Lode Runner

Y’all ready to run some lodes with me or what! If you opened this email hoping I might drop an unreasonably emo rant about an old Nintendo game, well friend, you came to the right place. I can front like this newsletter is a Serious Adult Writing Venture all I want; it’s really just a LiveJournal¹ under any other name, right? But then, what form of writing isn’t a LiveJournal? Novels? Nope, those are merely LiveJournals as well, printed and bound.

Anyway, like many formative experiences, for me this one starts with a severe emotional meltdown. I can clearly recall that day my mom took me to the mall (the Westfield in Trumbull, CT to be precise, probably sometime in 1989 to be imprecise), and offered to treat me to a new Nintendo game of my choosing at Electronics Boutique, which was more or less unheard of outside of birthday and Christmas seasons. The choice left me frozen solid², and with leaving empty-handed simply not an option, I reactively picked Lode Runner, based solely on the box. I had never played it or even heard of it, but the cover graphic looked pretty exciting, a Luke Skywalker stand-in caught in a proto-Tomb Raider style adventure, gold trinkets spilling from his knapsack as he evades villanous claws. I loved playing video games as a child - by the age of eight, they were my favorite toy - and getting to bring one home apropos of nothing was a really big deal. Elation barely describes it.

So here’s where things go wrong. I bring the game home, plug it in immediately, and within minutes I come to the painful revelation that not only does this game suck, it’s quite possibly the worst and hardest video game I’ve ever played. You die immediately, over and over, and are afforded no weapons (even though he’s shooting a gun on the cover!) besides the ability to drill a hole directly next to you (which you’ll more than likely fall into and die from anyway)… the hope of victory is not even hinted at, let alone attained. Just brutal. Chalk it up to a pre-adolescent hormone surge, or the now-obvious privilege of being a small child whose most horrific episode involved a video game he didn’t like, but some small part of my brain broke in that moment. It wasn’t so much that I hated the game (though I did), but that I was given one chance to get myself a new game and I blew it, one ticket to Paradise and I hopped a Spirit flight to Fort Wayne instead. I cried until there were no tears left, that mystical sort of deep internal wailing that cannot be controlled, a rare enough event that I’ve remembered this instance for the rest of my life.

So fast forward to 2020, having successfully repressed that memory (which, with relatively-healthy emotional hindsight, is no longer heavy), I found myself searching for fresh ways to entertain myself within the pandemic’s firm social restrictions. Let’s bring the video games up from the basement! Besides seeing other people, nothing has been off limits over the past twelve months, and in dredging up the old cartridges and systems (anyone who wants to talk about how exquisite The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past is, let’s take that conversation offline), I couldn’t help but spot Lode Runner in the stack, an emotional wound that has long since healed (though not without some mild residual scarring).

Out of morbid curiosity (and a whole lot of nothing else to do), I gave the cartridge’s undercarriage a ceremonial puff, popped it into my Nintendo Entertainment System and, with my more-or-less stable emotional state, gave it a try. Turns out… this game actually rules?? It’s tough, for sure, collecting all the piles of gold and avoiding the enemies (who, amusingly, are exact replicas of Bomberman’s titular hero in a lemon-lime colorway), but even though I haven’t actively played video games since nu-metal’s inital wave, I quickly got the hang of it. I have no idea why this is the case, as I’m objectively worse at video games now than I was as a child, yet I swear this to be true. You have to time your hole-drilling perfectly - the game is indeed remorseless - but it can be done, and unlike a Pac Man or some other more rudimentary “follow this specific maze-like path to victory” game based mostly on evasive measures, there’s more room for improvisation and experimentation here (though not much more). Plus, the Konami code’s elaborate lengthiness be damned, you can literally just press the Select button during the brief pre-game song and choose from any of Lode Runner’s fifty-nine levels. This is a great game!

Apparently I’m not alone in my appreciation, as being so smitten with it, I looked it up online and discovered that my NES version wasn’t the first version of Lode Runner, nor was it the last - they’ve made like a hundred of these, multiple versions across multiple gaming platforms to include Super Lode Runner, a Hyper Lode Runner, Lode Runner: The Dig Fight, Lode Runner: The Dig Fight Version B, Lode Runner: WonderSwan, and so on. These do not interest me (okay, maybe I’m a little curious about the WonderSwan sequel), because the few hours I’ve spent playing the games of my youth in the past few months have satiated my interest at least until the next pandemic hits, and because Lode Runner delivers all I really want out of a video game - a good 8-bit bass-line, enemy AI that’s 90% reasonable and 10% bewilderingly counterintuitive, large piles of gold and difficult yet plausible challenges.

Plus, the Edit Mode has proven fun, wherein you design your own levels from scratch, trapping the bad-guys in little brick prisons if you want (I know some of you freaks used to starve your Sims to death, so this might appeal to you). I’ve never played or watched someone play Minecraft, and while a Minecraft fan hearing me rave about Lode Runner’s edit mode is probably like someone trying to sell you on their new idea of a cola-flavored carbonated sugar-water drink without acknowledging the existence of Coke or Pepsi, screw you! I don’t want to play any of your games, all I want is Lode Runner, my least wanted game of all time.

I hope I’ve tempted you into wanting to give this game a try, and lucky for you, you can! I found this true-to-form emulator for free online. Hit the full-screen mode and thank me later.

1. Of which I had one, shortly after the turn of the century for a year or so. And the worst part… I’m pretty sure it’s still up! Or at least it was when I last checked a couple years ago. Perish the thought.

2. A vast array of fun choices in any sort of store that deeply speaks to my interests will forever paralyze my mental functions, it seems. See also: my first visits to Tower Records (Manhattan) in 1992 and Amoeba Records (Los Angeles) in 2003.