Time Flies When You're Having Fun: Part I

Welcome to a new series at DBtC: Time Flies When You're Having Fun.

There are thousands of video games on the market, some better than others, but always one or two that capture our attention and keep it for hours, days, years. This series is a tribute to those special few games that have kept us occupied for more hours than we care to admit. Every few months, a blog contributor will write about the game he or she played more than any other, and why. Sometimes the game is a childhood favorite; other times it has served as a platform to spend time with friends; and still others it is a game that, by design, requires significant time to complete 100%. Whatever the reason, these are the games that we play again and again, while newer or more popular games gather dust. And, more often that not, these are the games that stay with us even after the power is turned off.

Thanks to Aaron R. for his inaugural review.

Ground Zero 

by Aaron R.

"A helicopter roars in from overhead kicking up dust and dirt in a wide radius. You are efficiently hustled aboard. On your way to the dropoff, the Sergeant in command briefly wishes you luck but you can see from the expression on his face that he finds your survival highly questionable. Then before you know it, you are dropped off and the helicopter is gone once more." 

Probably my highest number of hours logged in front of a game of any sort was for a game with no graphics to speak of, aside from the occasional line of colored text or ASCII art. Ground Zero, and its successor Ground Zero II: The Second Coming, were MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), like another classic game Zork ("it is very dark here. you are likely to be eaten by a grue"). To play, you simply pointed your telnet at the correct address and port (what, you never used telnet?) gave your username and password, and then you'd see a huge ASCII mushroom cloud erupt on your screen, line by line.

A screenshot from Zork, one of the earliest interactive fiction games.

This game was the first time I had online "friends" that I had never met. Euthanasia, Randar, Drasnor, Josh. Killing each other over and over for hours and hours. When I got home from school I'd launch my dial-up connection and port in for a few hours every day. The basics of the game were very simple. As described in the code dump for the game on Google:

GroundZero is a completely different way of Mudding. There are no room descriptions or pretty things to look at. If you've played Half-Life or Counter-Strike or Quake you'll feel right at home. The battlefield is generated randomly on boot and packs of gear are dropped by parachute around the top level of the grid. There are two teams, alpha and bravo who fight their way to the lower level of the grid, depress the big red button, and detonate a large nuclear mechanism that wipes everyone out, gives your team points, and restarts the game. Simple, right

A 50x50 grid, with Alpha in the bottom left (0,0) and Bravo in the top right (50,50). Each team has a base that can be entered that is safe from attack, and is guarded by a near-invincible guardian who can shoot you from further than your guns have range to reach. The map is randomly generated each time, so you can never plot the same course through the rooms twice. The game was pure violence and creativity - the points never really mattered, and the game would reset eventually anyways, so you spent your time collecting guns and ammo and armor and trash-talking the other players. Your character would automatically fire on anyone that came within range, so all you had to do was focus on navigating around and keeping your ammo loaded and gear equipped. If you picked up a gun but forgot to type "equip postal rifle/load rifle 9mm" (action, item, sub-item - such as ammo) then you were out of luck. You might find barrels of gasoline lying around...if you wanted, you could push all the barrels into a single room and lay the mother of all traps. The offending party would see the following upon entering the room:

A burned-out hospital (17, 19)
You enter the room and see:
a barrel of gasoline (15)
a claymore mine

A screen capture from Ground Zero II.

What they would see next is the screen announcing their death while they are teleported back to their team's base. Examining the map in your base would show that the squares upon which you have been standing have been rendered aflame and inaccessible to other players until the flames died down. Remember how I said the base guardians were near-invincible? They can only shoot you if they see you and they never leave their spot. Thus, quickly pushing barrels into a pile in or next to their room, then carefully throwing a grenade, might kill them - or at least render the exit to the enemy base an inferno that would light anyone exiting that base on fire. Another favorite tactic for mass destruction: amassing a huge inventory of grenades, dynamite, and C4. Wait for someone to find and attack you. Just before your death, type the command "pull all" to pull the pins on every item of explosives you are carrying for the ultimate in kamikaze.

My parents would occasionally marvel at the speed at which the game goes by. Lines of text scroll by almost faster than you can read, and you type commands (especially movement: n, w, s, e, up, down) at blinding speed. Combat becomes a race to see who can quickly navigate the dangerous rooms while avoiding traps like dead-end rooms or grenades thrown onto gasoline barrels, while reloading or calling in airstrikes or an evac helicopter by doing nothing but typing commands rapid-fire. After enough kills you'd get a title like [MERC], [HUNTER], or [BADASS]. There were only a handful of [BADASS] players, but they were granted special abilities, the most unique of which was to become death incarnate. If they entered the room with you, they had a small percentage chance to become death. You'd see this:

NAME's eyes roll back into his head as his weapons drop from his limp fingers. A dark aura rises up around $m and the world seems to be perfectly still, perfectly peaceful. A low quaking sound begins to form, but from where you're not sure. It seems to be coming from all directions as it grows louder. NAME's eyes snap open. They are calm, deadly, and devoid of humanity. NAME's movements are a blur. Faster than thought you find yourself face down on the ground, gasping for air through lungs that you no longer have. NAME HAS BECOME DEATH! 

Of course, you were killed instantly. If you had a huge number of deaths, you would get ranked [JSOH] for JOSH, a spectacularly incompetent player who nevertheless stuck through. As the game would progress, after enough blood had been shed, an announcement would come that the door to the second level had been opened, the "down" (the only spot on the map where you could go down). It was not announced where it was, however, and each team had to race to locate the down on the grid. Once located, you'd communicate it over your team chat and your team would flood into the second level. This smaller level, 25 x 25, had the objective of the game: the big red button. Pressing it would initiate a countdown clock to nuclear destruction of the entire map. The team that had pressed the button would win, but the other team could locate and de-activate then re-activate the button to start the clock again with them in control. Of course there was the small matter of the NPCs, the button guardian and a disgruntled postman, both of whom could easily kill you.

I haven't thought about this game in a long time, and typing this all out makes me incredibly nostalgic. The lines above I pulled straight from the code, but there is no longer an active server available. I think why this game connects to me so much is that it was really the first social game I played. This was the first area outside of school and my normal life where I could immerse myself in a game world. The violence, frankly, was a secondary thing. The other team was your enemy, but all the players on that team had been your teammates the night before, and would be again later. This perpetual world that I could log in to and interact with was a huge draw - and this was early on in the development of multiplayer games, still in dial-up territory. It wasn't until years later that games like Counter-Strike would become popular, but even then you were always playing with a randomized cast of characters (unless you had a clan or something). With Ground Zero, no clan required, I would always know that my friends would be online.

The other reason I liked this game was the creativity involved. The coders were actively playing - problems could be fixed by the next day. Good ideas could be implemented (how tanks came about). Creative thinking was rewarded (pushing a bunch of barrels in one room and then mining the hell out of it). Fun things could be attempted, like making a line of barrels to wall off an entire area of the map in fire (which was of course represented on the map by little [F] markers). Anything you could type out or throw together had a chance of working, and the other players appreciated ingenuity. I don't think I've played a game since that had the same combination of variables, and nothing will ever compare to coming home from middle school, jumping into a helicopter, and joining a raging battle with my friends rendered entirely in text.

So yeah, I miss that game =P