Erik: The Phantom of the Opera from Crys

Erik: The Phantom of the Opera

from Crysys Games

Anne: Oh, man, baby. Look at the cover of this eighties game. Look at it. It is spell-binding.

John: What the hell is going on on that cover?

Anne: He looks like a bad-tempered caricature with gorilla hands and a serious need of hair gel. And is that a lamppost growing out of the Garnier?

John: Why does he have an axe?

Anne: I have no idea, but I think I'm delighted. It could be a holla to the 1983 movie.

John: But that makes no sense. He won't use an axe in the game!

Anne: OR WILL HE?

John: I'm not playing this.

Of course, play it he did, folks, because I made him. But first, I researched and developed on my own, because I'm a busy little bee like that. This game was originally released for the ZX Spectrum, one of the first popular personal computers in Britain. It looks a lot like a gigantic, possibly not-too-bright calculator. Of course, in this age of supercomputers that can calculate sine, like, way faster than that, the Spectrum and other machines of its ilk are completely obsolete, but it had a very large following back in the day. One reason for this was because it was very easily programmable, meaning that people could write their own simple programs, and the other was that it had a huge number of games generated for it over the course of its short lifespan. Yay! Games! About masked men in opera houses! Sure, why not?

So my first problem here is apparent: I don't exactly have an 8-bit computer from 1982 lying around amongst my newfangled space-age gadgets. But another great thing about time and technology constantly fornicating is that they produce babies like the internet, which is the world's largest repository of geeks telling other geeks about stuff they like. It turns out that there is a very large community of faithful old fans of the ZX Spectrum, and that they have ported many of its games and programs over for PC use, provided you have the tech savvy to operate one of the kajillions of Spectrum emulators they have also written. Oh, you wacky geeks, what would I have done without you?

So I sneaked on over to the nest of Spectrum geekery, snagged a copy of the game (long ago fallen into the public domain, much like Leroux's novel), and started trying to convince my computer that despite the fact that it has more RAM than it knows what to do with and a proven history of being able to take whatever massive abuse I subject it to, it really wants to pretend it has less capacity than a graphing calculator.

That took about an hour, mostly because I was trying different emulators and hoping one would operate close to the way I wanted it to. But then, huzzah! With a discordant buzz of low, ominous, almost cacophanous chords, the game ran! The DANGER could begin!

Then I spent another hour trying to figure out how to configure the damn thing so that I could use keyboard controls to do things. Even after I (vaguely) succeeded, it was still very touch-and-go. Sometimes, when you say right, my computer decides you go left. It resents me and it wants me to know it.

So, anyway, in the game, you play Raoul, intrepidly racing through the opera house in the hopes of rescuing Christine, who has been kidnapped by the madman Erik. So far, so good! Raoul is adorable in his evening wear, with a wee little top hat that he grabs whenever you force him to jump over something. He also has a tiny pistol, which may hearken back to Leroux's novel and its scene in his bedroom, or to a more recent version, such as the 1943 Lubin/Rains film, which featured people shooting at the Phantom in his very lair. The pistol is for shooting the many things that Erik begins throwing at poor Raoul the moment he starts moving away from his starting position, while you try to run around and find the six pieces of the key that you need to get into Erik's lair and free the distressed singer. It's one of the more basic run/jump/duck/climb ladders kinds of games; Super Mario Brothers in nineteenth-century evening dress.

The things Erik throws at Raoul, by the way, are hilarious. First it's just rocks. Then it's skulls and large, grinning theatre masks. Ooh! Symbolic! Then it's suddenly bombs - what. And then pyrotechnic flares! Then books, and ghosts, and holy Mary mother of god he's chucking entire chandeliers at you, and it only gets wackier from there. All the items, with the exception of the rocks, seem to have been selected by the game makers to have something at least peripherally to do with the Phantom's character; the skulls and masks are self-evident, while the bombs and flares could be related to various stagecraft skills or Leroux's love for pseudo-supernatural abilities in his character, the books are appropriate for a learned man (albeit one who obviously does not care about his books very much), and the chandeliers have plenty of precedent (though where do they keep coming from? aren't we out of chandeliers in this damn place yet?). And ghosts, well... looks like this version of the Phantom has a bit of a supernatural element to him, doesn't he?

Unfortunately, while I'm not what I would call bad at games, I'm also probably not spectacular at them. Which means that, about five minutes into my first attempt at this game, a flying skull clocked my tiny Raoul over the head and I received the following message in gigantic capital letters: