Exile III: Ruined World
I
Here I was, a child of twelve. Brendan and I sat to the side of a newly finished, still mostly empty basement playing Exile III: Ruined World on my family's new 200 meghertz pentium computer made by NEC; a machine that my father exclaimed to me when he first bought it a year before,
"You know what I just bought? A 200 megahertz Pentium computer! Can you believe that?
"That's fast?" I asked.
I knew how fast that was - fast enough to play any game I wanted. I lived for those moments, and so do most PC gamers still; the time when you can finally accept the Graphics-Messiah into your heart, and live a fulfilled life as a gamer.
I have memories from about the same time in my life of my father driving me to church in Worcester Massachusetts on Tuesday for choir practice, myself a boy soprano in an Episcopal boys choir, my dad, casually spelling mine and my carpool friend's name in hexademical representation of ASCII.
So here I was, semi-secretly sequestered in my basement with my best bud Brendan, sitting on swivle chairs in wet bathing suites and wrapped in too-large beach towels, sweating pubescently in the dry air-conditioned air while the summer which we had just briefly visited to earn our disappearance to the underground, awaited just a few feet above us.
At a time when japanese-cut-scene-polygonal-fetishism ruled the console RPG world, and the relative relief of the sprite and isometric graphics of the Baldur's Gate clan and Fallout 2 had just begun to be advertised heavily in PC gamer magazines, Exile III looked truly horrible.
None the less, on my families new blazingly fast "rig", we played only a light smattering of the PC gaming world's biggest brightest graphical beasts, Quake II and so forth and so on.
--The game screen in the entire Exile series is a small rectangle, about 1/5th the size of any desktop. There are no cut scenes, and only slim traces of audio garnered from a few low-bit public domain sound libraries. There is no music to speak of, save for a few bars during a fan-art style title screen.
If an art historian were to guess the age of origin of the Exile III graphics, they might spot it as pre-medieval religious art, hyroglyphs, or even cave drawings.
Art Historian
"Thousands of years ago," they would explain, "mankind hadn't discovered the craft of visually representing three-dimensions on a two-dimensional surface," taking long pauses to studder and move their hands about, "so they took creative liberties to get the point across."
But mankind named Jeff Vogel still didn't know how to solve that problem in 1997 and still doesn't today.
II
Sitting there in the stale underground air, Brendan and I were about to purchase a house. We had played for probably six hours that day. Later that night he would sleep over, and we would wake up extra early the next day to play for another six. My parents would look down on this behavior.
"Why don't you guys go outside again? Haven't you had enough of that game?",
and his parents would have his head for it.
and his parents would have his head for it.
But we loved Exile III, and we were about to purchase a home together.
We had saved up money as I remember, for quite a long time. It was fairly expensive, the house was, and when we finally payed for it, got the key and went there, it was like no feeling I had ever had in a game. Accomplishment. A sense of place, of belonging, of meaning for these little collections of visible pixels that we had given so much emphasis to in our short lives. Huddled up in towels on office swivel chairs in my newly finished basement, we had shared in the imagination of a world to which we belonged, and from this house, had found some semblance of permanence in our shared fantasy. What I remember most though, despite the accomplishment of home ownership, was that once we went in our house, we were stymied from exploring the whole of our domain by a magical barrier which none in our party could dispel. A secret room in our own house thusly stayed secret indefinitely. Inside our own house. We were not the masters of the universe. The universe did not bend to us. It extended beyond our success; it did not want it or celebrate it, the Exile universe existed for its' own ends it seemed, and there was no possibility more exciting than this.
