needed cops. Drugs, cold, booze, and the poor, crammed beneath layers of snow like cold folds of a long white sea. The roads thick with textbooks of ice, pages of rainwater that would crack and creak in the spring, a full-bodied layer, an ice road overtop the asfault highway.



Fort St. James. Small northern community near the almost notable Prince George, home of pulp mills and lumber work. From our short-term home in the cheap hotel, to our rathole on the lake, to our house on the hill. Moving up in the world. The ground melting beneath us. Client kids in cold water.

Up there, you carve friendships from ice detritus. And my dad had carved a few. Folks who knew the social work. The intake. Stuff I knew nothing about.

I was too busy jumping through walls.

It was a friend of my Dad's who first hooked me up with the glitch. They were big news back then. Virtual features of any good game. Holes in the map, invincible enemies, things that caused screenfreeze. Summer games was no exception. You could wrangle a perfect score in Gymnastics just by helplessly flailing and falling over as much as humanly possible: probably a sympathy vote for making your arms fall off in the proceedings.

For me, this was the best part of a nearly insurmountable game. I would don my Superman suit (I didn't even know who Superman was) with my mom-stitched silky-sequiny red cape, sit down and watch the funny pixels fall down--and then win.



Summer games was the first, but not the most significant glitch. Outside, the glitch of swirling winds, of desperate fists and brown glass beat down, and my dad struggled to weather and glue it together. My mom worked hard and waited for us to leave, and inside, the giggling and the falling down.

And I jumped through the wall.

I never found World -1. Never found 40 lives in Tempest, and it was years before the amazing invisible woman.

It was on Ninja, by Mastertronic. I remember the bulky plastic case that never clasped properly. I remember the sound like chopping glass and crashes, the endless rooms of flying kicks. It's not the Ninja game people remember for that beige box. The Last Ninja claims that title, but if the Last was the Last, then Ninja was the first. Black pajamas in daylight and all.



Because Ninja's not particularly famous, the glitch I found all on my own isn't that famous either, which is what made it special, way back by the eagles and ice. This was long before Porn was downloadable, long before most of us even had cheat hint-lines. Games were a portmanteau of secrets, or a miserable pile of little secrets, if you prefer references.

Ninja was an awesome early exploit of the Ninja craze that claimed the discount shelves of the 80's. There are probably more Ninja movies in Betamax than any other. This was for me an oddly eerie game, with awesome, jarring music and simple but deep gameplay. Numerous projectiles you could pick up, use, lose and re-find, a variety of hard-to-use moves, a maze of unique corridors, hidden treasure, etc. There were ninjas that could toss your weapons back at you, a fairly new innovation, I'm sure. Plus, the way the music and sound cut in and out seemingly at random was weird and unsettling. The way enemies lined up and waited turn before attacking was so classic it barely deems mention. Looking back, the game was simple and short, and not too hard, but that's now. I didn't play it to win. I never did back then.

In this game, which for my impatient fingers was nigh impossible, you could leap through one wall and enter another world. Health was inverse. You could only die by being healed. Rooms were a glitchy mess. Enemies grew stronger and eventually invincible. It was the ultimate secret level. A level they didn't bother to program.

Finding Ninja's secret world was much more impressive than simply stumbling into a secret garden. This took skill, luck and random chance. For my 6 year old self, kicking my way to the right wall and then hitting it just right was like clambering over a slick stile. I could spend hours jumping into the wrong walls the wrong way, just to see sprites upside-down and backwards.



I really think the magnificent glitch of Ninja changed me. I sought glitches, giggled at other in-game mistakes, made my own. I made my old Touch N' Tell (yes, they actually called it that) confused by sliding the wrong cards over the surface.

/Touches Dog.
VO: That's the Yellow Star. Touch the Black Star.
/Touches Ball.
VO: Correct.

The world beyond the wall was a scary place. Rules didn't work right. The world didn't work right. But I loved it, sought it, searched for glitch-worlds. I jumped into walls in other games, just in case they hid this unsettling secret. That same year I tried to fly using my Grandpa's walking stick. I made a raisin disappear poof, real-world glitch. I made lights come on just by opening my eyes. I was becoming a wizard.

Now of course, people may make a decent Olympics game. They may make you shake it, or lean on the balance board, run in place, make you work a bit. But I wonder, will there ever be another glitch-world? Will you fall and scrape and bump your way to the sympathy 10?



The vast majority of the world didn't play hockey in the basement of their house on the hill. They slipped along cracks on the cold lake. They subsisted in a world of harsh winds and broken glass. There is no sympathy 10. And there isn't any wall to jump through either. But I know me. I'm going to keep jumping. That's what I do, even if my face bruises and my knees bleed, I've got to jump.

Bugs are beautiful. They're still the best part of the game for me. The end boss explodes, the credits roll and that's it? No. I ask, how can I make this break. How can I find Minus world? Blackholes and screenflicker, infinite gold and negative lives. A world with opposite rules would look pretty good right now.

Here though, light brightens brown wood, laundry tumbles in the old grey machine. On the TV is a 6.5, tumbling her way through a routine. Outside there, outside the new stadium is the city, and outside that the world, and that's where I am, right there, down in the midst of it.



Inside, there's light. It's warm here. But outside, it's just drizzling, a dark cold rain that scatters in fragments against the old, old glass.