Beyond Dark Castle

The original Dark Castle was one of the first computer games I ever played. I must have been very young, and I remember very little about it save for the awesome splash screen featuring a dark castle, Dark Castle, lit up by flashes of lightning with the ominous strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor playing in the background. Its sequel, Beyond Dark Castle is the first game I remember getting really excited about. Before we bought a copy I was giddy with anticipation; I had heard there were lasers, a helicopter jetpack, and giant flaming eyeballs. Most amazing of all, you could save the game! No more starting from scratch every time you died.

This was important because, boy, were the Dark Castle games difficult! Real difficulty is something absent from modern games. Kids these day are weaned on games that instantly put you into the role of a superhero, able to accomplish amazing feats at the touch of a button. Just look at Assassin’s Creed II, in which you can scale the sides of the Florence Duomo like Spiderman (look at Spiderman, for that matter), or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, in which you can gun down hundreds of highly trained soldiers with ease and recover from bullet wounds in seconds. Wish fulfillment is central to most modern games (and who hasn’t, after being wounded by a bullet, wished he could recover from it in seconds?). If a game has too steep a learning curve players will just get frustrated and play something else, and so games do their best to make you feel like you’re amazing right off the bat.

But back in the 80s things were different. You couldn’t fit that much content on a 1.4 megabyte floppy disk and so games had to be difficult in order to prevent players from completing them too quickly.

Falling a few inches

So in Beyond Dark Castle your character, Duncan, is a clumsy, klutzy, accident prone buffoon with far worse motor skills than even I possessed at age seven, when I first played the game. Even on the ‘Beginner’ difficulty setting, it takes hours of practice before you are able to move through the levels with anything like the coordination of a normal able-bodied person, much less the superhuman grace displayed in Assassin’s Creed.

When you first start to play Beyond Dark Castle you are always tripping over tiny raised sections of flooring and becoming stunned after falling from ledges mere inches off the ground (often after a Wile-E-Coyote style terrified downward glance at the tiny amount of empty space beneath your feet). It seems to take all of Duncan’s concentration just to climb a staircase, and (infuriatingly) you are unable to jump, throw a rock, or do anything else while engaged in this activity, leaving you a sitting duck for the Black Knight’s crossbow-wielding guards.

Running out of fuel in the swamp

What’s more, there is no consistency in terms of when actions will succeed and when they will result in spectacular failure. On some levels you can jump normally, despite a low ceiling overhead (your head just passes through it, as in many platform games), but on other levels you will hit your head on that ceiling and crash to the floor, stunned. On the dungeon level, even if you manage to fell the torturer (using the ball-and-chain), you will likely trip over his unconscious body when you go for the key, because when you killed the guy guarding the lever (using the mace) you could walk right over his corpse with no problem.

Learning to play Beyond Dark Castle is a bit like growing up. You start out all awkward, clumsy and useless, but eventually you grow comfortable in your body. It is easy to forget that basic things like walking, running and jumping took patience and lots of practice in real life. Being able to do these things without hurting yourself is something to be proud of, and they must have been incredibly liberating and a source of great delight when first mastered.

Tripping over a small object

The proverbial “kids these days” will never have that experience of being an incompetent video-game toddler, experimenting with jumping for the first time. Games are too well play-tested nowadays, tutorials too slick, learning curves too shallow, and games too easy. Nobody even talks about games being “hard to beat” any more; that’s no longer the point of games. Modern games immerse you in another world, turn you into a hero capable of amazing deeds and allow you to escape the frustrations and difficulties of real life. They’re not supposed to be frustrating and difficult themselves. You don’t get “stuck” in modern games. You don’t spend hours and hours on a single screen, trying to land a dozen precision jumps in a row (jumps made from moving platforms to other moving platforms while deadly birds swoop at your head, all while playing a character who sucks at jumping). If a game is frustrating to play these days, it’s a sign of poor design. Modern games aim to produce satisfying play experiences at every stage. But Beyond Dark Castle made a virtue out of frustrating gameplay — all that built-up frustration made the catharsis of eventual success all the more glorious.

And I can’t help but feel that those old games taught me something valuable about perseverance and hard work that modern games will never teach.