Alex Seltsikas has been drawing parallels with the early computer role-playing games, and in particular one called Wizardry. He writes…Anyway I wanted to write to you about my revelation after watching the “Gate to Avalon” behind-the-scenes disc and also reading your “thoughts” page (which I avoided to save any spoilers or have it plant ideas into my head). In summary, I completely agree that the entire film of Avalon occurs in the game. You never see the real Ash in “real life”. Maybe she looks just like the Technicolor version you see at the end. But here’s why I’m convinced it’s all in the game. It’s a very common structure in RPG games to have a “lobby” or an area outside the actual game area, where players can meet, chat (on-line), see data & stats, and of course go warp to a location to start another adventure. THAT I believe is what you see when she’s not in the game.
There are even more strong matches with RPG computer games that support this. The idea of using some kind of in-game credits system to buy weapons, etc… that is evident in the game. OK I know in Avalon you only see Ash buy food with her credits, but bear with me. The whole business of different character “classes” (fighter, mage, bishop, etc), experience points that when accumulated to a certain point, will let you go up a level – again, that is a classic RPG mechanic.
The key for me was seeing the computer game “Wizardry” shown quite clearly several times in the “Gate To Avalon” special. My Japanese is nowhere near good enough to pick up all of what they were saying but it’s obvious that Oshii has clearly been inspired by Wizardry when he made Avalon. I don’t know if you’ve ever played it, but let me give you a quick historical run down and explain the uncanny parallels:
I used to play Wizardry many, many years ago, around 1981/2 or thereabouts. The original Wizardry game was written for the Apple 2 computer, running off a 5.25″ floppy disc, in 48K of memory, and total written in Apple Pascal. It was revolutionary for its time and it ran on to a number of sequels. The descendants of the game now run on the PC (Wizardry 8) and have been ported to the PS2 and even a few handheld consoles. Anyway I digress. The thing that you need to remember is this game was immensely addictive and compulsive, much like Avalon is supposed to be if your read the back story to it. Wizardry, well first of all, think about the name… is it any co-incidence that Ash used to belong to a party call “Wizard”?
In terms of game play similarities, it gets better. Wizardry started you outside the “dungeon” that the game ran inside, and when you were outside there were a number of locations you could visit. You’d start off in your “home” although it was never called that, it was simply the main menu, but from there you could travel to various locations (remember it was all text descriptions at this point). There was a tavern where you could “meet” other adventurers, a shop to buy weapons & provisions, a magic “shop” to go get healed. My point is all this is analogous to the “city” outside Avalon, the game. When you were outside the dungeon in Wizardry, you could assemble your party. Yes it was called a “party” just like in Avalon. You could have 6 characters, and you gave them whatever names you liked (so if you wanted, you could have Ash, Stunner, etc). As you created each character, you could pick their type, and the choices were things like fighter, mage, thief, priest, etc. Fighters were the battle characters, the thief would steal treasure and spring traps (that last one is mentioned by Stunner in Avalon), and mages would cast magic spells to either attack your opponents or heal members of your party.
The game would play out like this: you’d enter the dungeon, you’d explore your way around, you’d encounter enemies which you’d fight, and as you won (ie: you survived!) you were awarded experience points! Your characters would all start out Level 1 characters, and as they gained more experience points, they went up a level and were able to take on new abilities, spells, etc. Ok I hear you say, all standard RPG stuff, but remember this hadn’t been done before on a computer; it was all pen & paper stuff (D&D) before then. But think about the overlaps with Avalon. There is more: as your characters gained experience levels, you could have them PROMOTED to a higher class which you could only gain access to through accumulating enough experience and reaching certain levels. So you could promote one of your priests for example, to BISHOP. Alas it wasn’t an advanced enough game that a bishop character could go do influence the game design (although that wasn’t confirmed in Avalon, it was hinted at). The other parallel is that in Wizardry you spent a good deal of time looking for the entrance to the next level. The dungeons were usually 10 levels deep, and each level was larger, more complex and far more dangerous, so if your characters weren’t a high enough level, they wouldn’t survive. Sometimes your characters would die in battle, but so long as some other members of your party survived, you could take them out of the dungeon (provided you made it back out… or you had this very powerful spell that would INSTANTLY teleport you back out (yes like calling a RESET!) and that would save a lot of back tracking. You’d then take your dead character to the magic shop, pay them a LOT of credits, and they could try cast a spell to resurrect them, because after all you didn’t want to lose the character and all the experience they had (and weapons they’d bought). Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Anyway, here’s probably my favourite bit of Avalon vs Wizardry trivia… sometimes your character would not get killed, they’d have something WORSE happen to them… they’d have such a hard spell hit them, that they’d VANISH and when you got out the dungeon their status would not be listed as “dead” it would say…. “UNRETURNED”. Usually there was no way to get them back either! Think that’s cool? It gets better. Sometimes if you were on a very high level and you were a bit out of your depth and losing the fight really badly, you might be unlucky and have ALL your party killed. There was a little “workaround” that you could do, you could actually do a RESET on the computer and if you did it quickly enough, the game would not have the chance to update your status back to the floppy disc. Then when you restarted the game, it would load the last save game on the disc, which would probably mean it had no knowledge of your last game, but hey, you saved your party! The cool parallel with the game is that you’d execute the reset a LOT like Ash does when she’s running a search on her computer at home, and she’s finding all the avenues to the information are being “closed” to her, and just before she gets completely locked out, she does what we in the IT business call the “three finger salute”, which in modern PC terms is a CTRL-ALT-DELETE (which in the old pre-Windows, MS-DOS days, would REBOOT the computer). On the old Apple 2 computer, it was CTRL-APPLE-RESET. It looks strangely like what Ash does at that point too. Ok, I know she’s not doing a reset in the middle of a battle using her keyboard, but you can see the influence is there.
Ok, I’ll leave it there. I could go on and on about Wizardry vs Avalon, but I think you get the idea. There are just so many similarities, that it really does convince me not only of the old computer game’s influence on the game play mechanics of Avalon but of the fact that the “world” outside the actual battlefield of the game is still part of the game.