Then the first level or “step” of the game appeared—a sprawling green meadow, covered in patches of colorful flowers and strewn with the occasional tree or giant boulder. My tiny pixelated avatar appeared at the bottom center of the screen, and in that instant I was back in the zone. I wasn’t Kira Morrow, or Parzival, or Wade Watts. The controls became an extension of myself, and I became the vengeful Princess Kurumi, clad in blood-red silk and armed with an infinite supply of throwing knives, intent on reclaiming my stolen kingdom at any cost.
Four blue-clad ninjas in black hoods appeared from the top of the screen and charged toward me. While I was dispatching them with my throwing knives, a fifth ninja clad in gray appeared, descending upon me much more quickly. But I took him down, too, just before he struck me with his sword. Then I began to run forward, toward the top of the screen, dispatching more brightly colored ninjas as soon as they scrolled into view.
Ninja Princess, aka Sega Ninja, turned out to be much more challenging than I anticipated. But once I got a feel for the controls and the gameplay, I was rockin’ like Dokken—especially when I had Shoto whispering pointers into my ear.
“Just touching an enemy doesn’t kill you in this game,” Shoto said. “They actually have to strike you with their weapon. Ninja Princess was one of the first games to do that. It’s a much better game than Commando, and it was released three months earlier. In fact, I would argue that Ninja Princess is probably the first true run-and-gun game.”
“Unless you count Front Line by Taito,” Aech said. “Released in ’82.”
“I don’t,” Shoto replied. “It only has one level that repeats over and over—”
“Dude, it’s a game where you have a gun and you run,” Aech replied. “How do—”
“Can you guys debate this subject later, please?” I interjected. “On your own time?”
“Sure, Z,” Shoto replied. “Sorry. Hey! Get that shuriken power-up!”
In the game, I grabbed a small power-up dropped by one of the ninjas I’d slain. As I did, the theme music changed to a more heroic tune, and instead of throwing knives, my character began to hurl giant black shuriken, which could take down multiple enemies in a row, when they were kind enough to line up for me.
When I reached the end of the first level, Zaemon’s golden-haired second-hand man Ninniku appeared and attacked me with a giant boomerang-like weapon. I dodged it, then lined up with Ninniku and began to unload on him with my shuriken.
“Keep shooting him until his hair turns red!” Shoto told me.
I did as he instructed, and after seven or eight hits, Ninniku’s hair turned from blond to red—apparently to indicate his rising anger. Then the gameplay froze and Step 1 ended. The game tallied up my points, along with my total number of shots and hits and my overall hit ratio. The map of the kingdom popped up again, revealing that by clearing the first level, I’d moved slightly closer to the castle at the top. Then the next level began.
Step 2 required me to fight more ninjas while wading through rice paddies. When I battled my way to its end, Ninniku appeared once again, and once again I attacked him until his hair turned red, signaling his defeat.
Shoto continued to coach me, but Aech remained quiet, except to shout warnings or congratulate me on a nice move.
Shoto referred to Step 3 as the “avalanche level,” because it required you to battle ninjas while also dodging giant boulders that were continuously appearing from the top of the screen. It required a completely different strategy from the first two levels, and I lost my first life figuring that out. Then I lost another life during Step 4, where Princess Kurumi spent the entire level fighting off packs of ravenous wolves. It was a truly great game, and it was also kicking my ass. Now I only had one life left, and my confidence started to waver.
I found myself wishing there was a way Shoto could play through the trickier levels for me, but that was impossible. Tricks like hacked OASIS haptic rigs and illegal software, which had allowed Sorrento to take control of any of the avatars under his command, were obsolete now. None of them worked with ONI headset technology. I was on my own.
Thankfully, I hit my stride again during the next level, Step 5, which was set in a dense forest of bulbous 8-bit trees, concealing wave after wave of what Shoto referred to as “Keebler Ninjas.” I managed to earn back one of the lives I’d lost.
Step 6 was set on a roaring river, which the player had to cross by leaping from log to log like in Frogger, while battling more ninjas along the way. When I reached the other side, Ninniku appeared once again, hurling his boomerang at me from the riverbank until I landed enough hits to defeat him.
As I played, I noticed something odd about the music playing on the arcade’s jukebox. The same three songs kept playing, over and over. “Obsession” by Animotion, then “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, followed by “My Best Friend’s Girl” by the Cars. It was easy to see the connection. All of these songs could’ve been about Halliday’s obsession with Kira—his best friend’s girl. And, I realized, I could be reliving the moment his obsession began.
I pulled my mind back to the game. I was now in the seventh stage, which took place in the streets of the village outside the castle walls. Shoto referred to the oddly dressed enemies I encountered here as “Pastel Ninjas,” because many of them appeared to be wearing turquoise tunics and pink pantaloons. I had to battle several “Clown Samurai” who wore red-striped Hammer pants that made them look like walking circus tents with swords. Once I defeated all of them, I cleared that level too. Seven down. Nine to go. Almost halfway there…
Shoto referred to Step 8 as the “stampede stage,” because you spent the entire level trying not to get trampled by an endless string of horses stampeding across the screen, while fighting off more Pastel Ninjas, who miraculously never seemed to get trampled even once. The lucky bastards.
At some point, a small crowd of onlookers began to form around me—the NPCs who’d been playing on the other machines, I assumed. And the longer I played, the bigger the crowd sounded. I didn’t turn around to do a head count, but I caught brief, warped glimpses of them in the lenses of my mirror shades, during the pause in gameplay at the end of each level, when my score and hit count was tallied and I was given a brief view of my progress toward the castle on the map. I tried to put them out of my mind, too, so that I could remain focused on the task at hand.
Ninja Princess was a strangely nonviolent action game. There was no blood or gore in it at all. Or killing. When Princess Kurumi got hit, she would just fall down and cry. The Puma Ninja clan members and bosses didn’t collapse and die when they were dispatched. They just vanished in a puff of smoke. When I asked Shoto about it, he told me it was a conscious choice by the game’s creators, to promote pacifism and nonviolence.
“Wow,” Aech said. “A nonviolent game about killing people with knives. Genius.”
“Shh!” Shoto whispered. “Let the man concentrate!”
I made it to Step 9, which was a battle through the stone courtyard surrounding Kanten Castle’s outermost wall, followed by Step 10, which required you to scale that wall while fighting off dozens of expert-climber “Spider Ninjas.”
Step 11 required me to fight my way down a lone stone walkway through the castle grounds. Step 12 was another wall-scaling level, identical to Step 10, but with the color scheme changed. When I reached the top of this second wall, I faced Ninniku one final time, dispatching him for good.
“Boom!” Shoto shouted triumphantly as I completed the level. “You took out Ninniku! You’re almost to the castle!”
Shoto was right. Step 13 required me to fight my way through more ninjas and samurai, making my way up a long stone path that led to the castle steps. When I reached those steps, the main villain, Zaemon Gyokuro, finally appeared and started shooting at me with a pair of ball-and-shot pistols. When I managed to hit him enough times, the level e
nded. And then I finally made it back into Kanten Castle—my former home, now overrun with usurping Pastel Ninja dipshits.
Step 14 required me to battle my way into the castle, by running under ladder walkways suspended on pylons before I had to fight Zaemon once again. Then I continued on to Step 15, where I had to make my way into the castle’s inner chambers, through a series of washitsu, Japanese-style rooms with walls made of translucent paper.
When at last I reached Step 16, I finally got to face off with Zaemon and his minions in the castle throne room. I lunged forward into the final boss battle, with Aech and Shoto both shouting advice in my ear and cheering me on, like my own personal Mickey Goldmill and Paulie Pennino.
Luckily I’d picked up a few more lives in the last ten levels, because it took all of them to defeat Zaemon. Finally, I had reached the end of the game. But it was a strange ending. Even though they were supposed to be dead, Ninniku and Zaemon both reappeared, standing on a stage inside the castle alongside Princess Kurumi herself. Shoto told us the game’s lead designer, Yoshiki Kawasaki, had chosen this ending to imply that the events depicted in the game were just a stage play that had been acted out for the player’s benefit. No one had actually been hurt.
After the game’s characters finished their curtain call, the following text appeared on the screen:
CONGRATULATIONS!
THE PRINCESS HAS COMPLETED
HER ADVENTURE AND REGAINED
THE KANTEN CASTLE
A huge cheer erupted from the boys gathered around me, but I didn’t turn around right away. I still had one life remaining, so the game had started over again at the beginning of the first level, and I kept playing to see if Kurumi’s “imposter” was going to appear. After a minute of nothing more than the familiar color-blind ninjas, I let my one remaining life expire. GAME OVER appeared on the screen and I was prompted to enter my initials for the high-score list. I started to put in my own out of habit, but then I remembered who I was supposed to be and entered “K.R.U.” instead, for Karen Rosalind Underwood.
When the list of high scores appeared, I discovered that my score of 365,800 points put me only in second place on the list of “specialists.” The person in first had racked up a score of 550,750, outscoring me by over 200,000 points. They appeared to be sharper than me, too, because they’d entered the initials “K.R.A.” beside their score—the three-letter signature Kira Underwood had used on videogame high-score lists, instead of her initials. I’d failed to recall this obscure piece of trivia until I saw it in front of me. But my predecessor had not.
That was when I realized I was looking at Ogden Morrow’s score. Which made perfect sense. Og had completed this challenge earlier today. Just a few hours ago. And judging by his score, he was much better at Ninja Princess than I would ever be. Either that, or he’d kept on playing after he beat the final level and the game started over at the beginning again, to rack up those extra points. But why would he do that? Was he trying to match Kira’s real high score? Had I just screwed up somehow?
I snapped a screenshot of the high-score list so that I could examine it later. Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin.
I turned to see a young Ogden Morrow smiling at me.
Og looked like he was around sixteen years old. About the same age he was when he met Kira for the first time—at a local arcade, when she moved to Middletown in the summer of 1988.
No wonder this setting and the scenario I was acting out both felt so familiar. I’d read about it seven or eight years earlier, in Ogden Morrow’s bestselling autobiography, Og. Unlike Halliday’s blog and diary entries in Anorak’s Almanac, Og’s recollections were infuriatingly vague when it came to details, but in the second or third chapter of the book, he described meeting his future wife for the first time, on the last day of summer vacation before his junior year of high school. He’d described how an “unbelievably gorgeous girl, with short dark hair and beautiful blue eyes,” had wandered into “one of the local arcades,” where he watched from a distance as “she beat one of the toughest games there on a single quarter.”
But Og had never bothered to specify which local arcade it was, or the name of the game Kira had played, and other written accounts had given conflicting information about both. Now I knew he’d met Kira here at Happytime Pizza. And that the game he’d watched her beat with one quarter was Sega Ninja, aka Ninja Princess.
I was reenacting the moment Ogden and Kira Morrow first met.
If I recalled Og’s book correctly, he’d walked over to congratulate Kira after she finished her game. But then his socially inept shadow, Halliday, had interrupted them to ask Og for a ride home. He always waited until the last possible moment to return to his troubled home, so Og knew his friend didn’t really want to leave yet. Halliday was attempting to cock-block him. This shocked and amused Og, because he’d never seen him display jealousy over a girl before. Just computer hardware.
“Hi,” the teenage Og said, finally working up the nerve to make eye contact with me. “I’m Og. And you—you’re amazing! I can’t believe you defeated Sega Ninja on one quarter! This is the first time any of us have ever seen anyone do that. Way to go!”
Og awkwardly held up his right hand. It took a second before I realized he was offering me a high five. So I high-fived him. He looked extremely relieved when I did.
Then he locked eyes with me, and as he did, I felt my heart beat faster. My skin began to tingle with what felt like invisible tendrils of electricity. This was a sensation I was familiar with. It was how I’d felt the first time I met Samantha in the real world.
I couldn’t imagine how present-day Ogden Morrow had felt while going through this challenge. He must’ve been using a conventional haptic rig, thankfully—he’d never used an ONI by choice, and he’d still been without one in Anorak’s little blackmail livestream—so at least he’d been spared all the physical sensations. But re-experiencing this moment from Kira’s perspective must’ve still been heartbreaking for him.
“Thanks, Og,” I heard myself say, with Kira’s voice, and in her British accent. “I’m Karen Underwood—but my friends call me Kira.” I felt my head nod in the direction of the Sega Ninja cabinet beside me. “We have this game in one of the shops near my parents’ flat, back home in London. But over there, it’s called Ninja Princess. Not Sega Ninja.” I felt the corner of my mouth curl into a smirk, then I added: “I guess American boys don’t like to play with girls.”
“Yes, we do!” Og replied immediately. Then he began to turn red and stammered, “I mean, we’re not against playing games with girls! Videogames, that is. That have a girl main character. Like this one here.”
Og gave the Sega Ninja cabinet an awkward pat, as if it were an unfamiliar Labrador. Then he shoved both of his hands into his pockets and grinned at me like a lovestruck idiot. He looked as if his pupils might change into cartoon hearts at any second.
He opened his mouth to say something else to me, but right on cue, another extremely familiar-looking teenage boy interrupted our conversation. I immediately recognized him as James Halliday—at age seventeen. Wearing his half-inch-thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a pair of faded jeans, worn Nikes, and one of his beloved Space Invaders T-shirts.
Just as he appeared, the arcade’s sound system skipped forward from “Jessie’s Girl” to “Obsession” by Animotion. I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence.
“I gotta get home,” the young Halliday urgently told Og, without making eye contact with either him or me. “I’m out of quarters and…so…I need a ride home.”
Og stared at him for a moment in disbelief while Halliday kept his eyes on the carpet. Og gave me an embarrassed smile, then turned back to Halliday.
“Hold on just a few minutes,” Og said. “Or go wait by my car until I’m ready to leave. Or—” He fished a crumpled dollar bill out of the fro
nt pocket of his acid-washed jeans. “It’s too wrinkled for the token machine, but they’ll change it at the counter.”
Og tossed the bill in Halliday’s general direction and turned back to Kira without waiting for him to reply. The money hit him in the chest and then silently fell to the floor.
“No!” Halliday shouted, suddenly furious, stomping his right foot down like a toddler preparing to throw a tantrum. When his shoe made contact with the ground, Og and all of the other NPCs vanished, leaving me alone with the seventeen-year-old James Halliday.
And in the same instant, our surroundings changed too.
The Happytime Pizza game room was gone, replaced by a throne room that looked an awful lot like a live-action version of the 8-bit one in the final stage of Ninja Princess. The teenage Halliday morphed into the masked, black-clad ninja Kazamaru, who to my eyes looked exactly like Shô Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja back in 1983.
I glanced down at my avatar and saw that my own appearance had changed too. I still appeared to be a girl, but now I was dressed in a flowing tunic made of red silk, with gold piping and a Chinese dragon stitched onto each sleeve.
I was also holding a sword in my right hand, and in its mirrored surface I could see that I was no longer wearing Kira Underwood’s face. My avatar had changed into a live-action representation of Princess Kurumi—and the creator of this simulation had chosen to make me look exactly like Elsa Yeung in Challenge of the Lady Ninja, also from 1983.
“ ‘Reclaim her castle and face her imposter,’ ” Shoto recited. “This is it! Kick his ass, Princess!”
I nodded, then lunged forward and did as Shoto instructed—I kicked Kazamaru’s ass.
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