The Game Doctor

[The Game Doctor has been a legend in the electronic gaming industry since he debuted in the world's first video/computer game publication, "Electronic Games" in 1981. He has answered software-related questions in more than a dozen magazines and gaming sites. As a long-time fan of POSTAL, he has made periodic pilgrimages to the gopostal.com site and now returns to answer questions for The Urinal. Doctor, your patients await… The Gimp]

Welcome, POSTAL trick or treaters, it's been a while since I filled the waiting room with bowls of hard candy and put up the fake spider webs and the – oh wait, those aren't fake, so I guess it's just a long time since I've had this office cleaned. And now that I take a closer look at the hard candy I can see it isn't supposed to be hard, it's just been sitting here since Christmas.

In any case, this month's appropriately scary question actually comes from a game fan named Rob who I met on a bus ride here in my current home city of Las Vegas . And, since I gave Rob the URL to this site, I assume he's reading this. If not, well, I already told him on the bus.

Q: What was the first genuinely SCARY electronic game?

A: It's funny, but despite the fact that monsters and Halloween icons have been in almost constant use since the dawn of programmable gaming in the late 1970s, the monsters were mostly no more than non-threatening targets, as seen in the Ghouls & Ghosts series.

The first time a creepy creature actually broke that fourth wall and made us do the joystick jump, however, was in one of the initial games developed by LucasFilm Games (now LucasArts) in the early 80s. Along with the Habitat project for Q-Link (now better known as AOL), the first two games produced by George Lucas ' game development crew were Ballblazer (later Ballblaster, I believe), a futuristic sports game, and Behind Jaggi Lines (eventually released as Rescue on Fractalus).

Unfortunately, both of these games managed to escape the confines of the Lucas labs while still in development and were widely available through "user groups" and other pirate sources once the game reached playable beta status. For Mr. Lucas , who had proven so deft at keeping his pre-release "Star War" films under wraps, the far looser security of the game business at that time drove him nuts and he actually threatened to abandon the field and go back to making movies exclusively.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevails, and while Ballblaster proved a fairly entertaining little number, Fractalus was an absolute marvel. Using fractals to create a jagged, mountainous landscape on a far away planet, the game cast the player as the first-person perspective pilot of a ship with two missions: 1) take out the anti-aircraft batteries secreted amidst a strange planet's craggy peaks by the enemy alien Jaggi while avoiding virtual death and 2) rescue your fellow pilots who were downed by Jaggi fire.

The scary part came during the second part of that mission. When you spotted a downed pilot, you had to maneuver your VTOL craft onto a flat section of rock near the crash site. At this point, you would see a pilot running toward your ship. However, before long players noticed something – and if they didn't notice it, it was in their face pretty damned quick.

Occasionally, you see, that "downed pilot" was a fake, a Jaggi dressed in a human flight suit. The only way to distinguish between human and Jaggi was by the slight, greenish hue on the Jaggi faces. Didn't notice it? Then you opened the airlock and almost instantly a monstrous Jaggi kisser was right outside your windshield, its ham-like fists shattering the shield and ending the game in seconds.

In a game world where monsters had never before been seriously frightening, this was the real deal. Everybody who owned the game (either the bootleg or the official version released by Epyx for the Atari and Commodore 8-bit computers) would invite an innocent friend over to play, dim the lights and wait for a Jaggi to pop up and cause their pal's bowels to loosen.

And that's our history lesson for this month. Oh, and Rob, I forgot to tell you that the transfer bus I told you to take turned out to be wrong, but I guess you know that by now so it's all good, right?

Or maybe I'll just take our van when going places in the next few months…

*

Okay, gang, that's it for the Scary Edition of The Game Doctor. We'll be back next month, just like the guy who reads your electric meter. In the meantime, in between time, you can find answers to the most Frequently Asked Questions, check out the official GoPostal.com site. But send any new questions regarding RWS, the POSTAL franchise and anything else that occurs to you to: GameDoctorKunkel@gopostal.com.