Xanadu
Falcom, 1985 for PC-88
EGGConsole, 2023
There was no greater joy for a kid with a PC in the early 1990s than getting that first CD-ROM drive. Not just for Myst (though definitely also for Myst), but for getting those shareware CDs that had 100 games I never even heard of, offering hours of wonder as I dove through games that would launch empires, and a whole lot of games from people you’d never hear from again. I would spend hours editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to free up just a bit more memory to make Doom run better. That 40 megabytes of hard drive got a lot of usage in those years, before broadband was common, downloading any of these demos over a modem could take days, and nobody wanted to let you tie up a phone line for that long.
Some of those games stick in my memory for reasons completely unrelated to the games themselves. Jill of the Jungle is always going to be stuck in my brain because it was the game I was playing when my dad came home to tell me he was divorcing my mom, the summer before I went to high school. But the lasting memory is just how wild it all felt. Any of those games you loaded up could be anything, and it seemed just so expansive, a small history of a type of game development just waiting for me to dig into.
These times became part of my personal history of videogames, and much like how everyone has their own internet, we all have our own game history. But there are whole other histories out there, just waiting for us to find. I think this is at least one part of the Year of the Sicko, recovering histories that never were for me, and the big game for that is EGGConsole Xanadu.
Xanadu occupies a very weird moment of a lot of people’s histories, but not mine. As an American, I was almost forever denied direct knowledge of it by Richard Garriott, who flew to Japan in the mid 80s intending to release Xanadu in the West, only to find it used some artwork clearly lifted from the manual for Ultima, which led to his only release being a lawsuit against Falcom. But if you want to know how important it is to game histories both personal and canonical (in as much as that can exist), know that in celebration of the release of this port, none other than Smash Bros. head honcho Masahiro Sakurai tweeted out an image of his Xanadu card. For the original release, when you beat the game, you could send in something to Falcom to prove it, and they would send you a card to keep in your wallet, proof of your achievement.
Apparently Sakurai was the eighth person to ever do this.
In the fall of this year, I was at a meetup of friends, and someone told me that I always sound like I am sarcastic, so it is hard to tell if I actually like anything. It felt like a bit of an indictment, because I think part of that sarcasm does come from some deep well of self doubt, a worry that no one cares about what I care about, and wanting to couch things so much so that I can leave them if I need to. But it’s also because so many of the things I like the most are all deeply weird and shitty in their own ways.
With knowledge of this, I want you all to read the following and understand that it is a 100% genuine sentiment that I absolutely could not express auditorily without it sounding like I was dripping with sarcasm:
Xanadu is absolute bullshit and I love it so much.
Historically, Xanadu is part of a huge lineage, the Dragon Slayer series, which spans now like 80 games, mostly due to the sixth entry in the series, Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes spawning its own subseries of Legend of Heroes games, which subsequently spawned its own subsubseries, the now widely known in America Trails games, none of which I am going to probably ever get around to. Xanadu even spawned its own subseries, with Xanadu Second Scenario, Faxanadu (sorta), Xanadu Next, and eventually Tokyo Xanadu (which somehow is basically Falcom’s attempt at a Persona game). The main Dragon Slayer games were not often released outside of Japan, or had their titles changed completely when they were (Dragon Slayer IV Drasle Family became Legacy of the Wizard, for example). Most of them weren’t even released on hardware widely in use outside of Japan.
When the Dragon Slayer series was being released originally, Falcom was still in the process of becoming the company that would release the Ys games. Yuzo Koshiro would get his start at Falcom after sending him a tape of a song he made, which was then used in the soundtrack for Xanadu Second Scenario. Xanadu itself sold ridiculously well for the time, and probably kept the lights on for Falcom for a bit.
With all this, it’s kinda funny how I’d never even really heard of Xanadu before the EGGConsole release. Everyone has their own videogame history.
As I am now definitely in my middle age, I tend to do the things people who are in the 40s and think too much do, reflecting on missed opportunities and the singular nature of one life, a single path through everything, no chances to go back and redo it, probably a series of mistakes and mishaps that ended up shaping my own life for years to come. The finite nature of it all can be overwhelming, especially when I realize I am more than halfway through it. You know, the type of stuff so many boring literary works are written about.
Xanadu, a weird ARPG game rendered in 4 colors (but mostly blue and yellow), exists to remind me of that. Everything in the game is finite. There are only a set number of enemies that will ever spawn in the whole game. Only a set number of experience points to be had and treasures to find. And if you don’t properly allot those EXP, you might be screwed by the end. Unlike life, you can retry it, using your knowledge to go farther, learn more. Even in belief systems with active reincarnation, there are very few that ever think we get to keep our knowledge.
But it still feels like a microcosm of life, with all its hidden weird bullshit and rules I can’t possibly understand until I am dealing with them. Some tiles teleport me seemingly at random. Finding the exit from stage 2 seems impossible at first, because the whole world shifts around me. Some of the enemies just ignore my magic, or kill me way quicker than I think they should. It’s bullshit, and I love it.
And maybe that is part of why I sunk so many hours into this game. Why I started mapping out the levels, using a tileset I found on the internet while trying to find more information on the game. Why I dug around for PDFs of the two books that Falcom published about the game and its sequel, guides that are part strategy guide, part lore dump (the game has no internal lore, really), and part developer’s commentary, and machine translated what I could of them to learn more. I want to know and learn the bullshit.
I did all that because the game felt like a life I didn’t have, one that I could control, one that I could figure out. My own life isn’t really like that, being full of things outside my control that I can’t always understand. The first day of 2024 was the first day I no longer had a job, the end of a long layoff period that started the previous April, the day before my mother died. I spent the first quarter of the year hunting for a new job, sending out hundreds of applications to companies I would mostly never hear back from. My adopted kid is so unpredictably angry and violent and constantly can just destroy any day of my life at the hint of needing to do homework. I can’t control this, or even understand it. His traumatized brain does things I never will fully be able to comprehend, and I am going to have to deal with the consequences almost every one of these finite days I have left.
So that might have been part of the appeal of Xanadu, a game with the finite nature of a human life, but with the friendliness to let me try again, to map it all out, to solve it in a way I can never really solve my own. So I played a lot of it. I started my first character, got stuck, started another, and got much farther, to the eighth of the ten levels, but wasn’t strong enough to go on. I am on my third character, working it out and hoping to be a bit more balanced when the time comes.
It’s also why I started mapping, tile-by-tile, the game as I went.
These maps took hours, sitting at the game and just pausing long enough to map out the next chunk. I hope one day to finish them all, and maybe make an English language Xanadu site to help people through, but the process of building them definitely game me some sort of feeling of control of my life, which life itself doesn’t often give me.
Finding Xanadu was like finding one of those CD-ROMs again, and the language barrier often meant that I was just as clueless as pre-internet me had been about those shareware games. It opened up a whole new game history for me, one that wasn’t my own, but this year became part of mine. It let me feel like I wasn’t just slowly moving towards death, that I could maybe control it a bit.
It’s also bullshit (and don’t even get me started on the bullshit of Second Scenario).
Hinge Problems 
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