The "Waffleverse" is a complicated entity made out of both forgotten and forbidden lore.
There are some things in there that I simply don't dare revisiting (lest would I want to face some extremely unpleasant memories whose vague "outlines" are enough to put me on edge), whilst others were simply not recorded. It's as if the eternal hand that weaved the tapestry of the mind had simply moved away as they happened, leaving only loosely-connected threads that failed to form into something more meaningful. This is one such story.
Melissa is a friend I have to actively fight to remember. Someone whose sole presence made all the difference in the world, yet our time together was so brief (and so poorly documented) that I often have to force my brain into overdrive in order to acknowledge her existence at all. Why? Because she was with us for such a short time as not even be part of our class picture, joining way too late into the year to be pictured with the rest of us and leaving before the next cycle. For this reason there's always hesitation and an endless amount of second-guessing whenever she's brought up in conversation even amongst those who knew her. Was she real? What did she look like? What enduring memories can we share to prove that she's truly deserving on her place on Memory Lane? The answers to all of those questions are nebulous, undefined. There's no "dossier" for this one, and that both irritates and fascinates me.
I can tell you that she was very friendly. That she had a way with words that far surpassed her age. That I had never seen her mad. And that she always carried herself with a lot of dignity, as if she was above all the petty drama of Elementary School. I can definitely tell you all of that, but there's no way to actually confirm it because, again, she was a very brief presence on that whole "ecosystem", someone who was just passing through and couldn't really leave a mark... except with me.
I don't know why, but I always found myself listening whenever she spoke, even as our points of views clashed constantly.
My dad never knew that I had taken the dang installation CD to class. That was definitely for the better.
My favorite example of this was the way she approached authority, particularly when it came to making our own fun.
Most of us had perfected the art of sneaking our own games into computer class and loading them while the bored teachers looked away, tired beyond belief of trying to get us excited about the wonderful world of Microsoft Word and similar programs, not getting a single moment of attention as they tried to teach us how to handle Excel and FrontPage Express. And this worked quite well because, well, whoever was heading that class (and that changed on a rotation) simply didn't care to step in and put an end to it, so long as we didn't wreck the computers with viruses (which was highly unlikely on the pre-internet days). But Melissa had her own way of doing things and would often approach the teacher's desk with questions of whether or not she could put her own stuff in there, getting the thumbs up most of the time. We thought that she was being a big dummy by even risking getting a negative answer when all she really had to do was being subtle about it, but the teachers seemed to appreciate her attempts at playing by the rules and often engaged her while she loaded her own stuff onto the computers, marveling at her enormous backlog of Shareware titles and DOS-based applications, including a primitive Barbie painting program that became a bit of a sensation on the class (and not only amongst the girls) and a face maker program that was so utterly awful as to become comedic gold once we all got the hang of it and became engrossed on making exaggerated caricatures that attempted to look like our classmates and teachers. It was maybe because we had so much fun doing that that I eventually caved-in and shyly approached my teacher's desk one day, carrying my dad's precious Windows 95 installation CD.
I remember how the teacher's eyebrows shot up like a damn space shuttle before he asked me what I was doing. I told him (very nervously) that there were games and videos in there. He studied me for a minute and gave me the go-ahead, but not before warning me about steering way clear of the actual OS installation process, telling me that breaking the computer by overwriting the operating system would see me in a lot of trouble.... and I remember actually gulping at this, before nodding and heading to my own table, a space shared with both Alexander and Diego, my two best friends.
It wasn't long after that that other people began roaming to our table, attracted like feral animals by the cheesy majesty of "Weezer" and the surprisingly challenging nature of "Hover!", the CD's packed-in title.
It is said that a good game doesn't need graphics, and SkyRoads is the embodiment of that phrase.
We wasted away at those things for hours, making computer lab into our favorite non-mandatory thing in the entire school, getting really competitive in our games of Hover!, and actually making it very far through a team effort just to see more of that devilishly simple (yet addictive) game that everyone seemed enamored of. It was such a blast that someone even came up with the theory that it was the playable version of the Windows's "3D Maze" screensaver we all loved as kids... God bless that sweet innocence.
It wasn't until much later (after Hover!'s charm had begun to fade and all sing-alongs to Weezer had become a thing of the past) that I was approached by Melissa and asked if I had any more stuff to bring over, because she apparently liked my taste on games and music. It was a compliment as big as the world for me, and I quickly obliged, getting to my home and sorting through all my CDs in search of the next big hit that would keep our class safe from the clutches of the double-headed beast of actual work and learning.
In what I'm sure must have looked like a limit-testing parody, I showed up the next Wednesday with a stack of CDs so large as to actually reach my chin, and I dropped them on the teacher's desk with the subtlety of a brick. I could tell right away that the woman giving the class that day wasn't having it, but a few of my friends begged her to let us try at least a couple of them and she shook her head before picking a random disk off the pile and shoving it my way, telling me that we were only allowed to try that one, much to the class's collective disappointment. Luckily, the teacher had picked a really good one for us to die on: a gigantic demo CD full of goodies that I had been meaning to try myself.
Amazingly simple, repetitive... and awesome. I remember my friends getting into actual fights for a turn on this one.
The school's computers couldn't properly handle most of the really impressive offerings in there, but we were all so eager to give them a try as to not be discouraged by the single-digit frame rates and almost lunar response times they were pulling. We pressed on, playing the Tomb Raider demo like a demented slideshow and the Test Drive 4 demo as if in the middle of a wormhole. It was painful, but we didn't care. Those were famous games, and we were playing them, what else could we want? Melissa had the answer.
She wanted us to play something else... something, you know, playable. And she eventually got her way through a combination of charm and logic that made me her into such a formidable opponent.
I remember her getting away from the menu housing all the really good games (but not before trying her hand at the Virtua Fighter demo), and then moving into the "afterthought" section, games whose demos and Sharewares were included just to fill the CD to capacity and made it look a bit more complete. In a way, some of those were serving the same purpose as the WinZip trial and the Schedule+ demo that were already in there: bloating the disk.
We had dubbed this "The Impassable Screen"...
However... those were actually really good games! And the class embraced them a lot as she hunched over the keys and gave them an honest try.
I remember her trying to figure out the Prince Of Persia demo and getting laughed at because the first enemy had made quick work of her... and then I remember how no-one was laughing anymore because they hadn't been able to defeat that baddie, either. I also remember the beautifully intense and dizzyingly fast races we played on the SkyRoads Shareware (a game that has since gone Freeware). How fun it was to actually dodge obstacles as our little ship blew up over and over while we put our piloting skills to the test. And, of course, I remember the time we played Heretic.
The Heretic demo was surprising because it reeaaally let you play a whole bunch of levels before shutting down your ride. Even my sister liked it a lot because it gave her a lot of material to work with as she developed her own lore for the game (something she did for everything we played, and that she was very skilled at), coming up with her own, amusing explanations for what we were seeing, calling out the way red demons and mummies enjoyed beating the absolute tar out of each other right after killing us. Or why a pillar was so eager to fall on our heads. Or why there was a long corridor leading up to a monster that looked scary as hell, but guarded by nothing. It was all great fun.
My sister had a blast creating backstories and personalities for every enemy on the game, and I laughed the whole way through!
However, the one game that caught our collective eye was the true underdog of the whole collection... a game so casually thrown in there as to being the only one you had to scroll for: "Strife".
We were mesmerized by Strife because it actually came with voice acting and comic book art, despite playing just like the aforementioned Heretic. It looked like an upgrade to that former title, and our kiddie minds were already hard at work trying to figure out how both titles related. But here's the thing: unlike Heretic and all of the other so-called "Doom Clones", Strife actually had a storyline to follow and people to talk to in order to get the whole thing in motion... and it was all in English, a language we didn't speak at all, which caused us to inadvertently start referring to it as "Purchase Strife", because that's what it said on the help menu (that we triggered by accident after messing about with the function keys, as kids do).
Oh, we still managed to get stuff done in the one through the sheer power of being kids and trying things out until something worked, including getting that infamous unwinnable situation by listening to that guy at the end of the bar (although we had no idea what he said, other than he mentioned a chalice and that we found one on the way to an actual objective). We played Strife for several weeks afterwards, making no progress whatsoever and often just resorting to doing what we did best: absolute chaos for literally no reason, including trying every wall in the game until something budged (we were all from the Wolfenstein 3D school of thinking) and even murdering everything that moved until we got gunned down by the infinitely-spawning enemies that were triggered by our misdeeds, getting absolutely wrecked by that overwhelming threat after killing the town's mayor and murdering poor MacGuffin (and softlocking the game by doing so, even though we weren't going to make it far enough for it to bite us in the arse later).
Strife was everything I had ever wanted from a game: it was engaging, had objectives and actual interactivity through dialog boxes and cutscenes (all way too new for me at the time). If only I could have read it...
I'm sure we would have been able to figure out Strife and all those other games my friends and classmates kept bringing to the lab with enough time and practice, but the school finally stepped in and said that enough was enough after seeing us enjoying class way too much (a true crime) and cracking down on all that "outside gaming" junk. We were not allowed to play anything but edutaiment titles selected by the teachers after we made too much of a ruckus. That was OK, though, since the curtain was about to fall on that whole thing regardless.
In a level of cruelty that read like Lovecraft at that point, the universe decided to make us part ways through an invitation, really twisting the knife with that impeccable irony, as I was handed a beautiful cardboard rectangle informing me that I had been invited to Melissa's First Communion, only one of seven kids from our class to get such treatment. I was honored and quite happy to assist, since I had grown to really like this person... and we had an absolute blast playing all sorts of silly games as the festivities went from formal to chaotic, enjoying seeing her get her spotless white dress full of dirt and mud as we chased each other around her patio. It was a wonderful evening of games and fun. It was also the last time I saw my friend.
Melissa's party happened to be in the Summer, and she didn't return to school the next Fall. A mutual friend of ours who happened to live on her same street and told us that her family had just up and left during the dog days of January, right after the Holidays. There was no phone call, no farewell party, not even a hug. Just an empty space that couldn't be filled.
Basically how I felt upon learning that she wasn't coming back next year.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Melissa is in none of my class pictures (although there's plenty in people in there that I don't even recognize) and both her voice and her face are beginning to fade from memory as I grow older and my own experiences begin to bury everything that came before, but there was one thing I could do to guarantee that a part of my friendship with this awesome girl could live on, even after every trace of her existence faded into oblivion: many years after our last conversation, I finally got myself a dial-up internet connection and began the search for Strife, finding it a few months later and undertaking the titanic task of downloading the +25 megabytes file through a connection that couldn't even get 5 MBs downloaded in under an hour.
And then I did what I knew best: I played through the game, stumbling my way through cutscenes and dialogue boxes that were just as unreadable for me then as they had been before, but pushing through regardless, almost as if fueled by the echoes of the commentary we made all those years ago.
There's something extremely fitting about remembering someone through Strife, a single player game which nonetheless provides you with a companion in the form of Blackbird: a disembodied voice that delivers hints and witty commentary as you perform every other action. It's as if the game was mirroring the circumstances that had led us to play it in the first place.
It's interesting because Melissa's name rings absolutely no bells when brought up in conversation with former classmates, almost as if her time with us was way too brief to gain her permanent entry into the sacred hall of memories, yet the few class pictures still in my possession are filled with people whose names and personalities completely evade me. Were they all gone just as fast? Did something happen to make me forget all about classmates that actually made it to picture day and that had spent at least a year with us? Or was Melissa's case so special that I could actually remember her well despite the fact that she's a ghost for everyone else? Regardless, I'm glad that a part of me still latches to all the beautiful memories we made together as we became computer class outlaws and then wildest of things, running around in formal clothes as the party that was supposed to be enlightening turned into an attrition war fought with laughter and dirt. Perhaps that's how you make yourself truly memorable: by making the most out of the moment, however brief it might turn out to be.
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