Night of the Living X’s

“Shamus is the scariest game in the world,” I used to tell my friends.

That was back in the day, the day being the early ‘80s. Back when my Commodore 64 was just about the hottest machine you could have. At least I thought so. I still don’t know why dad bought it. He was working as a programmer at the time (and still is, doing abstract stuff that I can’t understand). The C64 certainly didn’t pack nearly as much power as the room-sized computers he worked with. Yep, room-sized, as in Wargames-style, old school.

Back then, when I sat down to play, I was just a nervous kid trying not to break the 5 1/4” disk that Shamus came on. For a long time I wasn’t allowed to use the disk system, which wasn’t built in, nor for that matter was I allowed to plug in cartridges in the back of the C64 . I never did learn how to copy a disk to a cassette, so my Shamus playtime was limited, which was probably a good thing since at the time, Shamus really jangled my already high-strung nerves.

Shamus scared me. This title had primitive graphics and was in no way “realistic”. It had a hero who looked like the love-child of George Harrison and a stoned cowboy, and a roving letter X as the main villain. Younger gamers might wonder why a simple maze game, with only pixel-shaped monsters to kill, could have made such an impact on me. I wonder about that too. Trying to piece it together is hard.

I guess Shamus was just the right mix of challenging gameplay, great game design, tense music, and a nemesis that came from nowhere to kill you. It was, essentially, Berzerk on amphetamines. The prismatic walls of the maze surrounded rooms that got harder and harder as you went. The huge number of enemies each emitted a jolting radio static ‘kzskszszh’ sound as you killed them. And that scary X!

Yes, X as in a letter X flying through the maze, ignoring walls, if you took too long. Accompanied by tense music, that X was certain to kill you unless you were out of the room. It moved like a speeding bolt from the blue. Similar to Evil Otto in Berzerk, the evil X was faster than you, stronger than you, and inevitable. Perhaps it was the inevitability that made it so scary.

Shamus was the most traumatic gaming experience of my life. The magnificent sound effects (and that dramatic X music) still make me feel bubbly and nervous inside. It was all so very basic, so simple and straightforward. “Simple and straightforward” might describe the entire games industry back then, but Shamus was a cut above. It was damn good quality.

Silent Hill, to me, is nothing compared to Shamus. No survival horror game of today scares me the way Shamus did. It’s a simple matter of fear. True fear is evoked not by what you see, but by what you might see next. This is why the dark empty spaces in Shamus frightened me more than the gallons of blood in more recent games: they are anticipation, defined. Maybe that’s why I loathe the horror genre today. There’s no anticipatory fear like that for me in Resident Evil, a bit of shock perhaps, but no fear. Once you’ve seen the zombies, what is left to scare you? No doubt some of this fear is because of my age when I played it. Be that as it may, I still hang on to memories of Shamus, brilliant and scary, an outstanding game of its time.

Shamus spawned at least one sequel (Shamus: Case II), which flopped. It’s easy to see why. The game had no charisma or identity that would make for a series. Though cooler and more colorful games came along, none came even particularly close to swooping me off my feet like Shamus did and certainly not in that same scary way.

Shamus has been mostly forgotten today. The consoles killed the home computer as we knew it. Mario and Sonic made a mess of all the C64 tapes and cheap copies for our Amigas and Ataris. The new generation pushed the old one into the closet or, if you didn’t have room, the garbage can. My Shamus disk stopped working long before that happened. By then my C64 was dead. A pity.

More recently, I hoped that Telcogames, a British company doing obscure ports for the various Game Boy formats, would be true to the original in their Game Boy Color edition of Shamus. Luckily, the game packaging made sure that I didn’t get my hopes up too far. Let’s just say that you should absolutely not get this “version” of Shamus. It sucks, because it is everything that Shamus wasn’t. The rooms are divided into a scrolling piece of “enhanced” graphic crap, and all the tension is gone. My memories of my earlier traumatic Shamus experience were tarnished by this sluggish iteration, and I hate Telcogames for it.

I guess I could download a C64 emulator and find a ROM, with my conscience intact. I don’t think I ever will. I enjoy having those memories, and I’m afraid I would squash them all for good if I tried to play the game today. If you watch a horror flick too many times, you get numb and then it doesn’t scare you anymore. Now imagine that the movie is from the pre-color era, the sound sucks, and it was made with an entire budget below the one this magazine carries for each issue.

Times change: this too is inevitable. Even William Mataga, the author of Shamus, has changed into Cathryn Mataga. Nevertheless, not everything changes. After all, Cathryn Mataga is still programming games, and if you haven’t watched an old horror flick for a long time, the first monster that jumps out of that black and white screen might just make you miss a heartbeat. Just like Shamus.