Like Unto A God

The first video game I ever got hooked on was Star Wars Jedi Knights, sometime in 1999 (in my mid-30s!). I'd never really gotten into video games when I was a kid, although I did have a Pong console that I spent hours using with my black and white TV when I was in high school. But while friends were going ga-ga over Ms. PacMan, Missile Command or Asteroids, I couldn't see the appeal and kept my head buried in the latest Marvel or DC treasure.

And really my foray into gaming was all Tammy's fault! She had received the Jedi Knights game for her birthday or Christmas, and had started to play it. (Aside: a bone of contention for years, between Tammy and I, is the way she has to try out every gift she gets right away, instead of playing with one or two for awhile before moving on to the next one. Instant Gratification Strikes Again!) She seemed to be having a great time playing it, although I was as oblivious to it as I was when she sleuthed through a Nancy Drew PC game or went on Math Quests.

But then, around the end of Level 1, she got stuck. For those who don't know, this is a First Person Shooter, meaning that you run around and kill lots of enemies, while trying to get through virtual locales in order to get on to the next level. In this particular case, she'd gotten to the point where her character was in a huge factory-like room, at the end of which was a vertical freight conveyor that carried boxes up, up and away. Tammy knew that she somehow had to get on the boxes and use the vertical lift to get to a higher point of some sort, but couldn't figure out what the right sequence was. If you didn't do it just right, you fell off and had to start the ascent all over. Pretty standard stuff to video game veterans; I'd never seen anything like it!

Good parent that I am, I of course helped Tammy get through this predicament she'd found herself in. And then stayed seated beside her as Level 2 started, and couldn't help but kibbitz as she played on. Before long, she suggested that maybe I should create my own character, and play the game from the start while she continued on by herself. "We can do that?" I asked incredulously. "You bet!"

We had but one home PC in those days (what do we have now? 3?) so what this really meant was that Tammy and I had to take turns using it, which is kind of funny since it was nominally Vicki's! But the sainted wife was well used to these sorts of developments on the homefront and took it all in stride.

A few days later, the womenfolk left for a week of camping (not my cup of tea) and so I stayed behind, ostensibly to work. The first night I think I stayed up until around 3:30 am playing Jedi Knights, and then behaved much better the next evening and got to bed before 2:00. When Vicki called on the third day to see how I was doing, I had little time for chitchat with her. Instead I said, "Hey is Tammy handy? She is, great, can you put her on, please!"

And Tammy barely got out her "Hi, I'm having fun, how are you?" before I shouted into the phone, "I'm on level 6!!!" And thus was a gamer born.

Level 6, as it turned out, was a watershed moment for me. It was the first point in the game where I got stuck. See, that's the difference between a player in his mid-30s and a pre-adolescent kid: she got stuck on Level 1, while I made it a whole 'nother 5 levels before I needed help! Unfortunately, there was no one in the house who could get me through this, for a variety of reasons. First, well, there was no one else in the house (cats were no help at all)! Second, all those hours of playing had elevated me to the top of the household heap, in the span of just a few days on the calendar. Tammy would've been willing to aid me if she'd been there, I'm sure, but I had probably passed her already, at least in the terms of this sort of game. And more importantly, my stoppage wasn't caused by not knowing what to do (I wish). No, my problem was I had a freaking ATAT (All Terrain Armoured Transport) killing my ass!! I'd gotten through most of the level (I suspected) but at a certain crucial juncture, no matter what I did, this ATAT would come stomping out of a building and start firing at me. I had about as much chance of beating him, at that point in my evolution, as I'd have today of winning a World Wide Halo competition! It was just no contest. I tried, and tried, and died, and died. And after about 10 or 12 hours, over two days, I gave up.

For part of a day or more, I believed that I'd run my course as a video game player. Oh, sure, I'd blazed brightly for a few days there, but isn't that exactly the kind of flame that so quickly burns out? Of course it is! The girls were gone throughout all of this, but I was still... mostly... going into work at the bank. Unlike my current situation, the bank wasn't filled from floor to ceiling with geeks. In fact, you were as likely to find a bird watcher there as a video game enthusiast! Nevertheless, I happened to mention my plight to someone (it could've even been Jim Hinckley, though I don't know that it was) and they said, "Have you tried just using a Cheat Code?"

Now, if you'd wanted to think of a label for something that was likely to make me flinch away, "Cheat Code" would've been a pretty good effort. "I don't want to cheat!" I said. "I just want to get this ATAT off my ass!"

When I came home that day, though, I figured I should at least look into these surely-poorly-named "Cheat Code" things. I did a little searching on the World Wide Web (we still called it that back then) and found that I could type in special console commands that would:

a) allow me to walk through any wall or locked door;
b) give me unlimited ammunition for my firearms;
c) take me directly to a later level;
d) give me every weapon in the game, even ones not introduced yet;
e) make me like unto a god.

Despite myself, I kind of liked the sound of that last one. It wasn't true godhood, but rather superhero-like invulnerability, which, of course, was all the better to me! "God Mode On" I typed, but I might as well have entered, "This looks like a job for Superman!"

And that poor ATAT driver never knew what hit him! I took that rat bastard out with my light saber! With. My. Light. Saber! Oh, sure, it took about 50 swings, all the while he was raining death on my head and no doubt scratching his over my continued existence. I promised him I'd kill him last, and so I did: his vehicle eventually gave up the ghost under my repeated-albeit-weak attacks, at which point he hopped out of the cab and I showed him the business end of a Jedi's saber.

The weird thing was, in all of the exhiliration of finally taking out that ATAT, it took me a minute or two to realize I still had no idea what to do next! I had expected that killing that threat would've opened some doorway to me, but alas, nothing had changed. After several minutes of running around futilely trying to get anywhere new, I resorted to "Set Clip Off" and passed like a ghost through various walls until I ended up in an area I'd never been before. A quick couple kills later I was through to Level 7. To this day I still don't know how you were really supposed to get through that level! Much, much later I finished the final level - numbered somewhere in the 20s! - and did most of it without any cheat codes required. But I'd never have gotten past Level 6 without them!

In the years since, I've had similar obsessions with Aliens Vs Predator and several Battlefield games. I'm currently slowly working my way through Quake 4, a good but not exceptional First Person Shooter game that I bought much earlier in the year. Just recently I had to go find the God Mode setting for it, because even on Medium difficulty there's just some parts I can't get through without being killed (again and again and again). I haven't had to bring out the "Set Clip Off" hardware on any other game so far, but it's probably there, if I need it.