the following piece on david crane’s a boy and his blob was written for issue nine of the gamer’s quarter, which explains the capitals. since i no longer foresee that issue being finished (for reasons i’m not going to go into here; i could be wrong), i’m publishing it here.

this essay came out of a conversation between gamer’s quarter editor-in-chief matt williamson and myself. we tried to pinpoint exactly what makes a boy and his blob such a memorable game for being, on the whole, a rather confusing play. a blob and his boy, by anna anthropy:

A Boy and His Blob is a confusing game. The player begins in a small and by all appearances complete area, the only object of interest out of reach; the game offers no instruction, and the player begins with a list of no less than thirteen unhelpfully-labelled verbs. Yet, in this age of save states, internet walkthroughs and perfect knowledge, David Crane’s 1989 NES title retains that ephemeral quality we most associate with 8-bit games of the era. Here is a game about searching for treasure in the caverns below a subway station: nothing could be a better metaphor for the way in which videogames, in 1989, were the magic worlds that crept into our reality.

There is something deceptive about the title of the game. The Boy, the player character and ostensibly the hero of the game, and who has top billing in the title, is not the star of the game. The Boy’s movements are stiff and rigid, his acceleration difficult to control, his animations largely lifted from Crane’s seminal earlier work, Pitfall!; to top it off, he’s fragile. Spikes and centipedes kill him, falling from too great a height breaks him.

In contrast, the Boy’s companion, an amorphous, shapeshifting Blob from another world, is everything the Boy is not. He is indestructable: neither monsters nor heights can harm him. His movements are seamless and liquid: the artist spent far more time on the Blob’s many animations than on any other object or character in the world, to the extent that the Blob tends to pop from the static backdrops. And where the Boy is rigid and unchanging, the Blob is formless, protean, continually changing his shape to suit the situation; he is the Boy’s verb set, without which he cannot do anything. He is a ladder, to help the Boy reach high places, an umbrella, to help the Boy fall from great heights, a bubble, to help the Boy breathe underwater. The Boy can’t even reach the magic cavern beneath his mundane city without the Blob transforming into a hole, the very gateway the Boy must pass through to travel from his world to the other.

Let us consider gateways. The Boy is an ordinary human boy, his world is ordinary human city. It is night, the lights of downtown skyscrapers glow wanly across the river. The subway, the only explorable location within walking distance, is dark and blue and dirty, its walls covered in grafitti. This is not the world one expects to find, plugging a videogame cartridge into a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. It is a little too dirty, a little too normal. And yet: from the very moment the game begins, the Boy has only to toss the Blob the right jellybean (root beer) and he will transform into a rocket, capable of lifting the Boy away from this place.

The rocket soars, the Boy astride as though it was a horse, through five or six screens of night-black nothing. Then, with a sensantion that is similiar to stepping from a dark room into the light of day, the screen changes: Blue. A sunlit blue sky, the Blue sky of Super Mario Bros. or Blaster Master. This is a videogame sky, and where the rocket lands is a videogame world: vibrant green plants, foes as incongruous as deadly cherries that the Boy dodges running left to right. This is the videogame we expected from the cartridge: this is Blob’s world.

This is, in fact, where the game’s story takes place. The Boy’s world isn’t in peril; or if it is, it is from forces too large and nebulous for the Boy to confront. The threat to Blob’s world comes in as traditional a form as an evil king, and evil kings can be vanquished. Blob’s trip to Earth was merely a diversion: he needed to find a human Boy to rally his forces and help him retake his planet. The obvious question is: why? The Blob is invincible. He can take any form, can travel anywhere, even between the stars. What does he need with this fragile human Boy, who seems incapable of handling anything without the Blob’s help?

To find the answer, we must consider what the Blob is, and what he means to the Boy: a portal to a magic world just past his fingers; a sky more blue than any his city has seen; the means through which he can imagine himself capable of all the things he cannot do, of visiting all the places he cannot visit. To a Boy in 1989, the Blob is a Videogame. The experience of the magical world, wonderous and dangerous, just past the thin but impenetrable surface of his own reality, the adventure promised by the stories and fantasies of youth. For the children who grew up with the early game consoles, late enough to create the impression of a real Place but not so late as to escape the abstraction that promises the possibility of anything, the videogame encapsulates all these things, and the Blob in the videogame A Boy and His Blob embodies them.

If the Blob, to the Boy, is a videogame, what then is the Boy to the Blob? The Boy is the Player. The Boy holds the jellybeans that unlock the Blob’s transformations, without which the Blob cannot access his many forms. Without the Boy, the Blob is impotent, devoid of meaning. There is no game without a player, no piece of art that can exist without someone to experience it, for the art is the experience itself. Without the Boy there is no adventure, no happy ending for Blobonia, no unmasking of the evil king. Only the Blob and his Boy, the game and its player, can together create the dialogue between the digital and the imagination that we call a videogame.

A Boy and His Blob is meta-fiction on the NES in 1989. It is an allegory for the experience of itself. It is a videogame.