Category: Video Game Memories

The game that introduced me to my favorite hero, Indiana Jones, and can instantly transport me back to every place I’ve ever lived.

Life is change. Sometimes, it’s hard to see that change as one year blends into the next, people age, and novel experiences become routines, then traditions. But when you’ve moved as much as I have, that change is particularly visible. You mark off the sections of your life into distinct eras based on where you lived.

Before age 12, five different houses and five different elementary schools.

Two colleges, including one dorm room and two apartments.

One grad school, three different houses.

In adulthood, three cities (Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle) with five apartments between them.

Sometimes, I suspect that the reason I’m so deeply attached to media, especially childhood media, is because it’s been one of the few constants in an ever-shifting life. It gives me comfort to fire up an old video game and breathe a sigh of relief, reassured that it’s exactly the same, thirty years later.

And there’s one game that holds a special place in my pantheon. A game that can connect me to almost every single house, apartment, and dorm room I’ve ever lived in. To every stage of life from age 5 to 35. A game that doesn’t even make me feel nostalgic because it’s never been in the past; it’s still present.

That game is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

It’s not only one of the finest adventure games ever made, with a compelling story, smart dialogue, engaging puzzles, and a sweeping score. It’s one of the reasons I’m here today, still writing.

In 1995, my Dad picked up a few more computer games along with Myst. The point-and-click adventure game was in its heyday (so called because of the simple, user-friendly interface; you could play just using a mouse to point and click). Two major companies vied for dominance: Sierra and Lucasarts, the video game division of Lucasfilm. Lucasarts was an incredible company, fondly remembered by many fans today. Its innovative, exciting titles like Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, the Dark Forces series, and many others, pushed the boundaries of gaming and helped it blossom into a major art form. With the studio’s emphasis on storytelling and high production values, in the 90s, that L-shaped logo stood for quality.

And so my Dad came home one day with The Lucasarts Archives, Volume 1.

If you’re a parent and you ever need an example of how a small impulse purchase can radically change your child’s life, this is it. These games and demos laid the foundation for my love of video games, movies, entertainment, and storytelling.

Fate of Atlantis was the next game my Dad and I tackled after Myst. No notes this time: just our own wits. This experience is ingrained into me so deeply that I still remember the dialogue options we chose in certain scenes. When I’m playing the game today, I can still follow what I call “the Dad path.” We got as far as the ruins of Knossos on the Team Path, where we couldn’t figure out how to unearth the Moonstone. We knew it had something to do with aligning the surveyor’s transit with the tall horns, but we were stuck.

When my Aunt Karen swooped in to the rescue. My cousins were into the game too, and they had the official hint book from Lucasarts. And so Aunt Karen actually brought the hint book into her office, photocopied each page by hand, assembled a little booklet, and gave it to me. I still have it today and I’m still touched by what a thoughtful gesture it was.

My Dad moved on from the game, but I was still hooked. Thanks to Aunt Karen’s hint book and my perseverance, I was able to get unstuck from the Moonstone puzzle, and Fate of Atlantis became the first game I ever finished on my own. That’s why I still know it like the back of my hand. If you’re ever in one of those classic sci-fi situations where someone has cloned me, the clone and I are standing side by side, and you need to figure out who’s the real Alex Reed, just ask us some obscure Fate of Atlantis trivia. Example:

“If you’re the REAL Alex Reed, then finish this line. ‘How nice…'”

Correct answer: “Wait, there’s a chain running up behind the waterfall! It must be holding the elevator’s counterweight!”

I’ve often thought that Fate of Atlantis (and Day of the Tentacle from the same collection) played a part in teaching me how to read and write. Their unique interface consists of constructing short sentences to carry out simple actions. For example, in the below scene from early in the game, you have to distract a Broadway stagehand and get him to leave the room. Giving him a newspaper will do the trick. So you click on the verbs and icons to build a sentence: “Give… newspaper… to… stagehand.”

Playing through a whole game like this undoubtedly boosted my book smarts, especially with an entire hint book to pore over. Imagine a kid lost in this game for hours and hours, exploring every nook and cranny, filling up all 100 save slots, and you’re imagining a kid who’s discovering a lifelong love of reading and writing, with the encouragement of one of pop culture’s coolest heroes.

The story of Fate of Atlantis is tight and intelligent, written by Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein. Barwood was one of George Lucas’ filmmaking colleagues from USC whose experience as a professional screenwriter greatly enriches the game. We find the Nazis, just like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, pursuing another ancient legend: the lost city of Atlantis. They plan to use Atlantis’ power source, the rare metal orichalcum, to fuel their quest for world domination. Once Indy gets word, he’s hot on their tail, with the help of his old flame Sophia Hapgood, a world-renowned psychic whose magical necklace may be possessed by the spirit of an Atlantean king. It’s a rip-roaring adventure tale with action, intrigue, and archeological puzzles galore. Once we learn that the Atlanteans were trying to build an unholy machine to “make themselves like gods,” it becomes a fable about the perils of trying to transcend our humanity.

It’s a fine introduction indeed to the world of Indiana Jones. I was too young for the movies, so this game let me experience the character in all his whip-swinging, treasure-hunting, Nazi-punching glory. I think every fan who’s played the game would agree it channels the Indy spirit better than some of the movies (looking at you, Crystal Skull).

A unique feature of the game is that it branches into three paths based on your choices: Team, Fists, and Wits. The Fists Path focuses on action, the Wits Path on puzzle-solving, and the Team Path is a balance of the two, with Sophia joining the adventure. As I grew up, I grew through all three paths. The Fists Path was my favorite as a kid because you got to punch people (and kudos to the designers for including the “sucker punch” option to make the fights easier for kids). Then, once I got smart enough to solve puzzles on my own, it was the Wits Path. Now it’s the Team Path since it’s more character- and dialogue-driven, and Sophia’s sassy spunk and kooky spiritualism enlivens the journey.

I could gush forever about how great this game is, but the best compliment I can give is that it’s grown with me from age five to the present. Through the years, I’ve always found new things to discover: how the street names in Monte Carlo reference everything from Jean-Luc Picard to Les Misérables, how the Lost Dialogue of Plato is cleverly written in the style of an ancient Greek dialogue a la the Symposium. Heck, I didn’t even discover the alternate ending until age 31!

For the most detailed possible deep dive into Fate of Atlantis, this fan site has excellent features on all the Lucasarts adventure games. What I would add is some advice for new players. Fate of Atlantis was released during gaming’s transition into the talkie era (just like movies, games had a “silent” and “talkie” era). When the game first came out on floppy disc, it was a “silent” version with no recorded dialogue, just text. A year later, it was re-released on CD-ROM with voices, which are generally good, especially Doug Lee’s excellent performance as Indy. But the fidelity isn’t the greatest and compression is heavy, so I recommend subtitles for clarity, and to see how the game’s dialogue originally looked.

And make sure you’re listening to the original MIDI score, which is magnificent and, in my opinion, one of the great video game scores. A product of Lucasarts’ three in-house composers, Clint Bajakian, Peter McConnell, and Michael Z. Land, it has everything you could ask for: scope, range, variety, leitmotifs, and a genuinely gripping and dramatic climax. Like Lucasarts’ previous point-and-click adventure Monkey Island 2, part of the reason it’s so great is that, like a silent film, the music has to carry the entire aural experience. It’s an integral part of the gameplay, not just background wallpaper. So crank up the tunes!

Ultimately, though, I can never experience this game the way a first-time player would, because playing through every scene triggers fractals of memory embedded throughout my entire life. Like how, when my sister Laura would watch me play, she enjoyed the Team Path the most because it had Sophia. And how frustrated she’d get on my behalf when Nazi meathead (and Schwarzenegger parody) Ahhhhhnold would clobber me over and over again.

Or how, during my ninth birthday party, I tried to get my friends interested in the game, but all they wanted to do was stupid shit like trying to push Sophia off cliffs, so I just gave up and let them run amok like lunatics.

Or the night that I finished moving into my final college house. The fresh, clean, bright feeling of that neat, impeccable room with everything in place, shared with my best friend. The excitement of an incredible year about to begin. And how I fired up Fate of Atlantis to celebrate.

Or when my sisters and I had a video game day for fun, where the three of us picked separate games to speedrun and spent the entire play playing side by side. Laura picked Pokemon Blue and finished it in seven hours, beating the Elite Four for the first time. Kayla picked The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and made it all the way to the Water Temple. I picked Fate of Atlantis and played the whole thing from beginning to end in one sitting: 3 1/2 hours.

Some things are impossible to recapture. I can never go back to my childhood homes or feel the electric potential energy of another year of college. But Fate of Atlantis will always be there, on my laptop emulator, just a click away.

Some of my earliest memories are of playing this 1993 adventure classic. Its eerie atmosphere still haunts me.

A seashore on a cold, gray day, with smudges of distant islands beyond surging waves.

A bench, alone on a high ridge, with wind whipping across barren plains.

A desert, bare and vivid red rock, empty except for buzzing power lines connecting horizon to horizon.

Sometimes, as I go about life, I’ll stumble upon images like these and get struck by a feeling. A connection to something remote and mysterious. Flickers of childhood impressions of strange worlds filled with unknown symbols and inscrutable machines. Empty worlds: eerily, ominously empty.

I’m reminded of Myst.

To me, Myst isn’t just an excellent adventure game, a prime example of video games as art. It’s an aesthetic: Mystlike, which I define as “austere, lonely beauty.” When I see something Mystlike, for a moment I’m transported to distant worlds.

In early 1995, my family got our first computer: a Compaq Presario CDS 520.

The Compaq, as we called it, sat permanently on our dining room table in North Spokane. It was a neat machine: a cream-colored box with a monitor, CD drive, floppy disc drive, and speakers all built into one unit. To Laura and I, two and four respectively, it was a fascinating new toy, but by no means the center of our lives. This was before the Internet took off, when personal computers were novelties owned by middle-class families with geeky dads. Since the Compaq was never connected to the Internet, we just played around with it for a few minutes at a time: writing nonsensical notes in the word processor, tinkering with simple games like Solitaire and Minesweeper. That’s one thing I deeply miss about those days: the computer was just another toy, unintrusive, nonaddictive, and nurturing rather than overpowering.

My Dad had a coworker who was into computer games, who tipped him off about the newest, coolest titles. (At this point in gaming history, there was a distinction between computer games, played on a home PC or Mac, and video games, played on consoles like the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. Video games were marketed to kids, while computer games were marketed to adults.) And at the time, there was no cooler computer game than Myst. Released in September 1993, Myst had already sold a million copies by the time we bought it, and would remain the best-selling PC game until The Sims surpassed it in 2002. As a CD-only game, it spurred mass adoption of the CD-ROM drive, rendering floppy drives gradually obsolete.

Myst was said to be so enthralling, so immersive, that people dreamed about it. And indeed, I did. I once dreamed that I walked into the living room of our North Spokane house, where, on the shelves where I normally stashed my Star Wars playsets, I found miniature dioramas of the worlds of Myst. I peered down, fascinated, at the redwoods and buildings and walkways, like a perfect snowglobe world.

People became obsessed with solving the game. If you could finish it in under a week with no guide, you were a certified genius. My Dad was one of those who got hooked. We played the game together, beginning to end. Sitting on my Dad’s lap playing Myst is one of my earliest memories. And the funny thing is, even though I’m sure he was the one figuring out all the puzzles, I still think of it as us playing Myst, solving it together.

I remember Dad pointing out how the “sad” credits music changed to “happy” credits music after we finished the game. And how he let me choose which color pages to gather and therefore which brother to trust: Sirrus or Achenar. I picked Achenar because I thought he looked friendlier with his round face and crazy giggle, and felt absolute devastation at the reveal that he was evil and had trapped us in his book prison forever.

This was also the age of computer gaming where the player was expected to take notes. No in-game hand-holding. I view my Dad’s Myst notes as precious artifacts and have saved them through many moves and many years. I was always impressed that he diagrammed the entire underground maze in the Selenitic Age (apparently missing the audio cue that’s supposed to guide you through!).

One of Laura’s first memories is watching me play Myst. More than twenty years later, we were hanging out in our parents’ living room. I hooked up my laptop to the big HD TV and started playing Myst, which Laura hadn’t seen in years. From that very first view of Myst Island, and those first sounds of the sea lapping around the docks, she had an intense, visceral emotional reaction. As I explored the island more, she kept exclaiming, “The wind! Oh my God, that wind sound!” It got so intense for her that she actually had to leave the room. When I asked later what was up, she explained, “Just hearing those sounds again triggered something so deep. This overwhelming sensation of bleakness and loneliness.”

I even tried showing the game to my friend Alex sometime during college (yes, another Alex). Usually, he liked to watch me play video games; we spent many an afternoon chilling while I played Zelda to entertain us both. But Myst struck a dark chord in him too. He watched me click around for about ten seconds and physically backed away: “Oh, no, no, no. This game is like my nightmares.” He said that his personal nightmare was being all alone, trapped in a confined space, and being forced to solve puzzles or else. “That plus the jerky motion…” he actually shivered. (Needless to say, Alex is not the biggest fan of escape rooms.)

As you’ve gathered, one of the central features of Myst is its lonely and eerie atmosphere. The premise of the game is that you appear on a mysterious island filled with puzzles to solve and have to figure out what’s going on and what to do. That’s it. Its brilliance is its simplicity. The game is played in first person; the main character is you. All you do is point the mouse and click. Better than any game before it, Myst lowered the barrier between yourself and the game world, allowing you to feel like you were there.

The game engine allows you to click through pre-rendered scenes of evocative 3D worlds, but the technology didn’t yet support realistic characters you could interact with. So aside from three characters who mainly appear within screens (portrayed by actors in FMV – Full Motion Video), the worlds of Myst are empty, which the designers brilliantly utilize as a thematic point.

As you explore more, you discover that you can travel to other worlds using magical Linking Books, and that you’ve stumbled into a dark family drama. Atrus, one of the last survivors of a civilization that perfected the art of bookmaking, uses his books to explore, learn, and establish benevolent contact with the peoples he finds. But his sons Sirrus and Achenar, behind his back, cruelly dominate and exploit those peoples. And so, when you arrive in each world, which you know from Atrus’ journals used to be richly inhabited, you find them empty. Chillingly empty.

The result is one of the best works of art demonstrating the evils of colonialism (a theme explored even more effectively in the sequel Riven). In the Mechanical Age journal, you read that a fortress used to shelter a small group of survivors weathering an onslaught of pirate attacks. The gray sky will never be blue, the people say, until the pirates are defeated. When you arrive in the Mechanical Age, you find that the sky is blue… but the fortress is empty. Evidently the pirates have been defeated… but where are the people? You look through a telescope and see a skeleton hung from a mast. Is this one of the pirates… or one of the people?

In the Channelwood Age journal, you read about redwood trees growing directly from the water, with a society of people living in treehouses and walkways built halfway up the trunks. When you get there, you find the village abandoned. Were the people driven off… or killed?

There’s a concept in video games called “environmental storytelling,” which is when the game world itself tells a story through the placement of objects, small details, mood, and atmosphere. Myst and Riven do this brilliantly. Aside from the Selenitic Age, which is more about pure puzzle solving, the Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood Ages each tell a silent story of how Sirrus and Achenar disrupted or destroyed the lives of the people living there. In Channelwood, you see how they built their own layer of treehouses above the rest, with a terrifying altar / execution chamber to force the locals to submit in fear. Their bedrooms in Channelwood and Stoneship are grim testaments to their different flavors of depravity, with Sirrus’ lust for riches contrasted with Achenar’s naked barbarity.

This environmental richness is what has compelled me to return to Myst for thirty years and counting. To me, it’s less about the puzzle solving and more about the atmosphere. I’m the type of player who just wants to explore beautiful, imaginative worlds forever (in the classic Bartle taxonomy of player types, I’m an Explorer to the core). Every so often, I just need to visit the worlds of Myst again. They’re compelling in themselves, yes, but they also connect me to thirty years of personal history, right back to sitting on my Dad’s lap in North Spokane.

And I don’t think Myst will ever leave my dreams. Recently, I visited Capilano Suspension Bridge Park in Vancouver, BC. I’d been wanting to go for years; as a bonafide Explorer, it was irresistible. The park features a breathtaking (and very wobbly) pedestrian bridge across a ravine, and a series of walkways built halfway up massive trees in a small patch of temperate rainforest. Wandering among the walkways was a surreal and moving experience. Because it felt like I’d stepped straight into a dream. It was Channelwood come to life. I could practically hear the brooding wind, creaking wood, and chirping birds straight from the game. It felt like visiting a fantasy land I’d imagined all my life, but also coming home.

You could almost call it Mystlike.