Pangs of Northerness @ 25¢ a Stab?

Just in case my last post didn't fully validate my parking ticket for the nerd-ville parkade, I thought I'd add this list. All that talk about fantasy adventure role playing games got me reminiscing more generally about the video games I played as a kid, games where I felt most sharply the pangs of sehnsucht that I was talking about before.

So: here are the top five fantasy role playing games from my childhood. Anyone remember any of these gems from the 80s?

5. The Treasure of Tarmin, (ca. 1983, Colecovision)

Pretty simple: wander the maze, collect weapons, spells and armor; battle magical creatures and what not as you work your way deeper into the dungeon, looking for the Minotaur and the treasure he guards.

4. Dungeons of Daggorath, (ca. 1982, Tandy)

This was one of the original 1st person 3-D maze exploration games, and still, to my memory, one of the best. The game had three simple features that, for an 11 year-old, intensified the gaming experience to pulse-racing: a beating heart that acted as a health meter (the faster it beat the closer you were to demise); the use of eerie sound effects that warned you about approaching monsters (the louder they were, the closer they were); and torches that gradually dimmed, making it harder and harder to see into the gloom. Not to boast, but after about two years of playing I did defeat the Wizard (and have been sworn to secrecy as to the final incantation that wins the game....)

3. Gauntlet, (ca. 1985, Atari)

This was by far the best game at our small town arcade, and the mob of kids crowding around just to watch the fortunate four who got there first after school was always so thick that you were lucky just to see, let alone to ever play. WhenI try, I can still hear the unmistakable voice of the Gauntlet narrator: "Elf needs food, badly!"

2. The Legend of Zelda (ca. 1986, Nintendo)

The original Zelda game. Apparently Zelda's a multi-million dollar video game saga these days, but there was something about the Northernness of the original that still has a vivid place in my imagination; and to this day I still remember how to defeat Ganon (lets just say you need a silver arrow).

 1. Dragon's Lair, ca. 1983

Designed by former animators from Disney, this Mother of all Fantasy Arcade Games used groundbreaking laser disc technology to create graphics the likes of which had never before been seen in a video game. The truth is, I never worked up the courage to actually play this game in the arcade, but I would watch, absolutely mesmerized, while others tried vainly to reach the Dragon's Lair. Sometimes you'd hear rumors floating around that someone knew someone who was watching when some guy actually finished the game and saved Princess Daphne. But I never saw the final scenes of the game myself.. They lived only as lost archetypes in the haze of my imagination.

Well, thanks for joining me on this little stroll down amnesia lane. We now return to terra incognita's regular scheduled programming.

The Adventures of Elroy (or: What has Nintendo to do with Jerusalem?)

A few posts ago, I shared a bit about my secret life as a computer game writer back in the Co Co 3 days. What I didn't say there was that, at 14, my game genre of choice by far was the fantasy adventure role playing game. Call me quixotic, but I loved programming magical quests set in magical kingdoms, games in the fullest D&D tradition I could accomplish, with only 128k at my disposal.

Now it wasn't the gaming itself that especially appealed to me, it was more the act of world-creation. Programming offered me the opportunity to create worlds where the diabolical machinations of necromancers could be defeated with weapons of light-- worlds where phrases like "you have discovered the Amulet of Imnodel (or some such)" were weighted with wonder-- worlds where words like "vorpal," and "arcane," and "adamantine" and "valiant" rang true, like steel from a scabbard.

And because they were games-- your games--you could not only create these worlds, you could inhabit them.

As I mentioned before, for old time's sake I've been working on a game using my son's game maker software, and, as those who knew me in those old times might expect, it's a fantasy adventure role-playing game set in a world where you can use expressions like "You have discovered the Vorpal Sword!" with perfect nonchalance. I call it "The Adventures of Elroy." Call me Tolkienesque, but it's the story of a lost elven prince, Elroy, who must journey through a magical kingdom overrun with goblins and jubjub birds, to discover the Treasure of Taran and regain his throne.

[I invite you to click here to download it. Enter the World of Elroy, if you dare! (Insert nerdy attempt at diabolical voice here.)]

But while you're waiting for it to download (or mustering up the courage...), let me add this: working on the "Adventures of Elroy," I've been wondering what it was about the fantasy game genre that so appealed to me as a kid. I didn't know at 14, but I think I might now.

It was the imagination's ache for a kind of other-worldly beauty-- the deep yearning and poignant desire for that elusive something that haunts the shadows of the best myths, and fairy-stories, and romances.

The Germans call it sehnsucht-- a joy-ward longing.

C. S. Lewis called it "the stab of northernness."

In Surprised by Joy he describes quite vividly "the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing" of an "unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other desire." It first touched his heart as a child of 5, when he was reading the story of Squirrel Nutkin in the Beatrix Potter books and was smitten by the very Idea of Autumn radiating behind its delicate watercolours. "It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season," he writes, "but that is something like what happened...the experience was one of intense desire."

Later, as a boy of ten, the "Stab of Northernness" would pierce his heart again when, flipping through a book of poems by Longfellow, he read these lines: "I heard a voice that cried, Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead." The ache that those lines awoke in his heart- a desire for some undefined thing, beautiful but ephemeral, other-worldly but more real than real- would haunt his imagination on its long journey through atheism and eventually to God. It was a pang for a kind of spiritual joy or ethereal beauty that he would later come to associate with the "Idea of Northerness" that he found in the Norse myths and the operas of Wagner.

This deep yearning for something beautiful, unsatisfiable, Other, would eventually turn Lewis's imagination, and later his mind, and finally his heart to God. In Mere Christianity, he puts it like this: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

This is the restless imagination's longing for that other world. The Stab of Northernness. Lewis found it in Wagner. John Keats found it in King Lear. Tolkien found it in Middle Earth (I've heard some say that the opening chapter of The Hobbit is sharp with Northernness, with it's thirteen dwarves arriving unexpectedly on the doorstep of a simple hobbit, to whisk him off in search of long forgotten gold). As a boy, I found it, among other places, in the worlds of fantasy adventure video games, which invited me to explore realms where words like "valiant" rang somehow true.