I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functioned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive.” It stored data as analog sound on magnetic audiotapes. When Halliday had first started programming, the poor kid hadn’t even had access to a floppy disk drive. He’d had to store his code on cassette tapes. A shoebox sat beside the tape drive, filled with dozens of these cassettes. Most of them were text adventure games: Raaka-tu, Bedlam, Pyramid, and Madness and the Minotaur. There were also a few ROM cartridges, which fit into a slot on the side of the computer. I dug around in the box until I found a cartridge with DUNGEONS OF DAGGORATH printed in crooked yellow text on its worn red label. The game’s artwork depicted a first-person view of a long dungeon corridor blocked by a hulking blue giant with a large stone ax.
When a list of the games found in Halliday’s bedroom had first appeared online, I’d made sure to download and master every single one of them, so I’d already solved Dungeons of Daggorath, about two years earlier. It had taken most of a weekend. The graphics were crude, but even so, the game was fun and incredibly addictive.
I knew from reading the message boards that during the past five years, several gunters had played and solved Dungeons of Daggorath right here on Halliday’s TRS-80. Some had solved every single game in the shoebox, just to see if anything would happen. And nothing had. But none of those gunters had been in possession of the Copper Key.
My hands were trembling slightly as I powered off the TRS-80 and inserted the Dungeons of Daggorath cartridge. When I turned the computer back on, the screen flashed to black and a crude graphic of a wizard appeared, accompanied by some ominous sound effects. The wizard held a staff in one hand, and below him, printed in all capital letters, was the legend I DARE YE ENTER … THE DUNGEONS OF DAGGORATH!
I laid my fingers on the keyboard and began to play. As soon as I did, a jambox sitting on top of Halliday’s dresser turned itself on, and familiar music began to blast out of it. It was Basil Poledouris’s score for Conan the Barbarian.
That must be Anorak’s way of letting me know I’m on the right track, I thought.
I quickly lost track of time. I forgot that my avatar was sitting in Halliday’s bedroom and that, in reality, I was sitting in my hideout, huddled near the electric heater, tapping at the empty air in front of me, entering commands on an imaginary keyboard. All of the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game.
In Dungeons of Daggorath, you control your avatar by typing in commands, like TURN LEFT or GET TORCH, navigating your way through a maze of vector-graphic corridors while fighting off spiders, stone giants, blobs, and wraiths as you descend deeper and deeper, working your way down through the dungeon’s five increasingly difficult levels. It took a while for the commands and quirks of the game to come back to me, but once they did, the game wasn’t that difficult to solve. The ability to save my place at any time basically gave me infinite lives. (Although saving and reloading games from the tape drive proved to be a slow and tedious process. It often took several attempts and a lot of fiddling with the cassette deck’s volume knob.) Saving my game also allowed me to log out for bathroom breaks, and to recharge my space heater.
While I was playing, the Conan the Barbarian score ended and the jambox clicked over and began to play the opposite side of the tape, treating me to the synthesizer-laden score for Ladyhawke. I couldn’t wait to rub Aech’s nose in that.
I reached the last level of the dungeon around four o’clock in the morning and faced off against the Evil Wizard of Daggorath. After dying and reloading twice, I finally defeated him, using an Elvish Sword and a Ring of Ice. I completed the game by picking up the wizard’s magic ring, claiming it for myself. As I did, an image appeared on the screen, showing a wizard with a bright star on his staff and his robes. The text below read: BEHOLD! DESTINY AWAITS THE HAND OF A NEW WIZARD!
I waited to see what would happen. For a moment, nothing did. Then Halliday’s ancient dot-matrix printer came to life and noisily ground out a single line of text. The tractor feed spooled the page out of the top of the printer. I tore the sheet off and read what was there:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE OPENED THE FIRST GATE!
I glanced around and saw that there was now a wrought-iron gate embedded in the bedroom wall, in the exact spot where the WarGames poster had been a second before. In the center of the gate was a copper-plated lock with a keyhole.
I climbed up on top of Halliday’s desk so I could reach the lock, then slid the Copper Key into the keyhole and turned it. The entire gate began to glow, as if the metal had become superheated, and its double doors swung inward, revealing a field of stars. It appeared to be a portal into deep space.
“My God, it’s full of stars,” I heard a disembodied voice say. I recognized it as a sound bite from the film 2010. Then I heard a low, ominous hum, followed by a piece of music from that film’s score: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss.
I leaned forward and looked through the portal. Left and right, up and down. Nothing but an endless field of stars in all directions. Squinting, I could also make out a few tiny nebulae and galaxies in the distance.
I didn’t hesitate. I jumped into the open gate. It seemed to pull me in, and I began to fall. But I fell forward instead of down, and the stars seemed to fall with me.