An Ape Assembled From Scrap: Donkey Kong
Craftsmanship. There’s a loaded word. In an age when art in games is conflated with evermore beautiful graphics and evermore cinematic storytelling, when teams of hundreds labor for years to create immersive experiences, there is still something to be said for the simple pleasures of an earlier era, when each individual pixel had to placed with care and what you could do was dwarfed by what you couldn’t. When options are infinite, it becomes easier to revert to heuristics in decision-making because it’s often the only way to make sense of the choice before you. But when you are constrained, presented with fewer choices than you would like, your ambitions will exceed your obvious capabilities and you will try to find solutions to problems that you would not otherwise know you had.
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.”
Donkey Kong is one of the most well-known and influential games ever created, standing as both a masterpiece of design and a landmark commercial success. Its iconography is immediately recognizable. Both its protagonist and antagonist have become fixtures of global popular culture. There would still be a video games medium today without Donkey Kong, but it might look very different from the one we have.
Yet despite its seemingly boundless influence, Donkey Kong is a game defined by its limits. Both design and technical decisions are the result of careful planning done under severe constraint. The game itself is for all intents and purposes a hack of Radar Scope, a Space Invaders-knockoff that Nintendo hoped would be its foothold in the North American arcade market of the early 1980s. Faced with the prospect of two thousand unsold Radar Scope cabinets gathering dust in a Seattle- area warehouse, Nintendo of America President Mino Arakawa and his Kyoto-based superior (and father-in-law) Hiroshi Yamauchi made the decision to reprogram the existing hardware to play a game from first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto, whose narrative-centric (if not exactly narrative-heavy) tale of an escaped gorilla, a damsel in distress, and a plucky carpenter presented a clear story with a concrete beginning, middle, and end for the first time in gaming history.
Despite the team’s ingenious method of repurposing existing capital, Donkey Kong was bound by decisions that had been made for another game. There was no escaping that. There was no additional memory to be added to the motherboard, no extra power to be squeezed from its primitive processor. Even its controls reflect a design from another genre - a joystick and a single firing button were common for shooters like Radar Scope, but if given the option of designing a game from scratch, it’s unlikely that Miyamoto and his mentor Gunpei Yokoi would have limited themselves to a single action button and a limited, imprecise control mechanism. (Yokoi would go on to design the famous cross-shaped D-Pad for Nintendo’s successful Game & Watch line only a year later, demonstrating that he was cognizant that alternative input modes were viable and often desirable for titles that managed to break free from the standard template of arcade control.)
That the game works as well as it does is a testament to its makers’ understanding of the constraints under which they were operating. True creativity often arises from circumventing limitations rather than taking advantage of unlimited freedom, and Donkey Kong is a testament to the ingenuity of the men behind it.
Donkey Kong establishes the basic conventions not just of Mario games, but also of the platformer genre as a whole. Over a series of four looping levels, Mario chases Donkey Kong through various stages of a construction site with the goal of rescuing his lady love Pauline. While simplistic, the basic concept of level progression in support of a discrete narrative was revolutionary at the time, although it is likely that games would have trended in this direction if given enough time. What is less likely is that the core mechanic of jumping to clear obstacles would have become so ingrained in the minds of arcade gamers worldwide that the entire genre would have been born.
In retrospect, the idea of the jump as a primary verb in a video game seems natural, but there is no reason to believe that it would have emerged in the absence of Donkey Kong. With the exception of certain classes of athletes, who among us counts jumping as a common daily action, much less jumping to clear obstacles (to say nothing of obstacles thrown by an escaped primate)? Defining jumping as the game’s core mechanic separates Donkey Kong from its contemporaries, which often fell into the shooter or chase category, but doesn’t make it any more relatable or accessible in and of itself. In some ways, it might actually have made the game less approachable, because the concept of a jump is not inherently tied to a specific and comprehensible goal in the way that shooters (goal: to kill) or chase games (goal: to catch or escape) would be tied to their core mechanics.
Although we have become accustomed to Mario’s incredible jumping prowess over the last four decades, it’s considerably less impressive in Donkey Kong than we might expect. For starters, the jump actually works against what would later become a staple of Miyamoto games because despite the variety of obstacles Mario encounters, his primary action serves only a single purpose. Jumping helps Mario navigate the world and clear obstacles, but it possesses no offensive capabilities. Part of this is attributable to the nature of the challenges that Mario faces in Donkey Kong - it would make little sense for a man jumping on top of a rolling barrel to do harm to the barrel. Still, given the leaps and bounds the mechanic would take four years later in Super Mario Bros., it is a little disorienting to find the jump so enfeebled in its first permutation.
More disorienting still is Mario’s fragility. It’s not just that he can be killed by a single hit from a foe or obstacle. It’s that he is incapable of surviving even the smallest fall. A drop from any height greater than Mario himself will cost the player a life - a limitation that would be abandoned in Mario’s next game as a playable character, Mario Bros.. Perhaps the designers anchored too heavily to the real-life limits that a human being might encounter in falling from any height. More likely they were simply considering the relationship between the core objectives established in the game (navigating an obstacle course) and the core objective of the game (to churn through a player’s lives quickly but joyfully enough to encourage her to put another quarter into the arcade cabinet). If there was an inherent danger not just in the enemies attempting to foil Mario but also in the environment he was attempting to navigate, then every move, every leap would require careful consideration.
In this way, even Mario’s sole distinguishing ability became something capable of killing him. A bad jump - which was quite easy to stumble into, given the unforgiving nature of the game’s semi- realistic physics - would spell death, intentions be damned. This simple decision to turn not just the environment but also the player themselves into a hazard is actually the game’s masterstroke, because it establishes the fundamental tension of the game by creating multiple motivating factors for players and setting them in opposition to one another. Caution is encouraged mechanically even as the game’s scoring system demanded a speedy ascent through each stage and assorted hazards, including barrels, springs, and piles of cement, applied pressure at various points. The player wants to perform well and not die so as to save themselves a quarter, but also to rack up a high score and etch their initials into the leaderboard. This leads to calculated risks that sometimes result in death, but those deaths are attributable solely to the player’s decision-making, rather than the caprice of the game itself. And the player is then forced to confront the death after the fact and recognize that they is complicit in it. The response is almost inevitably: “I bet I could do better.” Another quarter in the machine. Another coin in the coffers.
Multiple levels, multi-level platforming, environmental hazards, active enemies, moving obstacles, a narrative structure - Donkey Kong is a shockingly complex game compared to its peers, but the basic building blocks to reach it had been established by the arc of gaming to date. Pong established a competitive dynamic between players and a scoring system. Space Invaders pitted the player against the game itself with a simple shooting objective. Pac-Man introduced both the idea of navigating space to avoid obstacles and characters with some semblance of personality. Donkey Kong went one step further, but in a way so unique that it seemed new and fresh at the time of its release. Even with what has followed, it’s hard not to appreciate just how revolutionary the game was. What’s amazing is that even today, it’s still a joy to play.
When sitting down to play Donkey Kong in 2022, two things become readily apparent. The first is that however far games may have come in the last thirty-seven years, there is an inherent level of difficulty that time does not diminish in the absence of frequent play. The second is that neither does the inherent level of fun.
I worry sometimes about how younger gamers might react the first time they lay eyes upon Donkey Kong. Perhaps there is no longer any need to worry. For a time, it seemed that more and more realistic graphics were working to consign the world of pixels, chip tunes, and 224x256 resolution images to the ash heap of history. In the age of Minecraft, the retro game revival, and the concurrent rise of 2D indie games, however, it seems clear that simplistic graphics alone aren’t going to turn young players away. The greater danger might lie in Donkey Kong’s difficulty curve, which remains a challenge even for those of us who have grown older with the game and might be a bridge too far for young gamers who have grown accustomed to the more accommodating design decisions now commonplace in everything from simple side-scrollers to complex open-world adventures.
I say “accommodating” rather than easy because I don’t want to disparage the decisions that have been made to make games more approachable in the last couple of decades, nor do I want to make it seem that modern audiences are too soft to withstand the games in their pure form. I believe firmly that the primary purpose of a game is to be played, and if producing games that remove barriers to entry is going to expand a potential audience, I am all for it. Without making a value judgment, however, I will say that games like Donkey Kong are operating a level of difficulty that may be outside of the comfort zone of a modern gamer. The game’s controls are not clunky but they are constrained. The challenges can be mastered, but only with careful study. Players can grind their way through the first loop of the four stages, but how many will realistically get beyond the second? When the options were limited to whatever cabinet (if any) stood next to Donkey Kong in the local pizza parlor, the player might have doubled down and kept playing the game for hours on end. No 2018 gamer is constrained by such limited options, and when met with a barrier that initially seems insurmountable, they may quickly move on to something that provides a bit more bang for their buck.
This is the challenge that every retro game will face. Like old films, they were made in an era of different tools and different conventions. Modern viewers have been habituated to a different set of conventions that, while built on the foundations established by their predecessors, are nonetheless radically different in important ways. How much an individual gets out of the so-called classics depends largely on how much they are willing to learn these older forms and what inconveniences they are willing to tolerate along the way.
I am not a good Donkey Kong player. I was born five years after the game’s initial release, after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and cut my teeth on games like Super Mario Bros.. The restrictions inherent in Donkey Kong’s design clash with the habits I have built up across more speed-oriented games, and I find myself approaching the challenges within more as puzzles to be solved than obstacles to be overcome.
I have enough skill to get through the first cycle of levels without too much issue, but I quickly fall apart on the second. A typical play for me will last less than ten minutes. But the raw pleasure that I get in that ten minute session is enough to keep me coming back from more. I’m never going to sit down and play Donkey Kong for an hour or more, but I will gladly return to it for short sessions when I feel the need to go back to the beginning and appreciate the craftsmanship of how games are made.
Craftsmanship. There’s a loaded word. In an age when art in games is conflated with evermore beautiful graphics and evermore cinematic storytelling, when teams of hundreds labor for years to create immersive experiences, there is still something to be said for the simple pleasures of an earlier era, when each individual pixel had to placed with care and what you could do was dwarfed by what you couldn’t. When options are infinite, it becomes easier to revert to heuristics in decision-making because it’s often the only way to make sense of the choice before you. But when you are constrained, presented with fewer choices than you would like, your ambitions will exceed your obvious capabilities and you will try to find solutions to problems that you would not otherwise know you had.
Without impugning the amazing work done by modern game developers large and small, it’s hard not appreciate the pure craft in Donkey Kong, a game quite literally scrapped together from the leftover material of a previous failure that nonetheless remains a joy to play. Joy assembled from scrap.
A Belated Adaptation of A Non-Existent Animated Series: Freedom Planet
I came to possess a Sega Genesis by eminent domain.
My parents owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. They gifted me a Super Nintendo for Christmas in either 1991 or 1992 (my memory is imprecise and I haven’t found family photos supporting one date over the other). The Genesis, however, was a gift for my younger sister.
I don’t know why my parents thought it was a good idea to give her a Genesis. I don’t ever remember her expressing interest in one. She rarely played it once she had it. In time, it migrated to my bedroom by the curious process through which one sibling’s possessions become another’s.
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.”
I came to possess a Sega Genesis by eminent domain.
My parents owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. They gifted me a Super Nintendo for Christmas in either 1991 or 1992 (my memory is imprecise and I haven’t found family photos supporting one date over the other). The Genesis, however, was a gift for my younger sister.
I don’t know why my parents thought it was a good idea to give her a Genesis. I don’t ever remember her expressing interest in one. She rarely played it once she had it. In time, it migrated to my bedroom by the curious process through which one sibling’s possessions become another’s.
(That process has worked the other way too. My sister now has in her possession my original Super Nintendo, while I play my SNES games on the Analogue Super Nt.)
It was a Genesis Model 2. It included a pack-in copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I always treated it as a second-class console. I acquired 3-4 Super Nintendo games per year for the life of that system, either received as gifts or purchased with a quarter’s worth of accumulated allowances. I supplemented that catalog with rentals from the nearby Food King, and later from Blockbuster. Conversely, I don’t believe I ever acquired another Genesis game past Sonic 2. I played Sonic 2. I occasionally rented Sonic 3 or Aladdin or Comix Zone, because it was the mid-1990s and I was a child and I read comic books. I never played Gunstar Heroes or Streets of Rage 2. I never heard of Phantasy Star.
I do not have Genesis nostalgia.
There was a Genesis in our home but I did not grow up with it. I couldn’t even say what happened to it. All I know is that it is gone.
I discovered the Genesis’s virtues later in life. I now have a better appreciation today for what made a Genesis game a Genesis game.
All great games have a rhythm. Rhythmically, I find that the Super Nintendo’s games swing while the Genesis’s pulse. On the Super Nintendo, there is room to breathe. On the Genesis, there is only forward momentum.
Freedom Planet pulses with the feel of a Genesis game. In its bones, it desperately wants to be one.
Freedom Planet began life as a Sonic fan game. Iteration begins with imitation.
To begin life as a Sonic fan game is not unique. Sonic fan games have been around since right about the time the Genesis began to fade from public view. What makes Freedom Planet worth examining is that it is actively trying to not be a Sonic fan game.
Freedom Planet is built on nostalgia. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. It tries to transcend its inspirations and find its own voice. When a game tries this, it raises several questions for the player, including whether the game succeeds on that level, whether the game succeeds on any level, and if the player’s answers to those and other questions are more a reflection of the game’s merits or the player’s relationship with both the game and its inspirations.
Reflect on these questions for a long enough time and you find yourself considering the merits and limits of any fandom and their roles in shaping your life. And consider that long enough and you are forced to reckon with just how far you have come and just how far you still have left to go in your own journey as a human being.
Is Freedom Planet good? Is that beside the point? I’m thirty-five years old. Shouldn’t I have outgrown this by now?
“Shouldn’t I have outgrown this by now?” is the question at the heart of my experience playing Freedom Planet.
I do not have Genesis nostalgia. But Freedom Planet has more than enough for both of us.
Sonic spoke to people. The connection was undeniable. Sonic did not speak to me. But I still like him.
If there was no Sonic, I don’t know if I’d miss him. But I am grateful that we have had him at all. I enjoyed Sonic the Hedgehog 2 when I played it. I have enjoyed it every time I have played it. When a new Sonic game is released, I always consider playing it. I rarely do.
I think people loved Sonic because he was perfectly calibrated to be loved by children between the ages of five and nine in the year 1991. I think those people have continued to love Sonic because once we love something between the ages of five and nine, it is difficult to ever stop loving it completely. All it takes is the right push to reactivate that carefully planted affection.
I do not have Genesis nostalgia. I do not have Sonic nostalgia.
I am not a Sonic fan.
I do not want to be a fan of anything.
As young fans, we internalize media as we search for our own identities. The media in question exerts influence on us even as we outgrow them. They cling to us as we once clung to them. We will never be able to shake them.
In one way or another, we are all running away from things we used to love. Gotta go fast.
Freedom Planet began life as a Sonic fan game. It is running away from that as fast as it can.
Its creators at GalaxyTrail Games intended to use the fan game format as a means of learning development within an established construct. When the game threw off its predecessors’ trademarks - ostensibly to allow for greater freedom in development, possibly to avoid any potential legal issues that might arise down the line - it did not obfuscate the influence those predecessors.
Freedom Planet is an imitation of a late-period Sega Genesis game. The question I pondered as I played was if it would become anything more. The narrative can be skipped in the game’s “classic” mode, but it’s clear that the narrative is as important to what the game wants to be as is the gameplay. Without the narrative, Freedom Planet is a true Sonic-like. With the narrative, Freedom Planet tries to find its own voice.
Never before has a game felt more like a 2014 remaster of a 1994 game adaptation of a 16-episode 1993 animated series. At least, at first.
Freedom Planet is the story of a trio of adventurers originally created by Chinese artist Ziyo Ling and used with permission by designer and programmer Sabrina DiDuro. The trio - determined Lilac, mischievous Carol, and naive Milla - do not map exactly to established Sonic stereotypes, but each of them could appear next to a Blaze the Cat or a Rouge the Bat and not feel out of place.
The trio quickly becomes involved in a war spearheaded by an alien creature called Brevon, who is attempting to steal a mystical artifact called a Kingdom Stone to power his incredible interstellar army. The narrative turns dark as three rival nations ruled by pandas find themselves caught up in Brevon’s plot.
And how dark it is. Palace intrigue, shocking betrayals, brainwashing, torture, decapitation, body horror, and more color a plot told in surprisingly lengthy fully-voiced cut scenes. And I think there’s something interesting in understanding that darkness, and why a game featuring colorful animal characters and that on the surface reads as a belated adaptation of a non-existent animated series would try to find its voice in that darkness.
Nostalgia is about trying to get back something that was lost. There are feelings that we associate with particular moments and experiences, and if we feel them strongly enough, we will go out of our way to recapture them. For people of my generation, many of those feelings are associated with video games. And Sonic in particular had a way of inspiring a certain feeling in the young people who played. Hence, the Sonic fan game scene.
The essence of nostalgia is loss, and loss is inevitable. We change as we move through time. We cannot go back to the things we loved when we were young and expect to find the same feelings there that we had when we were kids. We are not the same people we were when we loved them. We can react to this in different ways. We can accept that we have changed and the games have not, and we can allow our relationship with them to change to reflect who we are now.
Great art should work this way. We should find different things in it when we revisit it through our lives. Those new things should illuminate our understanding of the work and allow us to grow into more complete humans beings. In this way, the nostalgia that motivates us to reengage dissipates, and a new appreciation can take root and give us something new to take forward with us.
But nostalgia is a dangerous tool, especially in the hands of a creative person. Creatives will tend to be more in touch with their feelings, more mindful of their past experiences, more sensitive, more introspective. A creative person may desire to recapture that old feeling. Perhaps they pull their old Genesis out of the closet and insert their original Sonic cartridge. And perhaps they find that the old feeling just isn’t there.
A creative person may be so desirous of recreating that original feeling that they take it upon themselves to modify or recreate the original work. If they are unable to go back to it in the same way because they have changed, they will do everything in their power to bring the work forward to where they are today. They will attempt to realign the work to their current existence so that they can find that feeling again.
I know this because I have lived it. I have written fan fiction. I have spent hours crafting scenarios in which familiar characters would carry forward the stories that I had engaged with in a way that I myself could still engage with. I posted those stories online under an alias. I took great pride in the clever twists I contrived to find ways to put those characters into situations that spoke to me as a fifteen year-old in the same way that their original adventures had spoken to me as an eight year-old.
I did this because I thought it would let me hold on to those characters a bit longer.
Eventually, I moved on to writing original fiction. I let those old characters stay in their old games. And when I did, I found that I didn’t have to give up those games forever. I could still play them. I could still find new things in them. I didn’t have to hold on so tight.
For all of its pretensions towards letting go, Freedom Planet is holding on very tight to the spirit of Sonic fan fiction. Freedom Planet superficially moves on from the characters that inspired its creators, but its narrative darkness speaks to that same impulse that drives adolescent fan fiction and ill-considered updates to the characters that people fell in love with. Sure, Sonic and his friends were fun, but aren’t they a little too kiddie? Wouldn’t it be cooler if they dealt with darker, more mature themes? If they endured real tragedies and trauma and experience real depth of human emotion? Wouldn’t we connect with it more deeply if they felt the feels the way we feel the feels?
Freedom Planet tries to force stand-ins for its favorite childhood characters to grapple with an adolescents’ perception of an adult’s world. Lacking depth, it conflates darkness with maturity and in doing so reveals its own immaturity. It twists itself into grotesque forms in an attempt to find its own voice outside of its inspirations. It does not use its childish aesthetic in contrast with its darker themes to say anything about either its inspirations or its own ideas. It uses it as fashion, as a way to brand itself as something that is almost - but not quite - Sonic.
It is a game made almost entirely in Denmark and the United States and features a visual design deeply influenced by Chinese culture, yet its title screen subtitles “Freedom Planet” with the Japanese hiragana spelling out phonetically “Freedom Planet” because _Sonic_ is from Japan.
Freedom Planet is an immature game, and I don’t say that because it features colorful cartoon characters collecting trinkets across a series of whimsical stages. I say it because it tries so very, very hard to hang drama and stakes and darkness on that colorful framework without using that framework as a way of meaningfully commenting on or raising those stakes. The choices are entirely aesthetic and motivated not by a desire to communicate any ideas but rather by a seemingly pathological need to maintain proximity to an influence that the game desperately wants to get away from. It does not achieve that feeling of nostalgic whimsy to which it aspires, nor does it transcend it to say to anything meaningful that a player can carry forward.
And yet for all of that, I still think that Freedom Planet is actually pretty good, especially when played in its “classic” mode, which removes the voiced cutscenes and lets the gameplay shine. Its trio of playable heroes all control similarly enough for a player to switch back and forth between them with minimal disruption yet distinctly enough to justify each of their inclusions. The levels are designed with the classic Sonic concept of multi-tiered paths, making it impossible to see all of them in just one playthrough. Boss fights are challenging but learnable. Enemies are well-placed and force creative moment-to-moment thinking. Levels continue to introduce new mechanics right up until the end, and those mechanics do not overstay their welcome. The game runs smoothly and the soundtrack by DiDuro and collaborators Leila Wilson and Shane Ellis pulses appropriately.
Freedom Planet is a good game.
Yet as I played it, I found myself wondering: what would I think of Freedom Planet if I have never played a 2D _Sonic_ game?
Everyday, there is someone born who hasn’t seen The Simpsons.
What is Freedom Planet to this not-at-all-hypothetical person? It’s a colorful, fast-paced platformer with a fun soundtrack and moments of surprising darkness. It’s not the kind of game that will knock your socks off if you’ve been playing games for a little while, but it has enough personality that it might get its hooks into a young player. It’s the kind of game that the successors to vloggers on the successors to YouTube might make videos about, expressing their nostalgia for the material and how much it meant to them when they were twelve in the same way that today’s video literati wax poetic about Rocket Knight Adventure or Cool Spot or even Sonic the Hedgehog.
What will be the feeling this game inspires that they’re trying to get back to?
Part of growing older is reckoning with the reality that the things that inspired you were themselves inspired by other things. I watched The Hidden Fortress for the first time recently. Star Wars is not a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but its predecessor’s influence on it is is obvious if you’ve seen both films. But if you’ve only seen Star Wars, you’re not thinking about what it took from The Hidden Fortress. You’re just enjoying Star Wars. And even if you don’t understand what feeling it’s trying to recapture, you find something in your viewing experience that you will try to recapture yourself as you grow older.
If all I have to say about Freedom Planet is that it’s close enough to a Sonic game to remind me of a Sonic game but not close enough to a Sonic game to come off as anything but a derivative of a Sonic game, then my entire relationship with a new work of art is defined by its relationship with its inspiration as filtered through my relationship with its inspiration.
I think I have Sonic nostalgia.
A Deep Nostalgia for a Never-Lived Dream: Marvelous: Mōhitotsu no Takarajima
I’ve been thinking about getting older. I’m in my mid-thirties and feeling it. Video games are older than I am, but we grew up together. My earliest memories are of watching my father play Metroid while I clutched an unplugged controller and convinced myself that my random button presses were meaningful. I learned to play by imitation. My father passed away in 2020. I am now ten years old than he was when I was born.
When we are young, video games show us worlds we have not yet experienced. As we grow older, they present us fantasies that we will never have the opportunity to fulfill. The journeys we had not yet embarked upon have transformed into the adventures we never had. If we step back, we can acknowledge that what the games are showing us has not changed. What has changed is that we have been swept further down the river of time.
“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current.”
Source: Wikipedia
I’ve been thinking about getting older. I’m in my mid-thirties and feeling it. Video games are older than I am, but we grew up together. My earliest memories are of watching my father play Metroid while I clutched an unplugged controller and convinced myself that my random button presses were meaningful. I learned to play by imitation. My father passed away in 2020. I am now ten years old than he was when I was born.
When we are young, video games show us worlds we have not yet experienced. As we grow older, they present us fantasies that we will never have the opportunity to fulfill. The journeys we had not yet embarked upon have transformed into the adventures we never had. If we step back, we can acknowledge that what the games are showing us has not changed. What has changed is that we have been swept further down the river of time.
This doesn’t seem tragic anymore although it once did. When I was young, I dreamed of adventure and conquest. Now I am older and my dreams have grown simpler, and my need for exploration has turned inward. Video games are wish fulfillment. My wishes have changed with me.
Marvelous: Mōhitotsu no Takarajim is wish fulfillment, but it would have fulfilled a different wish if I had played it in 1996 instead of 2022. I regret only that I did not have the opportunity play it then, as doing so would have given me a better sense of the distance I have traveled. Still, there is a purity at the game’s core that I believe I appreciate more today than I might have then. In this way, the years between its release and my experiencing it might akin to cellaring a bottle of wine. You only get to experience a game for the first time once, and in this case, twenty-six years might have been the right period for both it and I to reach maturity.
For me, Marvelous fulfills a simple wish. Marvelous granted me the opportunity to enjoy an experience I never had but always yearned for: a summer camp adventure with friends where the stakes, no matter how high, felt low.
I was never a “camp” kid. My family either couldn’t afford to send me away or couldn’t imagine it. Either way, my summers were spent at home. Semi-frequent moves at critical points of my development combined with an introverted, occasionally surly nature left me neither the inclination nor the opportunity to enjoy a bright and colorful outdoor adventure with two companions with whom I had quickly formed unbreakable bonds.
As a twelve year-old, Marvelous may have been a “wouldn’t that be nice” sort of adventure that came and went as quickly as any other game I rented at any number of local mom & pop northern Connecticut video stores. As an adult, it’s a reminder of a summer I never had. The wine has become more challenging with age.
Marvelous hits those notes for me now because design and aesthetics are just familiar enough to seem like I should remember them. It carries with it a deep nostalgia for a never-lived dream that feels as real as any true life’s experience worth of remembrance. Marvelous is a game that I felt like I had played before. It accomplishes what so many modern games attempt when adopting a retro aesthetic. The secret to evoking real feelings of the past is to wait decades before being played.
Marvelous is the story of three twelve year-old boys - Deon, Max, and Jack - attending a summer camp on a remote island. The island is rumored to house a treasure called the “Marvelous”, hidden decades earlier by the legendary Captain Maverick. When King Blue, another pirate, comes looking for the Marvelous, he kidnaps the boys’ beloved teacher, Miss Gina. An excitable monkey and a chatty bird partner with the boys, bestow upon each of them a special key, and kick off an adventure to rescue Miss Gina and find the Marvelous.
At no point does any of this feel like it matters. This is critical to Marvelous’s appeal. The game feels remarkably low stakes. Even as momentum builds, it never feels hurried. The point is not to push towards completion. It is to marinate in the world and to explore it.
Shigeru Miyamoto has often referred to his upbringing in the Japanese countryside a major influence on the exploratory atmosphere of many of his games - specifically, The Legend of Zelda. In a 2015 interview with NPR, he elaborated on the point, stating:
“When I was younger, I grew up in the countryside of Japan. And what that meant was I spent a lot of my time playing in the rice paddies and exploring the hillsides and having fun outdoors. When I got into the upper elementary school ages — that was when I really got into hiking and mountain climbing. There's a place near Kobe where there's a mountain, and you climb the mountain, and there's a big lake near the top of it. We had gone on this hiking trip and climbed up the mountain, and I was so amazed — it was the first time I had ever experienced hiking up this mountain and seeing this big lake at the top. And I drew on that inspiration when we were working on the Legend of Zelda game and we were creating this grand outdoor adventure where you go through these narrowed confined spaces and come upon this great lake.”
I have not been able to find any record of Shigeru Miyamoto having any significant involvement in the development of Marvelous.
The game was developed by Nintendo’s R&D2 division under the supervision of Masayuki Uemura and directed by Eiji Aonuma, then only thirty-three years old. Its Japanese release date of October 26, 1996 came nearly four months after the Japanese launch of the Nintendo 64 and nearly one month after that same system’s American launch. Miyamoto was busy. Yet more than any game released that year - except perhaps for the Miyamoto-produced Pokemon - Marvelous embodies that exploratory ethos. This is both intrinsic and extrinsic, especially in 2022.
Intrinsically, Marvelous is a game about childhood exploration. The player controls a party of three characters, taking control of each individual as the situation warrants, as they explore a small collection of islands in pursuit of the crystal orbs needed to unlock Captain Maverick’s hideout and rescue Miss Gina. The party progresses by exploring new areas and finding new tools and puzzles with which to interact. The game is built around experimenting and learning by doing. Sometimes this takes the form of baiting mice with cheese. Sometimes it means traveling back in time and reminding a bad architect to design a house with a door so that the same house will be accessible in the future. Sometimes it requires guiding penguins through mating season. This is a game about exploration.
Extrinsically, though, Marvelous evokes the feeling of childhood exploration by bearing a notable resemblance to a significantly more popular and successful game about exploration released five years earlier.
Marvelous is a lost chapter in the evolution of The Legend of Zelda. It is one of a series of games from its era that experimented with the conventions that Zelda established. Crusader of Centy emphasized the genre’s action for a faster, more visceral experience. Landstalker tilted the perspective to an isometric view and leaned heavily into dungeon exploration and treasure hunting. Beyond Oasis changed the series’ aesthetic influences from European to Arabian and amped up combat. Secret of Mana brought forward Zelda’s erstwhile RPG influences. Zelda’s influence was everywhere, and Marvelous was perhaps its last notable child before Nintendo recontextualized the series two years later with Ocarina of TIme.
The connection between Marvelous and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is obvious from the start. The games are built on the same engine and share a similar art style, color palette, and perspective. The game trades Zelda’s combat and action sequences for a more methodical pace and a greater emphasis on puzzles and situational thinking. If A Link to the Past leaned slightly in the direction of action games of its era, Marvelous is what Zelda would be if it abandoned combat almost entirely and focused instead on being an adventure game.
It is not a coincidence that so much of Marvelous’s opening chapter revolves around securing three colored keys. At its core, Marvelous is nothing but locks and keys. Structurally, it is a single puzzle with numerous layers the player moves up and down through. By solving a variety of sub-puzzles, the player moves closer to solving the master puzzle, saving Miss Gina, and uncovering the secret of the Marvelous. Some of these puzzles are more interesting than others. Some verge on tedious. Marvelous is not a polished gem of a game, and there are rough patches that require patience to overcome. But it is admirable for its integrity and its commitment to its conceit.
The conceit begins with the party of three. Deon is small, quick, and able to attack at range. Max is stocky but strong, with a collection of physical attack available. Jack is a tinkerer, weak in a fight but capable of manipulating machinery and accessing hard-to-reach areas. Each character builds their own inventory over the course of the game, which forces the player to consider not only which character is best suited for a particular situation, but also which tool possessed by which character is the key to a particular lock. Layers of locks, layers of keys.
The player controls all three characters, and they are all given equal weight in the narrative. Still I found myself considering Deon as the “primary” character, and the one with which I most identified. More often than not, he occupied the lead position in my trio, despite not being better suited to a greater number of situations than any of the other boys. Maybe it’s just that Deon is the most superficially Link-like in his design, despite wearing red instead of green. Maybe this makes him the easiest figure to latch onto for someone who grew up playing Zelda games.
As with much fiction aimed at children, growing up is a primary theme of Marvelous. Over the course of their journey, the three protagonists generally remain silent, avoid interpersonal relationships, and exhibit bravery only to the degree that it is mechanically important to progress the game. Acts of courage are driven by the player, not by the characters. Yet as the player returns to summer camp late in the game, a non-player character named comments on how they have been changed by their journey. Now, he says, they are men.
This comment had a greater resonance for me as an adult than I imagine it would have as a child, because coming to Marvelous for the first time as a grown man made me intensely conscious of just how long a gap twenty-six years really is. Twenty-six years before Marvelous, Nintendo hadn’t even released Donkey Kong into arcades. Twenty-six years before Marvelous, my parents hadn’t met. If I had played Marvelous in 1996 at age ten, the idea that the boys had become men during their journey might not have landed with me. I would have thought, “Of course they are men now. Look at how many islands they visited!” At thirty-five, the comment hit me harder than I expected.
I’m not sure there is anything a child wants more than to be treated like an adult. When I was young, I was always looking towards the next milestone along the road to adulthood. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be in high school. When I was in high school, I wanted to be in college. I was always looking for that imaginary line, that clear demarcation where I would no longer be “a boy” and would instead be “a man”. I didn’t understand what that would mean. I just assumed it would happen on day, that I’d do something and then someone would pat me on the back and say “Congratulations, you’re now a man. Put this man card in your man wallet.”
That day never came. I didn’t feel more a man when I graduated college, when I got my first job, when I got married. I kept feeling like that moment was ahead of me for so long, until I finally realized that there wasn’t anything I was going to encounter in life that would make me “a man”. The process of becoming “a man” is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It’s accepting that you are who you are and that you can take the world as it comes. It’s accepting responsibility for your actions and owning the consequences. The dramatic journey of a fictional hero towards manhood externalizes this process, but in most of us, it happens quietly. The line isn’t clear. There is no man card.
I actually think that Marvelous recognizes this. The characters go on a journey to save Miss Gina because no one else will. They endure hardships, but the game is so relaxed and its narrative so pleasantly paced and structured that it never feels like they’re really overcoming challenges that reflection any inner struggles. The characters have no inner lives. At age ten, the player might not recognize this, because most games in 1996 still thought of player characters mostly as simple avatars rather than participants in a dramatic journey. As age thirty-five, though, it’s impossible to see Deon, Max, and Jack as anything other than different hats that the player can wear at any point in time. They aren’t characters. They’re tools. They are keys. How can they grow?
Yet we’ve done so much, the NPC tells us. We’ve come so far. The praise is hollow because it can’t be anything but hollow when what you’re praising is not a person but a key. And to praise the player because they’ve successfully navigated a few hours of a video game by telling them that they’ve now “become men” is as laughable as it is condescending.
But I think that’s the point. Playing this game won’t help you grow up. But going out and exploring…
Exploration is the heart of this game. It’s baked into its DNA, going back its Zelda roots. But by stripping away the high adventure of Zelda, Marvelous did a better job of encouraging players to search for and find new things than any Zelda game since the original, and would hold that crown right up until The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvented the series under the direction of Eiji Aonuma.
Marvelous is Eiji Aonuma’s game. It was his first directorial effort, and to this day remains the only non-Zelda game he has ever directed. It was here that he first deployed his puzzle-box style game structure, which would become a staple of his Zelda games. But while the Zelda series married this structure with robust combat, expansive worlds, and high adventure in a fantasy setting, Marvelous manages to stay focused almost solely on the puzzles.
It’s that focus that challenges the player by turning Marvelous almost entirely into a game about thinking your way through situations rather than fighting your way out of them. The limited number of boss fights in the game are so mechanically rudimentary - and the tools you use to fight them so commonly used in non-combat situations - that they reinforce rather than detract from this point.
Marvelous is just a game about solving puzzles. Find the right key and use it to unlock the lock. This structure means that the player is constantly exploring. The player is either searching the world for new keys or searching for which key is best used in the current situation. The lack of viscerally motivated combat or dangerous situations means that this search is seldom cut short by an obvious and immediate need for a solution. The player has time to explore solutions. The player is always exploring new things, even when they’re new things inside the player. Exploration is in the mind.
Marvelous is about exploration.
When the player finally finds the eponymous “Marvelous”, Captain Maverick’s greatest treasure is reveled not as a stash of gold or a miraculous artifact. The “Marvelous” is a hot air balloon. A note left by Captain Maverick, the great pirate, explains that his greatest dream as a child was to fly, and his greatest achievement was not the intricate series of puzzle boxes through which the player has journeyed nor the wondrous ships and tools the characters have used, but rather a simple balloon that carried him closer to his dreams. It’s a real “Rosebud” of a moment, but in the context of a game about exploration, and about searching extrinsically for treasure, this turn inward constitutes a remarkable twist - one the characters and the young player may miss for lack of life experience.
The older I get, the more I feel like I’ve missed something along the way to getting here. I get the impression that there was a passion I found somewhere along the way but then moved on from because I didn’t understand that there was genuine value in just being happy doing something that I liked. I’ve lived my life mostly pursuing things that I care about only extrinsically, because they’re the things I have thought I’m supposed to care about. And I know enough about myself to know that I’m not going to stop pursuing those things immediately, because if you tell yourself that you care about something enough times a day for enough days, eventually you do start to care about it enough to not want to let it go.
I think I play games like Marvelous because I’m trying to work my way back along that path in some way. I’d like to find that thing that I cared about, that made me happy when I was young but that I discounted because happiness wasn’t enough. And I think by playing games like Marvelous, I come a little closer to understanding what that was. And if I never find it… well, I may find something else along the way.
In Marvelous, as in life, there is always value in exploring.