My Life In Horror: Digital Nightmares: Horror on the Commodore Amiga
It’s a strange experience, looking back at the cultural circumstances that shaped your existence:
I’m part of a particular, liminal sub-generation that occurs somewhere between Gen X and the Millennials (sometimes called “Xennials”). Born in the early months of 1984 (into the midst of a sustained period of snow and gales the UK is unlikely to know again), I vaguely recall a time before there was anything digital in the house, when the most complex piece of technology we possessed was a pocket calculator.
For the first six years of my existence, this was the status quo: Home-computing was in its infancy, video games were a new and exceedingly rare medium. As such, our entertainment was dominated by TV, VHS and the numerous toy-lines that sprang up in the wake of Thatcherism’s relaxation of laws prohibiting marketing to children.
I still recall the day we received our first computer: I was at an old friend’s house, playing some children’s game, inhabiting an imaginary scenario, when I received a telephone call from my Mother informing me that we’d taken delivery of this fantastic technology. At the time, having no particular frame of reference for it, I wasn’t particularly engaged or excited; I wanted to get back to my game, to finish whatever dream-scenario obsessed our fevered little imaginations.
But, soon enough, it was time to go home, the late and lazy Sunday afternoon wearing on.
When I arrived, I was surprised to find the kitchen table dominated by the monster and its monitor: A Commodore Amiga 500+, a home-grown species of computer currently making waves in everything from video games to professional TV and cinema graphical effects. Whilst I didn’t understand it or how it worked, my Mother sat and showed me how to insert the floppy disk into its drive, to type the “run” commands into the “Workbench” operating system (a kind of precursor to Windows).
This was, of course, so far removed from my general experience as to be magical, the images and sounds that appeared on-screen unlike anything I knew, but uncannily akin to certain things I’d dreamed or imagined.
The first video game I ever played wasn’t even a full game but a demo-disk from the front cover of a popular computer game magazine of the era (Amiga Action): Core Design’s Wolfchild, a peculiarly atmospheric, side-scrolling platformer with a sci-fi horror theme (player character Saul Morrow is the child of a geneticist whose research involves the splicing of human and animal DNA. Having been kidnapped by the Chimera terrorist organisation, it falls to Saul to rescue his Father, who uses the man’s research to transform himself into the lycanthropic, psychic entity of the game’s title).
Digital Nightmares: Horror on the Commodore Amiga
The demo itself is very short, consisting of an early rendition of the game’s second level: A primordial forest in which gigantic, mutated trees play host to all manner of reptilian and snake-like hybrids. The level is set at dusk, which deepens to night as the player progresses. At the climax, we encounter a gigantic, chameleonic creature that stands guard at the entrance to an ancient, ruinous temple complex.
Whilst exceedingly crude by today’s standards, and hardly revolutionary at the time, I found myself absorbed, enchanted, obsessed. Having no wider frame of reference, every aspect of the experience was magical to me: Already a highly imaginative child, it was my penchant to wander through imaginary states and conditions as a matter of daily living. It was -and still is- rare for me to be entirely present in the waking world, and even then, I am always a soul divided (liminal in a manner not unlike the Wolfchild itself). Here, I found a medium in which I could wander imaginary worlds, replicate that experience to a degree, but with an agency somewhat denied by traditional media.
Having no notion of the limitations of technology or parameters of the medium
I found myself obsessed by the apparent depths and leagues of those woods; the places that I now know to be illusory, little more than painted, animated backdrops designed to create the impression of depth and dimension.
Back then, my imagination went wild with ruminations on what could be lurking in those deepening shadows beyond the play-area, what secrets might be plumbed if I could only find my way to them. At the time, it seemed perfectly plausible that, if I could see those spaces, I should be able to access and wander them. Concepts of limited data space or capacity meant absolutely nothing to me.
As such, my imagination went into overdrive populating those illusory spaces with all manner of states, secrets and creatures. I recall having dreams and nightmares in which I was lost in those woods, trying to avoid the shimmering eyes of whatever lurked in the canopy or undergrowth. I have no doubt I attempted to render those discoveries in prose or maybe pencil and crayon at some point, even dragged my friends into little plays in which we performed the parts of various monsters and their prey.
Even back then, my imagination was inclined towards the darker shades of things.
Wolfchild, whilst ostensibly comic-book in nature, provided plenty of fodder for a mind obsessed with shadows, more interested in knowing what it was like to be the monster than fight and slay them.
A particular aspect of the game that enchanted me was the elaborate transformation from wild-haired, muscular Saul into the eponymous lycanthrope: The player doesn’t start as the Wolfchild, but must collect power-ups along the way in order to initiate the transformation. When they reach a particular level of health, Saul’s sprite writhes in apparent agony, the screen darkens and a pillar of lightning (a release of incredible psychic energies in the game’s lore) strikes down from the heavens. Transformed, Saul rears up and howls, now become the Wolfchild. In this form, he is much tougher and capable of utilising an array of long-range psychic blasts to take out enemies. Whilst technically possible as Saul, the best way to progress through the game is to maintain the Wolfchild state as consistently as possible, which makes an otherwise gruelling experience merely difficult.
As a game, Wolfchild is neither unique nor remarkable.
In terms of design, technicals, it’s fairly pedestrian, Euro-platforming fare the like of which were ten-a-penny on the Amiga. Where it really shines is in its presentation, atmosphere and the implication of back-story. Despite a fairly sophisticated -for the era- animated opening, plot and lore are thin on the ground, most occurring environmentally or through visual cues. Much of the work is done by a pervasive undercurrent of darkness that captivated my developing imagination and provided the fodder for many inspirations and stories to come:
That grim, ominous forest setting, for example, still features widely in my personal imaginings. Of course, it has expanded and elaborated since then, incorporating woods and forests from numerous tales and mythologies, but the essence of it remains those two-dimensional tracts from Wolfchild’s second stage.
I’d learn later, thanks to examinations of everything from Dante’s Inferno to the Grimm Fairy Tales, that the woods and wild places are ubiquitous settings in our collective imaginations: Something that recurs and recurs, obsessing our psyches as much as it inspires ancient, tribal dread.
In many of the mythologies I would craft later (some of which can be found amongst my published works), the wood occurs as a fundamental state; a setting that is neither entirely literal or metaphor, but where very real nightmares can be found, as well as dreams; the haunt of loves and horrors and adventures unending. Most often, it’s a liminal space where the division between the abstract and the actual dissolves, becoming meaningless. It’s also the place where characters most often find themselves, experiencing the necessary revelations to transcend their circumstances (or, alternatively, becoming one with the nightmares they’ve always feared).
Whilst these tales obviously draw inspiration from a host of sources, and explore concerns of some human complexity, the imagery used to express them derives from this:
A six year old of extremely febrile, often problematically vivid imagination, sat in front of a computer that would seem archaic to most present-day eyes, losing himself in the virtual forests of a long-forgotten video game.
That penchant for assimilation would become part and parcel of the experience in following years, as more and more settings, states, conditions became possible to render by advancements in technology:
Later experiences include the various folkloric and metaphysical settings found in Myth: History in the Making, a whistle-stop tour of everything from Norse to Ancient Egyptian mythology, in which Celtic warrior Ankalagan must face off against numerous gods and monsters in his quest to defeat Dammeron, the ultimate cosmic evil (an interesting collision of the traditional and Lovecraftian occurring in the game’s metaphysics).
Again, whilst crude to present-day perceptions, the game was graphically stupendous for its era, consisting of numerous settings derived from mythological influences. More than any, the game’s intro level -labelled as Hades, but aesthetically having more in common with Christian depictions of Hell- fascinated me:
A subterranean state of fire, rock and fragmented dungeons, the place flickers with hellish flames, echoing with the screams of the damned and the growls of demonic tormentors.
As Ankalagan traverses the dungeon-like realm, he encounters the souls of those he’s slain in battle in the form of skeletons that rise from the ground, as well as minor, imp-like demons spontaneously manifesting throughout.
Unlike most platformers of the era, this isn’t a simple case of progressing from left-to-right, beating a boss-monster and progressing to the next level: Reaching the far end of the stage, Ankalagan is met by an invincible incarnation of the Ancient Greek Chimera (here standing in for Cerberus at the gates of Hades/Hell). Trying to pass or defeat the creature with conventional weaponry results in quick death and return to the start. Instead, the player must engage in some fairly oblique puzzle solving: First, they must recover Ankalagan’s sword by defeating a number of skeleton enemies.
Then, they must backtrack to a particular skeleton who hangs via a chain from the ceiling, suspended over a fire-pit. Chopping the chain will plummet the captive soul down into the fires. Then, they must decapitate one of the active skeleton enemies so that its skull falls into the same pit. This offering causes a gigantic horned devil to rise from the flames and summon a smaller, trident-wielding demon to do its bidding. This devil then spontaneously manifests throughout the level until Ankalagan can defeat it using the demon-fire collected from the slain imps. Once dead, the devil drops its trident, which can be hurled at the Chimera in order to defeat it and allow escape from the halls of the damned.
As opening sections for video games go, it’s a deeply atmospheric, challenging and faintly disturbing affair.
To my rapacious, insatiable imagination, it was fascinating: Another example of my ignorance of technical limitations and the parameters of the medium inspiring endless speculations on what else those horrific cloisters might host: Might we encounter the myriad damned souls we hear crying out in the distance? Do we witness the various torments they’re subjected to in the manner of Dante being led through the infernal Circles?
Of course, the answer is no: The visuals, the sound-design, all conspire to create an atmosphere far richer and more potent than anything the game actually boasts. Just as the dusk-lit woods of Wolfchild evoked fantasies, so too did this shadowy, fire-licked realm of pain and torment. The sheer lack of apology, the unrepentant joy the game takes in rendering a state of utter despair and hopelessness, is fascinating, and extremely rare for the era (video games were still largely considered a children’s medium, so overt expressions of horror were thin on the ground).
Myth: History in the Making pushes those parameters to the extreme of tolerance, including not only some deeply distressing settings but also a number of monsters and encounters that are unsettling in terms of design and presentation (whilst I never encountered it at the time, the final encounter with God of Chaos, Dammeron, is the stuff of Lovecraftian, cosmic-horror nightmares).
I recall being enthralled by its mythological settings and monsters as a child,
Recognising its subjects and more subtle mythological cues from my already-well-established love of traditional folklore and oral traditions. To see familiar monsters from the printed page animated and lent a veneer of animus here was a sincere thrill, from the Hydra of Ancient Greece to the metaphysical dragon Niddhog from Norse mythology.
Later, the Amiga would become the first platform on which I realised video games could express horrific subjects in the same manner as film or literature: Still generally regarded as s children’s medium in the UK and Europe, video games tended towards the twee, cutesy and fantastical. Concerted works of horror were thin on the ground, but this is where the Amiga distinguished itself:
Whilst incredibly crude by present-day standards, horror games did exist on the system, and pushed the bounds of cultural tolerance to their extremes with their subject matter.
My first encounter with horror on the system occurred in the shape of the H. R. Giger-inspired point-and-click adventure, Darkseed. Incorporating the iconic artist’s work as its aesthetic, the game is a creepy, atmospheric adventure in which protagonist Mike Dawson must solve the mystery of the strange old house he’s inherited and thwart an invasion of Earth by extra-dimensional aliens.
Waking after the first night in his new home (from fittingly Giger-esque nightmares), Mike finds himself with a terrible headache. If the player doesn’t undertake certain actions immediately -showering, taking Aspirin- and repeat them regularly, we find out why:
What Mike experienced during the night was far from a nightmare: He truly was abducted by extra-dimensional aliens and had the embryo of some hideous abomination planted in his skull. If the player doesn’t complete the game within a strict time-limit, or regularly shower and take aspirin when Mike complains of a headache, then the alien bursts from Mike’s skull in a gruesome, animated death scene.
Progress through the game reveals moments of nightmare-like surrealness
in which the alien other-dimension bleeds through into waking reality (settings occasionally shift into Giger-esque nightmare-scapes of biomechanoid horror, whilst characters and artefacts sometimes shift to be replaced by equivalent examples derived from Giger’s artwork).
At a particular point, the player discovers that the mirror in Mike’s living room is actually a device allowing transition from the alien “dark” world to the “real.” Cleverly, the “dark” world is a twisted reflection of the waking: Buildings and structures exist in both, but in wildly different states and forms. A staircase in Mike’s house becomes a slope of skulls in the “dark” world.
A sinister atmosphere pervades both realities, but it’s in the “dark” world that horror finds true expression:
Everything here is desolate and twisted, the land itself a barren, biomechanoid expanse in which anatomy and technology mingle, where lifeforms are bound into their machinery and architecture such that they are indistinguishable.
Beyond the obvious disturbia of Giger’s designs, there’s a pervasive sense of hostility and oppression in the alien dimension: Everything is inimical to Mike, such that even touching certain things will result in a game over. Likewise, there’s an implied suggestion that this is a dead or dying reality; one brought to the brink of total collapse by the alien “Elders” who preside over it (and who have masterminded the invasion of our own dimension).
The air of nihilism and hopelessness about the place is profound, as is pervasive paranoia (every second spent in the alien dimension feels like one of impending death). Learning to navigate both realms is key, as is understanding how they both interact (opening a door in one realm might open it in the other also. Leaving an object in an area of the human world might mean its equivalent appears in the alien and so on and so forth).
Digital Nightmares: Horror on the Commodore Amiga
Puzzle-solving is thus intense and complex, as it’s difficult to tell where the next threat will appear from and, all the while, that biological counter in Mike’s head is counting down.
At the time of the game’s release, I can’t have been older than 7 or 8 years old. It was amongst my first experiences of video game horror, and thus created an indelible impression: By this point, the Amiga had been moved upstairs to the spare room, meaning that gaming was a solitary, isolated experience. This allowed for a level of engagement and immersion essential to cultivating a truly visceral sense of horror:
To a child only just beginning to learn the parameters of the world, for whom nighttime and shadows might still harbour demons, games such as Darkseed sewed such nightmares as we tend to lose as adults: An irrational sense that the digitised world on-screen might become a window through which the horrors it contains might spill.
I remember well the Autumn, after-school evenings spent in that small room, the Amiga itself humming and growling away, Darkseed’s ominous soundtrack echoing in my ears. That sense of unease, the feeling of palpable dread, is something I strive to recreate in my adulthood: The intuition that the world might not be quite as solid or certain as grown-ups assert, that there might well be spectres lurking in the corners of the room, monsters beneath the bed.
Darkseed made me afraid to open the computer-room door at night, to step out onto the landing.
Reason had yet to cultivate the sense of self-ridicule that allows us to transcend such infantile paranoia. Now, as an adult, I struggle to recall the immediacy of it; what it felt like to be in that boy’s skin, uncertain of what’s real and what’s not, the distinction making precious little difference to the fact of his fear.
As with Wolfchild, my imagination proved consumptive with regards to Darkseed: Elements of Giger’s nightmarish, biomechanical wastes seeded themselves in my mind, fostering a love of the man’s work -and a more general affection for the surreal- that sustains to this day.
Furthermore, the dynamic of the game -divergent realities separated by the merest septum- appealed to a fascination cultivated long ago, when I first encountered the likes of The Chronicles of Narnia. Here was a much darker take on that dynamic; one in which the alternative reality to our own is somewhere much, much worse. The nightmare other-realm is one in which technology has run rampant, beyond any bounds or restrictions, melding so completely with architecture, environments and lifeforms, there’s no longer any distinction. Worse, the other-world communicates a condition of perpetual suffering, the entities we encounter operating in depths of disgrace and peaks of pain that are difficult to comprehend. The overall impression is of a reality fundamentally tainted, brought to the brink of collapse on the most minute level.
That notion fascinated me then and fascinates me still:
Readers of my own work will be well aware of my abiding obsession with wastelands, realities on the brink of collapse, abandoned realms and civilisations.
On a purely sentimental level, Darkseed stands as a moment of sincere revelation; one of those formative experiences that blows wide the parameters of assumption. Before encountering it, I simply didn’t know video games were capable of exploring horror themes and subjects so overtly. The fact they could, and did so with such relish, felt like a transgression; a trespass into forbidden territory.
After, I became obsessed with seeking out that state again (though would find myself frustrated in the effort more often than not):
Games such as Harlequin provided subtler, more camouflaged species of Disturbia:
Ostensibly a primary-coloured platformer featuring cute, child-like graphics, playful music and creatively amusing enemies, underlying darkness that informs every element of the game.
Whilst story is light on the ground (as it often was in earlier examples of the medium), what little there is tells of an inverse Peter Pan fable, in which a young boy who grew up in a world of his own imagination -the gigantic living clock, Chimerica- leaves that world when he becomes an adult in order to explore waking life. Called back to his childhood home after learning that it’s in danger, he finds its doors shuttered, its streets empty, the great clock still. Some malign force has crept into Chimerica and broken its heart. As the eponymous Harlequin, it’s up to the player to explore the strange and tainted realms of Chimerica, slowly collecting the pieces of its heart before facing off against the entity responsible.
Needless to say, the fairy-tale resonance of the story struck a chord with me as a child, as did the metaphorical nature of the adventure (Chimerica is clearly not entirely literal, rather a liminal space born of dreams and imagination. Furthermore, the corruption that has infested it is not external, rather a result of “Harlequin” leaving it behind and forgetting his own imaginary realm).
The game has all manner of darker resonances and implications that lurk just beneath the cutesy aesthetics:
This is not merely some other reality, but a dreamscape; the expression of internalised inspiration and trauma. The game therefore invites the player to treat everything from its monsters to its environments as metaphor, expressions of internal process far deeper than most video games of the era were willing or able to plumb.
Whilst not a direct influence (insofar as I’m aware), the game would find echoes in later, more sophisticated generations with the likes of American McGee’s Alice, a twisted sequel to Alice in Wonderland that evinces a markedly similar subject and set of themes (like Harlequin, Alice is also an exercise in distorted childhood nostalgia, a journey through one character’s psychological decline, manifested in a warped and decaying dream-scape).
More than anything, Harlequin’s sense of subtextual mythology gripped me profoundly: The notion that the various areas, puzzles and monsters symbolically reflect aspects of Harlequin’s own psyche, struck me in a way very little had at the time. I fell in love with the fractured, incongruous dream-world of Chimerica, echoing, as it did, similar states I conjured in my own childhood fantasies.
Whilst ostensibly cute and jolly, a rip-roaring childhood adventure, the undercurrent of sadness and loss is always present, occasionally rising to the surface where it manifests in subtly disturbing ways (the manner in which the areas of Chimerica change subtly or profoundly depending on the puzzles Harlequin solves can occasionally be shocking, especially if the alterations are unexpected. Likewise, certain areas reflect darker or more ambiguous elements of the mind, exhibiting a somewhat less jolly and welcoming ethos).
Once again, elements of Harlequin became parts of my own imagination
; not only the game’s -occasionally surreal- imagery, but the psychological and metaphysical themes of the story (readers of my work might well recognise the obsession with internal landscapes, dream-lands taking the place of waking reality etc). The overall impression is of a game that wants to be more sinister and subversive than it’s able to be, owing to technical limitations. But that underlying imperative still bubbles to the surface on occasion, contrasting the primary-coloured, cutesy presentation with something fundamentally more resonant.
It’s a curious tension Harlequin draws that requires engagement beyond the superficial in order to appreciate: In technical terms, as a computer game, it’s a flawed but functional platformer with some nice adventure elements thrown in. But as a text, it’s a fascinating stepping-stone for the medium that, as previously mentioned, would find more fulsome flower in the likes of the -much later- Alice series(amongst others).
Whilst ostensibly crude by present-day standards (some elements might even be perceived as risible), these were the earliest experiments of the medium when it came to horror, and coincided with our own development as children and young people: Just as they grew and developed in sophistication, so did we in terms of our tastes and assumptions. Even now, some thirty-odd years later, I still recall the visceral dread of investigating the house of Darkseed, exploring Chimerica’s weird and wonderful sights in Harlequin. More than anything, I feel that visceral mingling of dread and fascination, horror and excitement that has become one of my most beloved tensions in fiction of all mediums, and one I actively seek out in the work I consume.
George Lea 24 08 24
