My Inspirations: The Crappy, Awful Game That I Loved

This entry is more or less part two of the story of my entry into the video game world. Part one featured my visits to Showbiz Pizza and a little game called Super Mario Brothers, which I loved but almost never played. This one features the first time I actually played one of the games at Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese/whatever and played it regularly.

The game was called Pack Rat. If you don't remember it, and you won't, it's a bit of simple, late 80s maze hunting in the general style of Pac-Man. There were differences, of course. The game used semi-realistic, two dimensional side-view maps instead of Pac-Man's more abstract maze, and as such the character had to climb up ladders, fell of the sides of platforms, etc. But the goal, though more complex than Pac-Man, was about the same. Traverse the map, find a bunch of shiny objects, and bring them back to your nest. If you got all the items a level required, you move on to the next.

It was not an easy game, and in fact I later decided that not only did the game suck, I pretty much sucked at it. The problem was how easy it was to die. Your character, who was as you may have expected an anthropomorphic pack rat, died after one hit by collision with any of the dozen or so types of enemies that may populate any level. Some were simple enemies, like less humanoid dogs and cats, who stuck to one level of the maze. Others, like other rats, could climb ladders freely and tended to move in simple patterns. There were even birds and other flying creatures. The real problem with all these enemies is that the maze was several screens high, so often it was a matter of guesswork if an enemy was right above or right below the screen and about to kill you.

Your own offenses were limited. You could fire other minor collectibles as obstacles. But if you didn't have any left, you could only fire the important collectibles, if I remember right. Either way, ammunition was limited and only fired straight to the sides, which like I said was rarely the problem. And the map was often very good at dumping you into dangerous places. The ledges were often limited and led to slides that dropped you even farther. So while falling off a ledge was sometimes a viable way to escape a deadly threat, it also often dropped you right into another certain death.

Add that in with the limited three lives and (if I remember right,) the fact the game dropped you back to level 1 as soon as you ran out of them, and you can understand how child me never got past level 4. This might be one of the reasons this game has haunted me; it represents one of my earliest and most embarrassing failures. Now that I thought about it, I would love to play the game again, just to see how my own skills have improved, and how the game even ends.

But that doesn't explain why it caught my attention in the first place. I don't know if it was anything special, really; it was just the game for me To Play, and it was substantially less complex than Super Mario Brothers. I think it was the variety of levels and enemies that appealed to me. For all its simplicity, I still remember it looking better than Mario, and even at this primitive stage, the thrill of seeing something new visually was appealing. The levels had a relatively decent range as well, including things like buildings, underground tunnels, and giant trees. Who knows what the theoretical final level would have offered? Similarly, the game's attract mode included a display of all the enemies, including ones the first four or so levels never featured. I wanted to see what they could do, even if they almost certainly would have been identical, game play-wise, to the ones I saw earlier.

It's hard to describe what this game specifically inspired me to do. Well, it did inspire me to play more video games, so thanks for that at least, game. I think it also helped grow some of the types of funs I briefly reviewed earlier. The thrill of exploring a game and seeing the unknown was already in me thanks to Mario, but this was the first game where it became a drive, possibly even my primary priority. But ultimately, it inspired me by being the game I had the bravery to play, even when failure was so inevitable. Losing still isn't especially fun for me, but realizing its role in game design is needed to even play games so often, let alone make them.