Welcome to the first in a series, where the Retro Games Collector team reminisce about their most ‘memorable gaming moments’. First up we have Trevor Briscoe and his Fractalus Fright.
Most people who have played video games over a period of time have experienced a particularly scary and shocking gaming moment. Maybe it’s the Resident Evil dogs leaping suddenly into the quiet corridor through a window. Maybe it’s the mind games played by the Game Cube’s Eternal Darkness. Maybe it’s having the T-Rex from 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81 breathing down your neck. This is a story of a moment of terror I experienced while playing a computer game that lives intensely in my memory to this day.
My tale takes place in the winter of 1983 but I remember it as if it were yesterday. The home computer boom was at it’s height and I had watched the great Commodore vs Spectrum playground battles of the early 80s as a bit of an outsider being the owner of the under-supported Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. As I said goodbye to school and headed off to university I also said goodbye to the TI, bought a 16K Atari 600XL and soon afterwards the extra memory to bring it up to a magnificent, for the time, 64K. Along with granting access to the much increased library of games requiring at least 48K, this memory expansion would allow my machine to use a disk drive and leave behind unreliable and slow cassette software forever but disk drives were costly and out of range of my student financial resources.
I began my degree course in Physics at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne but took Computing Science as an option in my first year little knowing that it would become my major by the time my second year began and the basis for my career. In one of my first lectures, I was informed by one of my new friends that another student in the group also had an Atari and was looking to sell his spare disk drive to raise some cash. Introductions were made, a deal agreed and before I knew it I was excitedly on my way to pick up my nearly-new Atari 1050 disk drive holding a box of blank disks that the seller had said he would copy some games onto while I was there.
The copied games I left with included two titles I had not previously heard of and that had not yet received an official release and went by their working titles of “Behind Jaggi Lines” and “Ballblaster”. The two early and innovative Lucasfilm titles were widely pirated before release and many sources claim the source of these pirate copies was almost certainly Atari itself. The two games were eventually released as “Rescue on Fractalus!” and “Ballblazer” but it is the pirated version of Behind Jaggi Lines that gripped me as soon as I booted my computer at home with the copied disk in the drive.
The game transported me into a ship travelling over a fast, dynamic fractal landscape that rumour had it was Endor just after the climactic battle in Return of the Jedi. Wether or not it was Endor, it became Endor for me as a huge Star Wars fan and I flew what I now considered my X-Wing fighter around the landscape shooting at the imperial outposts that would occasionally fire at me from the mountains. Ah, happy times! However, the main purpose of the game was not to destroy imperial bases but instead to rescue a number of downed pilots to complete each game level and there was a procedure to be followed:
Step 1: Locate a downed pilot on your radar.
Step 2: Navigate to within a couple of distance units and land the ship.
Step 3: Engines off.
Step 4: Wait for the pilot to run to the ship. If you were facing the pilot then you could watch him run towards you but either way you could hear the footsteps as the pilot ran to the ship.
Step 5: Wait for the pilot to knock on the door a few times after a brief pause.
Step 6: Open the airlock with another cool sound effect as he climbs into the ship (careful now – press for the engines by mistake and you fry your pilot).
Step 7: Close the airlock.
Step 8: Engines on, take off!
Now, this procedure is a long list and after a couple of levels I began to relax into it and become very very used to the sequence of events. I went through what seemed like countless iterations of this procedure and I knew it off by heart, becoming adept at locating and rescuing downed rebel pilots.
But this was not Endor, the bases were not imperial alliance bases and I had relaxed a little too much. I think it was somewhere around level 10 to 15 of the 99 in the game where it happened. As students are often inclined to do, I stayed up late playing and had moved up through the levels. Sometime around 2am, I landed as normal to pick up a located pilot, turned the engines off and awaited the knock-knock-knock. I can’t remember whether I saw him, but I heard the footsteps and then I waited with my finger poised over the airlock button ready to open up. No knock came. Instead something sinister, startling and green suddenly reared up in front of the ship, accompanied by a loud sound effect that I can only describe as the scream of a banshee from the depths of hell. The Jaggi alien went on to punch his way into my ship through the canopy while I had been rendered a gibbering wreck with a heart rate that had gone through the roof and wouldn’t come back down for around 20 minutes or so. Game over.
There had been no warning of this possibility. Even in the official retail release there is no indication that the aliens may try this evil trick and impersonate a downed pilot. You may play games that are openly trying to be scary or shock but what made this so much worse was that scaring the player wasn’t something explicitly in the nature of the game and so was totally unexpected. The game lured me into a false sense of security and then delivered a thunderbolt.
The beauty of all this was the way the game from that point on was filled with unbelievable tension for me. Every time I landed I would be a nervous wreck until I heard the knock of a human pilot, my finger poised over the engines to turn them back on to fry the alien with the speed only adrenalin can bring should I suffer the jolt of another alien appearance. The pause between the “pilot” reaching the ship and confirming that he was human by knocking on the door had seemed around a second but from that point on seemed more like an minute as time seemed to stretch. It was almost too much to take. Many human pilots were accidentally fried by my jumpy trigger finger.
I did work out some strategies to minimise my chances of a jolting alien-delivered fright. Leaving the airlock open would prevent the alien from smashing the cockpit canopy but would allow it aboard to crash the ship unless you could boost to the mothership when available. At first I would only try to retrieve pilots once the mothership had appeared and just leave the airlock open. Later I realised that aliens always had green helmets so I would only land and switch off engines if the pilot was in front of me and I could view him through the cockpit canopy as he ran towards me. If he was behind or to the side when I landed then the risk was too great and I’d be away for another pass.
From the moment I first witnessed the shocking alien appearance, when he destroyed my ship while I was rendered helpless with shock, I would do absolutely anything to avoid a repeat performance. Even working on a video re-enactment I jumped the first time the alien appeared and I accidentally opened the airlock. Still, to this day, it gets me. That’s what made it the most scary moment I’ve ever had in a video game.
Excellent! I remember this well. The animation for this Atari version is way better than the C64.
I am very glad it wasn’t just me experiencing this. I got a lot of crap from family from getting a fright over this “green Fozzie Bear” jumping up on the screen. It actually put my off picking up the pilots entirely, and I just started playing the game as a space shooter. I read the manual cover to cover afterwards. There is actually something, but it’s written as a communications log from a downed pilot. It says something like “I’ve crashed on this planet, waiting for somebody to pick me up. A ship has stopped nearby. The pilot is heading towards me. Wait, the colour of his helmet… Base we don’t have any… AAAAAA!”. As I remember the first time this happened to me, I did see the green helmet, but had no idea what it meant. I was expecting another “special pilot” like the ace pilots you can pick up. Thank you also for clearing up what happens when you let the alien into the airlock, I wondered about this later.