PHOTON MAN (2/7)

 This is a little journal where I wax poetic about family, reading, learning, and Age of Empires.

Rest in Peace Ensemble Studios. You changed my life.

        I taught myself to read on Age of Empires. We never purchased the game, it was a simple unmarked CD-ROM with “Age of Empires: Rise of Rome 2001” written in neat red sharpie. It was a burned CD from my Uncle Billy, my mother’s brother. The game was released on October 17th, 1997. 32 days later, my brother and I were born.

I don’t know why he gave us the game, if I can be totally honest. In 2001, Nicholas and I were four, Connor was six, and Brendan was at best two. My mom did not play video games, and I’m not sure if the concept of video games have ever occurred to my dad, even today. But we had that silver disc, the red sharpie, and absolutely no idea how to play.

We didn’t know how to make the units move, we had seen UB and cousins play, and knew that there was a world beyond several villagers standing in a circle around the Town Center. We knew that, theoretically, you could move units, you could build buildings, and that armies could clash. The knowledge of how to get that to work was beyond us. And yet we played pretty much every day.

The most exciting day of my life, up to that point but is still pretty high in the rankings, is when Nicholas and I were staring at the screen, trying to make anything work. One of us worked the mouse, the other mashed as many keys on the keyboard as we could. All the spaghetti we had available to us was thrown at the wall. Click, mash. Click, mash. Click, mash.

A villager moved a few dozen pixels, which may as well have been a marathon distance. We flipped our lids. We frantically searched the keyboard and screen for some sign of what we had done. We failed to replicate our success.

The primary method of playing the game was through typing. We understood that Enter brought up a fillable text box, and that cheat codes could be used to win despite our disadvantage of not knowing how the game worked. So we would type in BIGDADDY, a sequence of letters transcribed from a legal pad near the computer. Letter by letter, we input the symbols which in Age of Empires created a near unstoppable unit. It was a sleek black convertible, a man with a blue motorcycle helmet and a rocket launcher peeking through the roof. It was the coolest thing I could conceive of as a child.

Still unable to control it in any meaningful way, we had somehow discovered the “attack ground” action in the UI. It had been explained, probably by Connor, that it would cause the rocket launcher to shoot wherever we clicked. We didn’t know how to move, but we could sure get the BIGDADDY to move inch by inch. It pulled itself from location to location, dragging itself by its rocket launcher like some sort of Mad Max gondolier.

And so we would pilot our fleet of convertibles over hill and dale, the same looping animation of the explosion heralding their approach. We’d sweep through enemy settlements like avenging angels of gasoline, steel, and nitroglycerin. We had no idea how to play the game, and we won time and time again through this flawless exploit. And every time, we would read the same words flash on screen:

YOU ARE VICTORIOUS

And we would lean close to the screen, knees on the computer chair, and sound out letter by letter the banner of our achievement. “You-awe-victowious,” we slurred, each word stretched like taffy as we attempted to pronounce a word with more syllables than we had any right to read. And we would do so all the time, sounding out the scrawl each time until we no recognized the words and their meanings by sight.

As we learned the game more (as in, learned the basics) our retinue of cheat codes expanded. If we wanted to gain access to the benefits of cheat codes, we had to learn the arcane art of spelling. If we wanted ten thousand food, we had to spell PEPPERONIPIZZA which was no mean feat for four year olds. I still am unable to spell pizza in my head without hearing the exact rhythm of our four year old voices. P-I-Zihzih-Ayyyyy.

If we wanted to clear all the fog from the map (which why wouldn’t we, it made the core of the gameplay loop frivolous) we had to type in the cleverly coded NOFOG. And I cannot read the word “fog” without hearing each letter sounded out. I can still feel the muscles in my neck contract as I read the word; two decades later it's a habit I haven't broken. I’ve learned a lot of words since then. I’m a very technical boy. And I cannot free myself from the mimetic grip of Age of Empires.

In first grade, I told my teacher that the alphabet board on the side of the classroom was incorrect. Under “U” it had an Umpire. I gently told her that there was a typo, as “empire” was spelled with an E. She assured me that was how “umpire” was spelled. She even pointed to the man in the Umpire's uniform that squatted beneath the bubble letter. We agreed to disagree, and a lifetime of pigheaded stubbornness was to follow.

I think it's a strange thing to be a child of the twenty-first century.

I don't really have an ending for this. Grateful to my family and to the public education that allowed those beginnings to grow. We're living in scary times, but I have to be optimistic. I can't let that little kid down. He was victowious. So I will be too.