The first time I remember a game breaking on me, and the first game I broke, was Super Star Wars (1992).  I was about eight years old and had saved my allowance for two whole months to buy this one video game, one I had fallen in love with on a series of weekend rentals spread out over the course of years.

 

This was back in the days when you had X number of lives and three continues. There was, apparently, no transference of data from one play to another, so when those continues were gone, I found myself back on the moisture farm, slaughtering Jawas.  I can’t tell you how many times I scaled that Sandcrawler, only to get pushed by a tongue of sandy fire, falling back down to the treads, where the Jawas I had already killed respawned in with all of their adorable, slave trading hatred for me.  Pretty much the whole game was like that, so I was rarely able to reach Old Ben Kenobi’s hut and pick up my lightsaber, which looked great on that old jaggy and glowy game.

 

One time, though, I shot my way through Mos Eisley and scores of Sandtroopers to the Millenium Falcon, blasted into space, got captured by the Death Star, and rescued Leia.  I had never made it this far before, past the Jawas’ proximity laser walls, the docking droids of Mos Eisley, and so, so many Stormtroopers.  I climbed into my X-Wing to fight the skirmish around which all Star Wars Canon is reckoned: The Battle of Yavin.

 

And that’s when my game crashed.  It took me a while to figure out what had happened, because, partly due to me not wanting to believe the game could have crapped out on me, I thought it was another story sequence.  I flew around a infinite, serene Death Star surface with only the X and Y coordinates in the upper-left hand corner to gauge where I was on the endless map.

 

When I realized I was looking under the game’s hood, my fascination somewhat mitigated my anger (which would only lead to suffering, anyway).  Before then, I, like most kids, thought everything I enjoyed came from whole cloth.  Video games didn’t have components, they just came this way.  But this copy of Super Star Wars had unraveled on me, and I knew I had to buy the game to beat it.  And this time I would come back in larger numbers.  Or the debug code.

 

Games used to have these things, cheat codes.  You’d buy a magazine to get them, or copy them out of the magazine in the store, because why should anyone pay $5 for what we would one day get on the internet for free?  Time long ago, kids.

 

The ultimate code was a game’s debug code (that is, other than the Konami Code. Look it up.).  Programmers would use this to test the game, figure out where and why it might crash and fix it.  It was godlike power over the game to make it work like it was supposed to.  Of course I would exploit it.  I figured I had earned it, after being cheated out of the chance to fly as Red 5.  Plus, the game had already bared its inner workings to me, so I figured nothing of virginity was lost.  I entered the debug code and BAM! any ammo I wanted, lightsaber right off the bat, nothing could stand in my way.  I was sure to plow right through til Leia gave me my medal.

 

Thing is, until researching for this editorial, I had never seen the end of the game. I grew bored with my unlimited power and never blew up the Death Star.  At least, not that I can remember, but I do remember flying the X-Wing, so I must have, but it didn’t stick with me.  What stuck with me was that every time I played the game after entering the debug code, I had the lightsaber at the start, which made things awkward when Obi Wan tried to give me another.  “It’s alright, Ben, I found this one lying around the farm and boy, those Sandpeople, well, they’re animals, and I, well, you know…”  There was no accomplishment in it, even if I didn’t use the code or the lightsaber; I knew I had it, and that wrecked the illusion.

 

Super Star Wars had stopped being fun, not because I broke the rules, but because I had done away with most of them.  I had discovered what it takes to game a game.  I didn’t like using an unfair advantage (whatever that means for a single player video game), but it wasn’t all bad.  I enjoyed new ways of interacting with the Star Wars universe, seeing what it would be like if Han Solo had stormed a Sandcrawler or Chewbacca was an even more unstoppable dog/man monster with an anachronistic laser crossbow.

 

It’s that different way of looking at a game that is so fun, busting it open like a pocket watch (look it up) and playing around with it.  In tampering with the components of a system, we step outside and past what we’re “supposed” to do.  That new, transgressive way of looking at play is what we want to share with you this issue, this rebelliousness that stuck with me years and years after I saw something I’ve never seen since: the Death Star, quiet.

 

                                                                                                  - Brandon