It was when I printed out a map for
Metroid (Nintendo, 1986) off the internet and felt a creeping unease and remorse that I really started to understand what makes the game work.
Why did it bother me to look at that map--sweeping my eyes over it to find Energy pods I missed, identifying the boss rooms--why did that seem so
wrong? Five minutes at my PC and this venerable game felt somehow... broken.
Some games, it must be said, are all the better with maps.
Might & Magic without maps? Absurd!
Grand Theft Auto III without that paper map unfolded next to you (at least for the first few hours)? Why would you do that?
Etrian Odyssey??-- well, I haven't played it, but I've read enough to know: MAPS!
So what's with you, Metroid? Is there something under that power suit of yours that's too simplistic or fragile to be laid bare like that?
"Me?" this game responds, eyebrows raised. "I'm Metroid. If you need a map, you're playing me wrong." Further shamed, I look away, because I know Metroid is right. Because the Joy of Metroid is...
Familiarity
It's built up slowly, as familiarity has to be. Here's the short hallway with cracked bricks under me. And the broad wall I have to roll under. Ah, and here! Here is the tall vertical shaft room. Up a bit and through the non-descript hallway and I'm in the gold vertical shaft room.
If you've played Metroid, you'll remember these shaft rooms. With their dozen branches and sub-branches, these two rooms are the twin trunks at the core of the game--at least the early stages. They're the axis of the world.
If you passed through these rooms just one time, as you might in another platformer, you wouldn't remember them--they would be simply a couple challenges to be bested. And not very good challenges, at that. Repetitious. Obvious safe havens and generous angles for firing on enemies. The biggest setback they offer is slipping and falling down a few screens (assuming you're on your way up). But these vertical rooms aren't built for that kind of challenge, and for good reason. In Metroid, form follows function: these are throughways, meant to be driven not quite on auto-pilot, but with the sure, steady confidence that comes from... well, familiarity.
The mechanic that produces this effect is Metroid's trademark backtracking structure. You see obstacles early on that you only get the solutions to much later. And so you come back to them, threading your way through rooms you've already (maybe) mastered.
Replaying stuff, even in reverse, is not really why it works. The magic happens in your mind. The first time you visualize exactly how you can get from one far end of the game world--through the green brick area, down the gold shaft, down to the short corridor...--then actually follow that mental map to your destination, you feel a singular thrill. This world that confronted you at first with its stark alienness has become your own.
If you had done that by following some paper map, the world would still be
out there... it would still belong to the designer, like a book belongs to its author no matter how many times you read it.
Patterns of Behavior
Why doesn't familiarity breed complacency? Or dullness? Well, of course there are always new branches to explore and then absorb. But it's also because while the environments stay the same,
you change. Returning to a vertical shaft with the freeze gun turns every side-to-side skimmer into a potential platform to stand on. It's a bit like revisiting a poem you read in high school: the words don't change but your vocabulary has grown.
The enemies in the game, with their at-first surprising, then perfectly predictable, behaviors serve as their own distinct layer of familiarity to achieve. Maybe this is less revolutionary than what's being done with the environments--enemies with deterministic patterns to learn are as old as...
Centipede?
Space Invaders, I guess. But it's still effective: There was a time you hated those fly-like things with two big dangling claws. They drop down fast, take a ton of shots to kill, and slide on the ground just below your gun's firing line. Now? Now you roll underneath them, tease them off the ground with a jump, freeze them with a shot, jump up, and plant bombs on their icy blue heads. Whether you deal with enemies by avoiding them or shooting them, success hinges on familiarity.
Even the game's music reinforces the theme. An hour into the game, you respond to a certain sparse bleep-bloop theme with a tingling anticipation: It means that mere screens away is one of those peculiar bird statues holding a juicy new power-up. You check your missile display because you know you'll need 5 missiles at the end of the room to open the red missile-locked door.
A Strange New World
Playing recently, I was struck by the paradoxical phenomenon that familiarity somehow enhances the genuine sense of alienness to the world of Metroid. You don't really get this in, say,
Super Mario Brothers. Sure, the world is as bizarre as anything in Metroid. But how long does it take before the newness consists of nothing more than a series of abstract challenges of dexterity you haven't seen in
quite that configuration before? Metroid provides an ebb and flow between comfort and anxiety as you pass back through familiar areas to take a strange new branch previously inaccessible to you. Emotionally, it's not unlike the airy calmness of riding your horse in
Shadow of the Colossus between the stress of confronting and solving each colossus.
Reading up on Metroid, I learned a fascinating historical fact: Metroid flouted the expectations of gamers in 1987 in its very first moment by allowing the player to simply
move left. Left of the starting area, in fact, is the game's first crucial power-up. But how many players just assumed that, like every side-scroller before it, Metroid was a game about moving from left-to-right, forever?
Right-to-left, left-to-right, up and back down! For the first time, a game made the player
retrace and revisit. The result is a world that is more than a string of challenges; it is a place to
inhabit.
Footnote
Okay, actually, this? This is just beautiful.
