Grid Wars

Grid Wars is a simulation of an arcade game from the future. You, a human, enter an alien bar, called Alphie’s, in search of a space drink. But a sign reads: “You must play before you drink, human.” The game you must play, against a wide assortment of aliens and robots, is Grid Wars. As a kid I loved the pictures of my opponents, rendered in fantastic monochrome against a dark background on my tiny Mac Plus screen. As you progress through the game your opponents get harder and harder. You start off playing against something that looks like a vacuum cleaner attachment, then move up through big-eyed tentacle creatures, bionic space cowboys with mohawks, and a fungus-like creature that spews smoke out of its orifices. At one point the potted plant that you assumed was just decoration gets up and starts playing against you (it’s good!). My favourite was the furry blob whose only facial feature is a Cheshire Cat grin (which turns into a Cheddar Dog frown once you defeat him).

Grid Wars is a game of unequal sides. Even within the world of the game, you are very unlike your alien opponents. You control a square at the bottom of the screen and fire a stream of bullets onto the board, while your alien opponent sends various geometric shapes down the board, attempting to break through your fortifications and destroy your square. During a match the “grids” slowly descend, accompanied by an ominous beep-tick sound that gets faster as the game progresses. If the grids push past your defenses you lose all your lives at once and it’s Game Over. It is a difficult and stressful game. You are playing not only for fun, but for the respect of these aliens. If you achieve a high score you win the honour of buying everyone a round the drinks. A friendly alien puts his arm around you and you watch fireworks exploding in space. If you fail to achieve a high score an enormous, aproned alien stuffs you into a garbage can and puts you out with the trash (outside the ‘Android Entrance’).

Once you have defeated all the aliens, you go up against your most difficult opponent: another human being. After playing against frog monsters, eight-eyed spider monks, and smiley-faced robots it is very unnerving to see another human being sitting in the alien’s chair. I see him as a Mr. Kurt from Heart of Darkness, as a Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. He’s gone native and he’s playing the game the way the aliens do.

As a child I had two completely unjustified theories about this human opponent: 1) that he was somehow supposed to represent “you” (or some sort of doppleganger capable of taking on your appearance); and 2) that he was impossible to beat. I don’t know why I thought these things. You never see your own face in the game, and there’s no reason to think that you look anything like this opponent. But for some reason this made sense to me. Maybe, given the general hostility to humans in Alphie’s, it seemed unlikely that the top Grid Wars player would turn out to be another human. Or maybe it was a deep-seated discomfort with an alienness that I recognized in myself—a fundamental otherness within me that I could never overcome.

To this day I have never been able to beat the human.