Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Sam took the cartridge and inspected it. The slightly faded logo of Games World, the magazine that had given the game its very limited distribution back in 1992, was the only sign of wear. Providing it still worked, he considered it half-a-grand well spent.

  He gave Jamie both a smile and a nod.

  —

  While Sam retrieved the Sega Master System II from a cupboard filled with ancient consoles, Jamie went around clearing away the clutter of the MSII’s modern brethren, shoving all the sleek new units and their myriad controllers beneath the huge flat screen that dominated the room.

  “Right,” said Sam, crossing the room with the MSII in hand. “Your first job—”

  “I already did a job,” Jamie said, pointing at the space he’d created on the floor. He sounded out of breath and his plump cheeks were red.

  “Your second job, should you choose to accept it, is to get the tea in.”

  “I already did a job.”

  “No tea, no game.”

  Jamie left the room with a dramatic harrumph and Sam set up the MSII while listening to Jamie’s disgruntled clattering in the kitchen directly below.

  Once the wires were connected, Sam flicked the On switch. The pent-up anxiety that had been building for a week, ever since an anonymous gamer had contacted Sam on a forum and offered to sell him the rare game, melted away when the familiar blue Sega logo lit up the screen. He sat down on the single mattress that he slept on every night, control pad in hand. It had all worked out. It was real.

  A menu appeared on the flat screen bearing the Games World logo and beneath, a list of six games. The game that Sam had been waiting for was the last on the list. He flicked down and selected it, the sweat of his anticipation greasing the pad.

  The following screen was a pixel painting of a man standing alone in the middle of a desert looking across miles of empty terrain at a purple mountain range far on the horizon. Crude as the rendering was, Sam felt a shiver shoot up his spine and dissipate across his shoulders. Above the purple mountains were two words in bright green capital letters that were as much responsible for his reaction as the image: DESERT WALK.

  At the bottom of the screen, in smaller text, were the flashing instructions: PRESS START TO WALK! Sam pressed Start.

  Immediately the screen was filled with a yellow-pixel desert, seen from the point of view of the game’s main character. On the ground were gray-pixel stones and on the horizon were purple-pixel mountains just below a blue-pixel sky. Sam pushed the Up arrow on the control pad, and on-screen the character he was embodying took a step in the direction of the mountain range. The game simulated the sound of footsteps on sand, chshh, chshh, chshh. Other than that, it made no noise. When Sam stopped walking, the game was silent.

  “I’m really playing it,” he said. “I’m bloody playing Desert Walk.”

  He was six steps in when the screen went black.

  From downstairs Jamie shouted: “I’ve got it.” Sam looked over at the blank face on the clock on his mattress side table and concluded that for the second time in the last few days, the kettle had caused a power cut. He shook his head.

  While he waited for the power to come back on, Sam reached over and picked up the envelope in which the game had come. He looked inside the envelope and noticed a small square of paper. He retrieved it and saw the sender had sent him a handwritten note. It read: Enjoy the game, but not too much. Don’t forget to eat!

  —

  When Jamie finally came in with the tea, Sam had the game back up and running, the power restored. “Mate,” Sam said. “New house rule. When I’m playing this game, we can’t use the kettle.”

  “Get out,” Jamie said. “I need my caffeine.”

  “Look, you can’t save this game, you can’t even pause it. If I’m fifteen hours in and you start an explosive brew, I’m making you homeless.”

  “We could buy a new kettle.”

  “Or you could.”

  Jamie flapped his hand dismissively. “Sod off, you know I can’t afford that.” Sam did know this: Jamie had been staying with him rent-free for six months while he tried to get back on his feet following his “redundivorce.” The simultaneous blows in quick succession had made his childhood best friend a figure of maddening pity, but Sam’s patience was on the wane of late.

  “No job, no tea,” Sam said. Jamie looked crestfallen, and Sam felt a twinge of regret. Had he been too harsh? He was about to apologize when Jamie gave him the finger.

  “Lovely,” Sam said. “You done? Good. Now shut up and watch me play the best computer game ever made.”

  Ten minutes of walking later, Sam having made no visible ground on the mountains, Jamie said: “Is this literally it? The whole game.”

  Sam shrugged, his gaze fixed on the television. “That’s the point,” Sam said. “No one really knows—that’s what’s so exciting about it.”

  “Yeah, I can barely contain myself,” Jamie said, and Sam sighed. “You said this was the game that you’d been waiting your whole life to play.”

  After a moment of reflection, Sam spoke softly: “You need to understand what you’re looking at. This is possibly in the top five of the all-time rare games—”

  “I know that, I’m just saying it’s probably rare for a reas—”

  “Listen first, and then learn. The game’s rare because it was only ever released as part of this Games World sampler. The other games on the sampler were all demos that later got a proper release, but due to a manufacturing balls-up, the full game of Desert Walk was featured instead of the demo version. So the magazine had to recall the issue, which means loads of the samplers got destroyed. However, Desert Walk never got its official release in the end because Sega pulled it for no reason that anyone’s been able to properly ascertain, meaning those few who bought the sampler before it was recalled were the only people to ever play Desert Walk.”

  “Well, it’s obvious why it never got an official release, isn’t it? It’s rubbish.”

  “That’s not the reason. No one knows exactly why it was pulled, but there’s all sorts of cool rumors about it doing the rounds. Go look it up. The game causes epilepsy, it causes blindness, it causes madness. I’d never have put much stock in all that, but on one of the forums someone posted a link to a BBC article from two years ago about some bloke who apparently got a copy off eBay and died of dehydration after playing the game for a week straight.”

  “I’m the only one that’s going to die of dehydration if you’re serious about that kettle,” Jamie said. Sam ignored him. Up on the screen, the passing desert looked the same as it had at the start of the game.

  chshh, chshh, chshh

  “And it isn’t rubbish,” Sam continued. “It was ahead of its time. It might look simple at first, but those stones on the floor aren’t being regenerated from previous screens. The arrangements don’t repeat. They’re all completely unique. That means the designer made every square inch of this huge, endless desert.”

  “Why did he bother?”

  “She. The designer’s a woman, you pig. That’s the question, isn’t it? And that’s what I intend to ask her when I go to Manchester to meet her on Thursday to interview her for the blog.”

  “You’re going to ask him point-blank why he bothered making a game where nothing happens?”

  “Obviously not. And anyway, it isn’t like nothing happens. Some people—”

  “Forum people?”

  “Yes, they’re people too. Some people who’ve played it a while say they’ve come across different objects after walking for long enough. A small shoe, a mailbox, a skeleton. One guy says he came across a van half-buried in the sand. It’s, like, widely believed that if you keep walking long enough, you can complete the game by finding a main road. No one’s done it, though, so that’s what I want to ask her: Can it be completed? Why the attention to detail? Is there a cheat? Why was it pulled from the— Holy bum flaps.”

  Jamie, who was slouching on the mattress, sat up and looked at
the screen. “What? What is it?”

  “Look,” Sam said. On the horizon a dark shape had appeared. At first it looked like a person, arms wide open. When they drew closer to it, the dark shape became green, and in doing so, revealed its true identity.

  “It’s a cactus. Yessss.” Sam pumped a fist in the air, his voice high and excited. “Other people have found those too. Ten minutes in, and we’ve found our first object.”

  He flattened out his fist and offered it to Jamie for a high five. Jamie raised his eyebrows, stood up, and left Sam hanging. “Sorry, mate. I don’t think I’ve got another minute of this in me.”

  “Fine,” Sam said. “But don’t cry to me when you miss me making history.”

  Jamie mumbled something on his way out the door but Sam didn’t hear; he was already focused on putting the cactus behind him and finding the next secret of the game.

  —

  The alarm clock on the bedside table continued to flash uselessly on the default setting of 12:00, depriving Sam of a meaningful relationship with the correct time of day. He’d been too engrossed to get up and open the curtains. After what felt like an hour of playing, he hadn’t come across any more objects, and the purple mountains still looked ominously distant.

  He didn’t mind, though. The gentle chshh, chshh and the undemanding graphics had lulled Sam into a deep contemplative state where he’d been able to think clearly for the first time in a long while. In addition to his biweekly blog, there had been numerous commissioned pieces he’d been writing that took up a substantial amount of his time, not to mention the monthly column he was writing for one of the national newspapers. It had been almost a year since Afshan left him, and it was only out here in the make-believe desert that he simultaneously reasoned and believed that it had probably been for the best. He wouldn’t have had time for all the demands of gaming had they still been together. He’d have had to go back to work on the shop floor at PC Planet.

  Certainly there wouldn’t have been enough time or goodwill for the demands of a blog about Desert Walk.

  Sam’s stomach growled. He put down the controller and up on the screen the walker stopped. The room went quiet and Sam felt an unexpected stab of loneliness. He ran down to the kitchen, eager to return to the game. He opened the fridge and pulled out a bowl of leftover Balti from the night before. Only after he’d put the bowl in the microwave did he notice that the light coming through the kitchen window was much weaker than he’d expected it to be. He looked at the clock on the oven. It was flashing 12:00 too.

  He went into the lounge, where Jamie was sitting, watching television. “What’s the time, mate?” Sam said.

  “Dunno. Can I use the kettle yet?”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Seriously, what’s the time?”

  Jamie sighed and flicked the button on the remote that brought up the menu. “It’s twelve minutes past four.”

  “Get out.” Sam went over to the screen to see for himself. He snorted out a laugh to hide his genuine shock. “Bloody hell, I thought it was, like, lunchtime.”

  “Nope, you missed that. You been playing that game the whole time?” Sam nodded. “Why don’t you take a break, mate. Come watch this unbelievably fascinating documentary about the 1876–78 Indian famine. Next up’s one about the fastest car in the world.”

  “Sorry, I’d love to, but I’ve got to get on with work.”

  “Yeah, of course. Work. You found anything else out in the desert yet?”

  “No. Not yet. Can’t believe it’s been nearly six hours. That’s insane.”

  “What’s insane is you’ve been playing it for six hours and nothing’s happened yet. You haven’t even found another cactus? Or an anthill? Or a dried-up twig or a bit of leaf?”

  Sam shook his head and grinned. “Nope. It’s brilliant.”

  After devouring his curry, Sam went back upstairs. He was nearly at the landing when he heard the familiar noise of the game coming from his room: chshh, chshh, chshh. Wondering if he’d left the controller the wrong way up, he went inside and saw everything was as he had left it. The control pad was the right way up, and, on the screen, his character was standing still.

  chshh, chshh, chshh

  It was a glitch. It must be. Perhaps he’d uncovered the real reason the game had been pulled, and it was nothing more fantastic than a useless bit of programming.

  Sam reached for the control pad to check that the buttons weren’t stuck. They weren’t. Two things occurred to him then. The first was that the chshh, chshh sound emanating from the television was slightly different from the one he had grown accustomed to over the course of the day. This sound was softer, and somehow more distant. And the spaces between footsteps sounded irregular, less rhythmic and robotic. The second was that there was a small dark shape on the desert horizon that hadn’t been there when he left the room earlier.

  More unnerved by both these realizations than he dared acknowledge, Sam laughed and went over to the television to look at the object more closely.

  chshh, chshh, chshh

  The object had already grown larger by the time Sam got close to the screen. He could make out that it was a small figure now. He could see its arms, and legs, its shaggy yellow hair.

  Puzzled, Sam took a step back. The graphics used to render the figure were much more like those from the start screen than the surrounding blocky desert and mountains.

  It was a toddler, dressed in a red romper suit and carrying some flat, rectangular object in its left hand.

  “Hel-lo,” Sam said, his voice soft.

  chshh, chshh

  Had he done it? Was this advancing child some sort of clue to the end of the game? His game-player’s instinct told him it might be; he recalled a certain randomness to many of the solutions to old-school games. Even better: How funny would it be if after all that walking, the solution to the game was to just stand still?

  He thought about the small shoe that someone had reported on one of the forums. Sam stepped toward the screen and saw that the child, now a third of the way between the top and bottom of the television, was wearing only one shoe.

  Sam didn’t feel a rush of excitement upon piecing this together. He’d noticed something unsettling about the child on the screen. He couldn’t be sure if it was just bad design, but the boy—it was obviously a boy now—looked almost skeletal. The romper suit wasn’t packed with pixelated puppy fat. Instead, it hung so loosely on the child that it appeared to be blowing to the left in a nonexistent desert wind.

  There was something wrong with the child’s face too. And this, unless the creator was unhinged, had to be some mistake in the programming. The drawn skin and the gaping mouth were reminiscent of famine victims that Sam had only ever seen on news items and in documentaries.

  The child raised its one empty hand and reached toward Sam.

  Appalled, Sam stepped backward and put his foot squarely on top of the MSII. The desert was replaced by a series of wavy lines, then the screen went black. Sam got his footing and realized he’d turned the console off.

  He fought the urge to yell. He couldn’t believe what he’d just done, the time he’d wasted. But when the rage subsided, Sam was surprised to find he was also relieved: he could start the game afresh and wouldn’t accidentally play all night without a stock of supplies. He thought of the note that had come with the game—Don’t forget to eat!—and smiled. He was starving. He could grab a cup of tea now too.

  He went to tell Jamie about his exploits but when he stepped out of his room, he found the whole house was pitch-black. He turned on the landing light and went downstairs. Jamie wasn’t in the lounge and when Sam turned on the television to bring up the menu, he realized why. It was half past four in the morning.

  —

  “The game was meant to be a satire,” the woman opposite Sam said. She took a sip of her coffee and pushed a loose strand of gray hair away from her eyes.

  Sam typed satire into a document entitled “Lorna Fry Intervie
w” on his laptop. He nodded, took a sip of his own coffee, then shook his head after understanding what it was she was saying. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. I wanted to bring down the industry from inside. Very idealistic stuff. Seems a long time ago now.” Her eyes flicked down to the nurse’s uniform she was wearing. “So I sold a game called Duck Shot, which I made enough money from to start my own little company. And when I say little, I mean it was just me and one other bloke. Because of Duck Shot, we were never short of offers for the games we made. Nintendo put out Means of Production, a Mario-style game where you had to overthrow your capitalist overlords.”

  “Yeah, I loved that one.”

  “You’ve played it? Interesting and impressive. What about Freedom?”

  “Oh, I loved that.”

  “You know, the only thing they didn’t let us do with that one was call it The Nazi Killer.”

  Sam laughed and typed The Nazi Killer. “No way. They were fine with the other stuff, the violence, et cetera?”

  “Oh yeah, just not the literal description of the main character’s job.” Lorna took another sip and looked at her watch. “With Desert Walk we wanted to be subtle. We wanted to satirize game playing itself. My worry was that we were seeing kids spending more and more time playing games as a hobby. Great for the industry, but what about the kids?”

  “Never harmed me,” Sam said, offering a confident grin that definitely did not say “I’ve just spent every night since Saturday wandering around your satirical desert.”

  “Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-gaming or anything. I think these people taking their shoot-’em-ups into the real world more than likely had a screw loose in the first place. But I reasoned if Moore’s Law continued to hold through the nineties, soon consoles would be able to simulate real life, and I wanted to raise philosophical questions about that. So we designed a game where nothing happened. Literally nothing. And worse, it happened in the middle of nowhere.”

  Not knowing what else to say, feeling suddenly very self-conscious, Sam said: “So Desert Walk is, sort of, a practical joke?”