I’ve never had as much fun playing computer games as I did when I was a teenager. The true gift of being a teenage boy is the impenetrable focus that consumes you when you set your mind to it. Once you’re in, so very little can bring you out. It would have been nice to have some level of control over it as it can be a curse to be sure, but once you’re in, it’s all bliss.

Sadly that was a long time ago and since then, video games have evolved - and if you ask me, not for the better. Maybe it’s just my recollection but they used to be “games” in the sense that you could win or you could lose, and if you lost, there were consequences. Dying in a video game now is usually a momentary graphical flash and usually a teleport to the safe area. Games today seem to pretty much be designed to tell me I’m the chosen one (born that way don’t you know), feed me compliments, and give me big flashing messages about what I should do next. The way today’s video games lead me from quest to quest I often wonder why the games don’t just play themselves (that does seem like we’re headed, doesn’t it?).

Before all this hand-holding, games were a bit more like the wild west. They gave you a sandbox but after that, if you were eviscerated by a bile demon - well, sucks for you.

I can remember spending a good few days in my teenage years playing a role-playing game on my venerable Commodore 64. If you’re not familiar with role-playing games you take on a Tolkien-esque persona of a rogue or a magician and go into dungeons and slay monsters. All along the way, you gain experience, which grants you power levels. You can only use that power really to go kill more powerful monsters and get more experience and more levels. It’s quite the hamster wheel really, but it’s engaging for a while. And for a teenage boy, best of luck trying to pry my cold dead fingers off the keyboard.

Anyway, I created a level 1 thief and started the game. I was placed in a town full of hustle, bustle, mystery, and intrigue (all rendered in blocky 8-bit graphics).

I spoke to the constable. He had a problem with some rats in the basement. A wacky old witch wanted me to deliver a pie to hermit on the edge of town. The bartender kept trying to get me to drink his “magic mead”. This may sound like the essence of mundanity to you, but I assure you - to my 15 year old mind, this was nothing short of magic.

After a few minutes of toying around with being in-game drunk (an event worthy of phone calls to other teenage boys at the time) I got bored with all these town citizens asking me to run their errands and went to look for the dungeon.

In retrospect, this was probably a bad idea. I was level 1. Dungeons were full of monsters and monsters were at least level 1 and probably way higher. I was doomed.

But hey, what did I know. I was a 15 year-old know-it-all. Bring it on.

I ignored the warnings of the town guards as I left town - “Kobolds have been seen in the area!”. Whatever dude.

To find the dungeon, I expected a long, perilous journey through dank forests and foggy swamps; probably needing to slink past bands of orcs or flocks of dragons. I prepared my entire store of guile, wit, and perseverance and treated every keystroke like it may be my last.

I did not, however, consider that my computer at the time only had 64 kilobytes of memory (the computer, tablet or phone you’re using now has lots and lots more). Apparently when you’re making a role-playing game in 64k of memory you don’t have a lot of room for dank forests, murky swamps, and certainly not flocks of dragons. Apparently, you pretty much put dungeon entrances 14 paces outside of town with some text that says “dungeon” above them.

Right then.

So, with all my pent-up, unused perseverance and all that - I lit my torch and climbed down the stairs.

Dungeons were often created by automatically generating random floor-plans. Twisty mazes, odd turns - it all came together to make a perilous and most nonsensical underground habitat. After that was done, the computer then infested the area with rabid monsters of all types. Oddly, despite the fact they had no food or bathroom facilities, the monsters for some reason did not actually attack each other or mess up the place, but instead waited for a hapless adventurer to bobble along.

That would be me.

As I entered, I found myself in a room that my 15 year old imagination was able to wildly transform into the dankest, darkest, deepest, nastiest dungeon in the universe. The walls bled slime. The breeze howled of despair and the whole place reeked of sorrow and death.

To my surprise (which should have been no surprise, but again, what did I know) - in the room with me was a Kobold (a tiny dog-man). Holy crap - those guards weren’t kidding. And given that I was a full 14 paces plus one stairwell down away from those guards - they really weren’t kidding. “Kobolds have been seen in the area” - really? Like they could have probably just craned their necks a bit and seen this one.

The Kobold noticed me, snarled viciously, and raised its rusty dagger to attack (translation: the blocky, non-animated, 8-bit pixelated representation of (apparently) a kobold moved one square in my direction).

I nearly jumped out of my seat! I have no idea what level that Kobold was but I was not about to find out. I immediately attempted to flee by going back UP the nearby stairwell, but in my haste, my keyboard-fingers went the wrong way.

Before I knew it, the kobold was between me and the precious stairs to safety (or at least to the safety of showing the guards this kobold - not that they would have helped me. They probably would have let the kobold hack me to absolute death all the while they sat there saying “I told you so”).

I continued to flee but now the only direction to go was deeper into the dungeon. As I ran down a nearby hallway I came upon another set of stairs. But these stairs were going down.

I might have only been 15 but I knew one thing, computer monsters in role-playing games made with only 64 kilobytes of random-access memory do NOT follow player characters down stairs.

Awesome. Down I went.

Now again, as I said, this dungeon was randomly generated. No other player had probably seen this exact configuration ever before. This wasn’t terribly important as even though all maps are random, they are at the same time, all sort of the same.

Every floor of the dungeon was sure to have a set of stairs going down to the next. What I didn’t know was that in this dungeon system there was apparently also a set of stairs that went down four dungeon floors at once. I started on floor one where ostensibly, you’d find easy monsters. Floor two would be tougher, floor three even tougher and so on.

The designers put in stairs to leap past dungeon levels so as you got deeper into the dungeon, there was still a reasonable way to travel back and forth between the town (to sell your loot) and then get quickly back into the action.

Sadly, after hastily bolting down these stairs, I found myself on floor five. Now, a level 1 character on floor five of a dungeon is pretty much a walking hor d’oeuvre. But I didn’t care, I was 15. I sniffed triumphantly after valiantly escaping the frothing kobold and walked forward.

Ha. No monsters to be seen. Word of my courageous kobold evasion adventures precede me!

By the grace of random dungeons, just a few steps away, I chanced upon, yet again, another set of stairs downward. Another set of stairs leading down four floors.

Fine. Seriously at this point I’ve pretty much felt I had won this game. What danger lies down there that I could not skillfully run away from? What agent of death wielding fangs of fire that I could not deftly escape in fear? I spit in the face of fate - I trod down the stairwell traveling down 4 more floors of the dungeon.

The game spent a moment drawing the new level.

And, then, there I was. My 8-bit avatar standing next to the stairwell I had just descended. The dungeon looked bleaker than ever before.

I am quite sure to this day that the designers of that game in their wildest dreams did not expect a level 1 character to ever set foot on the deep ninth floor of that dungeon. It would take a commitment of cleverness and persistence (and just the right random dungeon setup) that they probably didn’t worry about the chances of it happening. But there I was. Level 1 me on floor nine of the dungeon of death.

Oh. hey. And what’s that. There’s me. There’s the stairwell. Who’s that guy in robes standing next to me trying to communicate with me sign language?

Hey wait a second. That’s not a guy. That’s a SPECTER.

Now, unless you’ve played dungeons and dragons or participated in a zombie-dress-up weekend - you might not know what a specter is. As a quick little refresher, a specter is an undead creature formed from the tortured soul of a murderer or similar evil-doer cursed to walk among the living spreading its tortuous hate with all it comes in contact with. Pretty standard fare for undead.

Hmm. This can’t be good. And those darn guards only mentioned kobolds - nothing about specters. Maybe they meant “kobold specters”? Heck who knows. But at this point, I had a situation.

The other icky fact about specters is that if they so much as touch you, they literally drain your life force from you. Again, not good. That might sound like it just kills you - which it probably will, but in role-playing game terms what it does is suck experience points from you and you can go down in levels. Which to a role-player is far worse.

Most undead that do this suck enough experience from you to suck away one full level, but specters are a bit more nasty. They suck away 2 full levels of experience. If you’ve spent weeks getting your character to level 7 - one touch from a specter and you are now level 5. This has badness written all over it.

Well anyway, the whole time I’m freaking out about all this - the specter of course is standing right next to me. And, as specters are inclined, he slashed me with his bony hand.

By all rights, that should have been the end. I should be dead. But I wasn’t. What happened next is a mini-mashup of role-playing games, undead specters, level draining, 64 kilobytes of random access memory, and 8-bit computers.

As I said, it’s pretty safe to say that the designers of this game never expected a level 1 character to reach this deep into the dungeon. They probably expected you to be level 10 or 12 before you ever got here. You would have died a hundred times before seeing this part of the game - I hadn’t even died once! (I mean, until maybe now)

Now time for a little computer programming lesson. Computers store numbers in lots of different ways. But one of those ways allows you to save space by only storing numbers you expect. And if you only expected players to be at a minimum level 1 and maybe a maximum level 255, you could store it that way (aka an “unsigned byte”).

If by some act of God a player tried to move past one of those limits the computer would “wrap-around” the numbers to the other side.

So - let’s put this together. Level 1 character, touched by a specter that sucks away two levels. Level negative one? Nope, we wrap around… level 255.

You can guess that if level 1 is wimpy, level 255 is basically superman. You could imagine the look on that specter’s face.

Now if you’re thinking I knew that all this had happened, boy are you wrong. I was 15, I was probably being yelled at by my mom to take out the garbage or something. All the while the specter starts flailing at me - trying to slash me over and over and over.

Thing is - now he couldn’t hit me. Level 1 characters are easy to hit. But level 255 characters? Impossible. Their dodge and avoidance skills are godly.

Wondering why I wasn’t dead, I finally composed myself enough to take a swing at him with my level 255 sword. One swipe - one dead specter.

Trying to understand what happened I looked at my statistics - and saw my new level. Huh. Ok. I’m level 255. That sounds nice. I must be really good at this game.

I proceeded to amble through the dungeon steamrolling any monsters I encountered. I finally worked my way back up to the first floor of the dungeon and found that little kobold. Hey dude. Remember me from like 14 minutes ago?

Some days are bad days to be a kobold. This was one such day.

Now, I’m going out on a limb here saying you probably shouldn’t give god mode to a (mostly) bored 15 year old boy. Once the dungeon was cleared I went back to town. But in addition to having all new weapons, armor, and levels - I had a whole new attitude.

And honestly, I was sort of a jerk. Want me to deliver pies? Clear out your rat problem? I don’t think so. Again with the tiring excuse that I was 15, I’m not proud to say that I pretty much just leveled everything.

I’ll admit that the game sort of became not fun after that. That’s God-mode for you. But I’ll also point out that it was very fun up until that point.

You can surely say games of today are far more polished and wonderful and all. And that crazy bugs are happily long gone.

But I really doubt I’ll ever write a blog entry about playing a modern game. If I did it would be titled “I got the level I expected and then could use the sword I expected and can now do 10% more damage to the new enemies I’m fighting who have 10% more hit-points”.

At this point, that doesn’t seem to be all that fun either.