Ghosts & Goblins & Chocolate
Entry posted by Fionavar in Community Blog
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A blog by @melkathi
About Me: As a child living in Greece, I would spend my summers in Germany. There I’d eat licorice, local brand chocolate, and Mohnkuchen (there is no English language wiki entry). Either way, the moment summer was over, things I enjoyed would be left behind with it. Thus, when I started gaming I was already nostalgic.
In games I look for that certain magic. I want escapism but more importantly I want to experience something. The game should tell a story, even if it doesn’t have one – I don’t need an emergent story, but I want the story to emerge from my experience of playing the game. I don’t need to experience narration, but I want to have an experience worth narrating.
This is a story about sacrifice. It is also a story about nostalgia, but more than anything, it is a story about the sacrifices gamers make.
We travel back to a time of low pixel count and greenish screens – specifically the summer of 1992. The radio that summer would blast SNAP! Rythm Is a Dancer and my cousin and I, shortly before our 13th birthdays, were in summer camp on the German island of Norderney.
In the evening, after lights out, with eight kids per tent, obviously nobody slept. In our tent we did two things. Firstly, one of the boys had brought terrible horror novellas, and we read those. Over thirty years later I still have nightmares. Mostly because the story did not make sense – you can’t hide a whole labyrinth inside the walls of a bell tower! The second thing was eating chocolate and other sweets.
And this is where this becomes a story of sacrifice. You see, the eating was predominantly done by the other six. The two of us would initiate it, but then we’d spend the night selling our stash to the others in the tent. In retrospect, we should have found a way to expand 
business to the other tents, but we were not even thirteen.
There was a reason to this, which had little to do with entrepreneurial spirit. The camp organizers had permitted each kid a 50DM allowance per week for the two weeks of camp. Incidentally, as my cousin pointed out, 50DM was roughly the price of a new Game Boy game. Not eating chocolate but watching others enjoy my stash was not a choice. It was a sacrifice that only gamers will understand: others would eat so I could game.
Everything went well. Until the very last day. It was hot. We were on our last excursion in town, killing time until we had to get the ferry. In the (heat of the) moment we decided to grab an ice cream. The worst 3,50 I ever spent. Also, one of the worst ice creams I ever had and most likely the reason why I still do not eat lemon ice cream. It almost put me off lemonade as well. An hour before we left, I dropped to 46,50.
One, horrible tasting lemon ice cream was the reason I couldn’t pay for Gargoyle’s Quest solely through the chocolate black market.
Mind, the entire process did turn Gargoyle’s Quest into one of my favourite games, even though it wasn’t really my thing – too dark in tone, too much jumping around spikes. In the end, the cool green daemon on the box cover turned out to be red! That was an unexpected plot twist. It highlighted something though about descriptions and plot relevance: how often do authors abuse the fact that in written format you do not have information until they give it to you? In comics, movies, and games, you see things from the start. Unless it is a greenish Game Boy screen and after hours and hours some NPC tells you: your skin is red.
Two things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it and how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red. Also, the many spikes.
Three things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it, how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red, the many spikes, and the gnarly trees, the inextinguishable flames, the different breath weapons…
Among the many things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest is that it is a game literally worth it’s weight in chocolate.
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