I started playing Spelunky
– the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during
the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I
don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a
famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed
those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted
half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to
have bounced off Spelunky after my
first handful of deaths.
Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which
doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky
career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then
decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again,
wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for
the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time
again.
The platformer where I threw all our bombs to get out of all our problems and pT used all our ropes to get us out of poverty, culminating, every time, in a dead gold god squashing us to death
