Rom Check Fail!

A first person perspective in one of the greatest — and strangest — games ever made.

From the first moments of your existence, something registers as unmistakeably wrong: you open your eyes and see only darkness. You find yourself completely alone. Then, yawning across the gulf of plangent time, a beeping hits your ears. It is a bitonal register, a dualistic dance, one part auspicious, the other nefarious. Up and down it goes, transmitting – what? Knowledge? Information? Light? None of these things. All you see now are the words: RAM CHECK OK! ROM CHECK FAIL!

What does it mean? For an eternity of unmeasured time you hover, poised over the collosal abyss, and then the silence is shattered by the gritty rumble of catastrophe in sybilline red:

ITEM ERROR!!!SYSTEM ERROR!!!SYST
SYSTEM ERROR
SYSTEM ERROR
ITEM ERROR!!!SYSTEM ERROR!!!SYST

Thus your world is shattered, and reborn! For one breathless moment you witness the sky: a windowless world hovering above a canopy of fog-drenched verdure, diminishing into pearly distance; in the next moment all is rent by horizontal screams of colour and a lathe of static sunders the base of your vision. All is skewered until… what now? Music? A few sinister notes play from somewhere, perhaps a melodic glimpse of hell’s song, and then a host of bodies manifest across your vision. A hundred thousand souls of different shape and texture, some simple and others infused with terrible complexity, all shivering and jerking in the throes of their own personal agonies.

Suddenly, like the blasted hand of God, the words ROM CHECK FAIL! appear again across the maroon sky, obscuring the febrile hordes. Below it, cryptic words declare: PRESS PLAYER 1 START. Before you have occasion even to ponder their meaning, you feel a rushing, a strange calming threnody, a mysterious flow, and then…

You find yourself again in a dark room, but this time you are not alone. Your hands clasp a sword and shield in a grip that you are powerless to loosen, and across from you approaches a mushroom with slanted yellow eyes that gleam with hatred. In a flash it is upon you, and it is all you can do to cleave it in half with your weapon. It falls to the ground in two pieces, each half writhing in loathsome defeat. You feel a primal connectedness to the slain creature: its fate is yours as well. You are bound to it by lines of meaning you do not understand, but are helpless to overthrow. With its death the room suddenly freezes, and a pleasant beep greets your ears. For some reason you understand that this was the first of many challenges.

The next room appears and surrounds you.. It is similar to the last: black floor and ceiling, with walls of glowing neon blue and purple. There are four mushrooms now, glowing with cruel intentions; they converge upon you, for it is their sole purpose in life to destroy you. You are surprised, as you slice into the first, and the second, how easy it has been to assume this role. They chase you, but you are unmistakeably their hunter. It feels good. The power of your stroke meets their hollow flesh, and they collapse under the weight of your violence. Their deaths mark the promise of your continued survival. Yes… it is all as it should be. The world at least seems to possess a logic, however perverse and insane.

You slay another, and move to the fourth. You are about to perform your effortless task when a sound like lighting scraped across a ground of blighted ash fills the air with turgid anger. Confused, you and your nemesis are once again frozen in space and time. You regard each other, both overcome with abject fear, and then in a flash you and he are transformed: you have become an object of steel, pointed to a sharp cylinder that, with all the desperate energy of an orgasm, unleashes hot, searing laser fire. And he, your hapless mushroom, now a quivering white alien face, explodes into particles of air and heat, and is thus transformed once more.

Again, you receive your beeping praise. The room changes: its walls of blue conical pillars contain a river of bracken sludge pressed between two shoulders of grass. There are more alien faces, but in a heartbeat you and they have changed again! Now you are a being of pure geometry, a triangular vessel, and you have only seconds to learn that you can fire white pellets from your nose before a large sphere of bouncing magma bears down upon you. You hit it dead-centre, and it explodes into smaller spheres, all of which converge on you with renewed hatred.

You feel the same connection to these horrible shapes as to the mushroom. Their spirit and purpose are the same, though their forms differ so wildly. You pity them, even as you fear and destroy them, for they are like you: trapped and doomed for extinction.

And so the dance continues. You are variously become: a squid with locomotive flagellae releasing spores from the rounded cavity of your mouth against wild, sentient bubbles; a frantic mouth overcome by a hunger, snapping at multicolored lines that ricochet off squares of hovering brick; a rotund man in overalls with remarkable jumping abilities leaping atop bi-colored boxes; and so on, the changes coming ever faster, ever more blisteringly incomprehensible, all relationships to your nemeses more and more tenuous than before, until finally you are pit against an army of creatures your current form is hopelessly ill-equipped to combat — as if the world you inhabit had defied some primary celestial ordinance, and denied you the proper target of your destiny of slaughter. Finally, without fanfare or bluster, you are slain, pierced, or crushed, and you collapse. The world screeches to a halt, flashes.

You sigh with relief. Now your torment can end.

But no! A pale sheen of white light covers everything, and you are immolated, reborn, transfigured again! You have only to continue, and desperately, doggedly, you strive to crush your newest foe, fearing always that inevitable, unbidden change that will either tilt the odds to your favour, or render them utterly, comically futile. You chomp your yellow mandibles down on a whirling polygon, and sense its fear even in the substance of its mathematical rondures, and are struck by a sense of the perverse, horrific injustice this world has created. You and they are killed and then rebirthed, the whole cycle of life and death spread out across a ground of mindless suffering, denied even the ordinary, grotesque simplicity of lifeless surcease. You rail against your maddening prison! You hurl invective at your invisible, unmanifest tormentors! What diabolical mastermind could have contrived a prison so unnatural, so vastly immoral, so irredeemably bereft of beauty?

With your laser, you lay numb waste to a legion of screaming black ghosts, pressed up against each other in panicked cloister, and over their burning corpses you hear that sickening beep — whose noxious recurrence now brings only disgust and dread — and are once again shunted into the future.

Only, instead of a dark, monster-infested room, you are met by the face of an old, rugose gentleman declaring in dubious english, “SPLENDED! YOU ARE A REAL PRO.” Then a blur, and another screen greets you with inexplicable praise: THANK YOU MARIO! PRINCESS IS IN A FASTER CASTLE! And then another: YOU HAVE COMPLETED THE ULTIMATE RACE! Then the letters THE END appear in gleaming bronze, hovering above a field of thin mushrooms utterly unlike the ones you have been hunting, but yet again perhaps not so dissimilar; and even as these thoughts occur to you, the screen once again changes — to a helicoptor hovering above a military complex; two clothing-adorned baby chicks cuddling; a circle of men and women applauding as you are handed a long sheet of paper; a man bowing to you in a dungeon of bones and distant eyes; another man, floating in a dark ocean; and more, other, stranger visions, one after another, faster and faster until all you see is a blur of light and sound and…

Then the final words appear, hovering against a backdrop of starless space, perfectly mirroring your first moment of life. You gasp, free at last of the nightmarish procession! You feel yourself flying, expanding, become immaterial and vast. And the words draw ever closer, heralding some great secret, the true justification for your existence, or perhaps the key to the promised land… oh the words! You can almost read them now… almost… and they say…

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING.

And then there is nothing.

ROM CHECK FAIL is a Farb submission to The Independent Gaming Source’s Video Game Name Generator competition. Try it out, for free, here.