The Never-Ending Pixelated Vision Quest

What was originally a project to replace the U.S. military's severely outdated battlefield simulators from the current hacked version of Doom to a next-generation SIM quickly morphed into something altogether different when the defense contracting company spearheading the project was found guilty on 50 separate counts of fraud and graft. Control of the project was then handed over to a separate psy-ops division down the hall who were then forced to spend as much money as quickly as possible or risk having the project defunded because of Defense Department budgetary requirements.

To do this, they quickly expanded the programming team to include as many programmers as humanly possible. A whole South Korean village and an outpost of Russian mathematicians living in the Siberian forest were enlisted to write code. Without anyone from the original team to guide the structure of the project, nobody was quite certain what they were building. Originally titled "Sniper Recon", the name changed weekly, and some times daily, from "Untitled Interactive Adventure XIV" to "Cybernetic Matrices Scavenger" to "dEathN•ut x0", and sometimes just meaningless strings of symbols like, "∫≈7‘≥Ω".

To get things under control, a lead Nintendo guru and an ex-hippie from Silicon valley, who claimed to be the true mind behind CollecoVision's Smurf Mountain, were brought in. Together, they would have long peyote-filled trance sessions to conjure up the true nature of the game. In the end, they decided on two separate titles; "Electric Disco Bubble Fun Adventure" and "Glythar: Golden Child of Future Past". One was a candy colored interactive dance game where you popped day-glo soap bubbles, and the other was a Conan-like adventure to save a princess from a dystopian future-primitive landscape. As disparate as they were, the two titles would ultimately need to be merged in some way, shape, or form.

Using remnants of other abandoned defense spending projects, they created a prototype console using an aquarium filled with electrified jelly. Originally, the gameplay involved shooting random geometric objects with a laser beam, but with some retooling, a neural interface made out of an eye massager found in the back of a SkyMall catalogue, and some alligator clips, they were able to access elements from the player's deep subconscious. You could go from shooting a zombie to shooting a zombie with the face of your childhood nemesis which, upon success, would reward the player with instant orgasmic jolts via electric impulses to the brain.

Once the artificial intelligence used to control the behavior of objects in the game became advanced enough, arbitrarily shooting inanimate objects seemed downright brutish, and the designers started to move away from killing as a basic gameplay device. Lengthy investigative storylines were developed splicing ideas from obscure Myst imitations and old episodes of Quantum Leap. Each time you played, the outcome of the game would change drastically based around your current emotional state. Some of the testers described an ecstatic state of completion or cathartic hypnosis similar to Csíkszentmihályi's idea of "Flow", as if the game had fixed a lingering trauma in their lives.

Eventually this too became rote, and it was decided to re-introduce some killing and shooting. But instead of guns and lasers the developers created something called gna, akin to a psychic energy force. Essentially a measurement of total current brain function, in the game it was manifested as anything you could think of. It could range from creating pails of water out of nothing, transporting oneself out of a locked room, or destroying space-time continuums. The introduction of a secondary aquarium tank opened the opportunity for multi-player psychic battles, and the QA testers would have late night competitions lasting through the night to see who could work up the greatest amount of gna, destroying each other's space time continuums over and over until six in the morning.

The result of such psychic stress, as well as a diet based around mac & cheese and cheap soda, could leave the testers nutritionally spent. Slower, less violent gameplay was needed to nourish the overall experience. So the designers returned to the idea of complex storylines but now with the use of gna as the main interactive tool of gameplay. At this point everything was completely flexible and interdependent on the person playing: their powers, weapons, what they were fighting or doing or saying, and the purpose to it all. It was constantly altering itself, bending and undulating to the slightest interaction in every other aspect of the game. Quests to save princesses would morph into snipe hunts for loose change which would then lead to adventures under the earth to save the mole people, who, you would discover, were your ancient relatives that foretold of your return from eons ago. All of that could be part of an interpretive dream meant to teach you about your own conflicted association with your family's genetic heritage. You could sometimes overhear the screams of family arguments from within the tank throughout the testing facility.

Some testers described the experience as an interactive movie of infinite possibilities. Others could barely find the words except to mumble something about masses of color and objects swirling in a whirlwind of confusion. Originally, the team developing the game expected a little emotional stress, but one after another of the testers succumbed to a strange affliction they referred to as "the bends". Without a solid purpose to the game, some players would get stuck in unending loops, trying to accomplish grandiose tasks only to be undone by distractions. After their allotted 2 hour time slot ended, those suffering from this disorder would fall into desperation, demanding to be let back in to "find the lost key" or "return to that world".

One particular incident ended violently with one of the marines being given a dishonorable discharge for punching a colonel who forcibly removed him after 6 hours in the tank. You'll still see him wandering around the Fort Dix downtown, asking for change, and demanding another chance at returning the ghost crystal back to his grandfather.

—March 7th, 2010

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