Rabbits(25)

Shortly after playing Wizard’s Quest Four on that old Apple computer with Andrew Goshaluk in one of our computer science labs, I encountered that phrase for the second time.

“Check it out.” Andrew pressed the return key, and Wizard’s Quest Four booted up.

There was a small box in the center of the screen that included some really primitive graphics—at that moment it was a purple wizard who looked like he was dropping some seeds—but the majority of the game was plain text.

As Andrew tapped the arrows on his keyboard and guided the characters through the first stage of their dungeon adventure, 8-bit classical music blared from the computer’s tiny speaker: a short song playing on a loop that sounded slightly medieval.

“What are you doing?” I asked, not sure I actually wanted to know the answer. Andrew had a habit of falling into some pretty deep research spirals when it came to computer games.

“What do you think? I’m playing a game.”

“A dungeon crawl from the seventies?”

“Come on, K, look at this thing.”

“What about it?”

“This is a runtime library system, my friend. Total early eighties–style.”

“Okay, then. Let me ask you this.”

Andrew leaned back in his chair and waited for me to ask my follow-up question.

“Who gives a shit?”

Andrew smiled. “You’re funny.”

“I’m serious. Why are you playing this garbage game?” I was actually a little pissed off. We were in the middle of a really great Drakengard campaign, and we’d almost reached the final battle.

“Ah, now that’s the real question, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said, hoping he might get to the point. “But I thought you were going to look into that game Beverly and Travis were playing?”

“I am.” Andrew smiled as he pressed the return key. “We are,” he continued.

The screen changed, and we were now looking at two boxes side by side, one filled with text, the other with the graphic of an extremely long-armed dungeon monster.

“Please tell me what the fuck is going on. I have a French test in an hour.” I was getting impatient. French was killing me. It was easy enough for me to memorize the verbs and phrases, but there was just something about the pronunciation and the way everything fit together that wasn’t coming easily.

Andrew stood up and stretched. “I can’t feel sorry for you; I’m taking astrophysics this semester.”

“They call French a Romance language.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“It’s murdering my soul.”

“I’ve heard that can happen. Check it out.” He navigated to another screen on the computer and motioned for me to take his chair.

I sat down and leaned forward to examine the screen. “What the hell does this mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“It’s fake.”

“It’s not.”

“Bullshit.”

“Oh yes, mon copain. This shit is real.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I checked it out.”

“For real?”

“For real real.”

I took another look. “There’s no way.”

The monster on the screen, one of the myriad creatures you might encounter while playing Wizard’s Quest Four, looked very familiar. As a kid, I’d seen its name and the trademark spiky hair thousands of times.

Staring back at me from that screen, in a computer game from 1983, was the main character from a videogame that wouldn’t exist until almost a decade later.

The monster on the screen was Sonic the Hedgehog.



* * *



—

The reason Andrew was playing Wizard’s Quest Four was because he’d been looking into another game, something our friends Beverly and Travis were playing that their friends at MIT had discovered: a game that existed in the real world, a game that the government was allegedly using to recruit secret agents.

It actually sounded plausible at the time.

Cold War films and literature from the 1980s—like the proto-hacker movie WarGames and the military science fiction novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card—posited a world where videogames intersected with the real world, where these games might actually train future soldiers or operatives to deal with potentially dangerous real-world scenarios like global-scale war or national security–threatening espionage.

The possibility that a game like this actually existed—a game that took place using the real world as its playing field—was intoxicating. This was everything I loved about role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, amplified by a thousand.

I very badly wanted it to be real.

I had no idea how it was possible, but Andrew appeared to be implying that this Sonic the Hedgehog anomaly was part of that mysterious game.

If it was fake, it was nothing but evidence of a forger with a weirdly specific set of interests and skills. But if it was real, Andrew had uncovered an interesting anachronism: Sonic the Hedgehog was there, on that screen, as part of a game that had been released almost a decade before the character would be created by the brilliant game-design team over at Sega.