Groundings and Gauntlets

I wasn't the best student for most of High School. I skated on ability for a good chunk of my time there, and that meant I didn't do well. The first three years I was there I would not do well the 1st semester, and then in the first grading period of the second semester, my progress report would be awful. My parents would ground me then until my grades came up. My Freshman year of High School, when this occurred, I had already pre-ordered a game called Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. After it arrived, I was forced to let it sit on my cabinet, taunting me, until the day my grades were better. It sat there for about a month, then one weekend, I proved to my parents that my grades were getting better. I brought in test scores from a number of classes to show them how well I had been doing, and as a reward, they suspended the grounding for a weekend. I had a mission to beat that game within the confines of the weekend.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was a revamped version of the old Gauntlet games from the 80s. You have a man, and you're in a dungeon, and your goal is to get to the end without dying. Along the way, monsters spew forth endlessly out of monster generators, and the only way to stop them is to destroy the generators. You accomplish this by hitting it with your sword, the same sword you use to hit the monsters. Along the way you can pick up food to increase your life, which, in the old games, was constantly decreasing even when you weren't being attacked. This served to keep the quarters flowing in the arcade machines, and frustrate home users. The game is famous for its voiceovers which informed the user of what was occurring, such as the famous "Wizard needs food badly."

So I called my buddy Kevin and told him of the ceasefire, and we plopped our butts down for some marathon gaming. Joe should have been included, but he was away for the weekend, and this was a one time deal I couldn't afford to blow. For my character I chose the Knight, and the color Blue. Kevin chose the Green Jester. We played that game for at least 12 hours each day. We played it when it was fun, and when it wasn't fun.

You see, there comes a time with every hobby when it just becomes not fun anymore. We knew that our time with the game was limited, so we knew we had to beat it. In order to beat it, we had to do some pretty tedious things; finishing a level multiple times in order to get every collectible, namely. I have distinct memories of us getting angry at each other for not fulfilling our roles adequately. By the time we finished it, we wanted nothing to with it. That game, in all of its simplistic glory, had served its purpose.

The victim in all of this was Joe. When he got back, he was ready to play the game, as he too had been patiently waiting his turn. Unfortunately, though, we had nothing to offer. Sitting down and playing that game only brought out disgust from Kevin and me. We would play for 15 minutes, and after that, we were done. The memories of grinding away at the game until we found its juicy, unfulfilling core, flooded us. We were done, and Joe to this day is angry at us.