emulation

I’ve been sitting here for over twelve hours, playing with MAME. It initially began as a quest to find and play the Castlevania arcade game. While it is pretty… not-good, I did get me-out a hefty basket of insight on Simon’s Quest.

I’ll let your imagination play with that for a while.

It only took a few plays to fill me as full of Haunted Castle as I wished to be filled. So, I took to seeing what else MAME happened to support. This was the first time that I’d really paid much attention to the program. It used to be a practical nuisance, last it was high on my radar.

Now, though, it… kind of works okay. It’s still not got some features that I’d like, but it makes up for them in how comprehensive it manages to be. You’ve got your Art of Fighting 3 right next to your Asteroids and your Rolling Thunder and your obscure Japanese porn Mahjong.

Through all of this business, something struck me.

I’ve… most recently spent an hour with Centipede when I could have been sleeping. This wasn’t in the plans. After about fifteen minutes, though, it occurred to me what was going on with the levels. Merely by playing the game, I was altering the level design. It couldn’t be helped.

When stage 2 came around, it wasn’t a different stage because of a pre-ordained set of obstacles. It didn’t even rely on a random generator. I made it different, albeit unintentionally. The randomness of my actions was translated, through various side effects, into the randomness of the mushroom field. All I had to do was be there. To exist.

It keeps going on like that. Perpetually. You get the same thing with Asteroids, although with all the moving pieces it’s not quite as evident.

…

Games aren’t quite so poetic anymore, are they.

Hmm, I say!

EDIT:

According to the KLOV, Centipede was the first arcade game to be designed by a woman (a certain Dona Bailey — sister to Justin, perhaps?).

Curious, curious.