Everywhere you can get to, there is game waiting for you. Flying into the sky may reveal hidden doorways in the clouds. Falling into water drops you into the ocean. In The Dragon's Trap, however, falling off the screen takes you to another screen that is presumably sat below the first screen. In the platformers I had played up until now, falling off the screen was definitely a bad thing to do: falling off the screen killed you. It was a platformer in which you could go anywhere. More than anything, though, it was a platformer where the world didn't just scroll left to right. It had a sort of in-game economy with shops and hospitals and treasure chests. You jumped on floating ledges, you avoided enemies in real time. The Dragon's Trap looked and behaved like a platformer. It played a trick that, in retrospect, seems extremely simple, but at the time it really did blow my mind. More than that, though, The Dragon's Trap was just a strange, mysterious, boundless game. It came at a pivotal moment: I was moving from one school to another, at the same instance in history that the UK games market was shifting from stuff like the Commodore 64 to other stuff like the Master System and the NES. The Dragon's Trap was the first game to truly blow my mind, I think. The Dragon's Trap was ours, to be honest. West 111111 was much harder to fathom, though. West One made sense as a sort of developer debug code: a gateway that took the designers to the end of the experience. It gives you a decent enough amount of gold and a handful of items from the game's armoury of swords and weapons. Type in enough extra 1s and you discover that WE5T 111111 takes you to a point about halfway through the game. We didn't find that secret door to the endgame. "Didn't you notice," said a boy named Bruce the next day during French, "that there were three spaces after the first four spaces on the password screen? Didn't that make you think it should be O-N-E, not 1?" Eventually we started typing extra 1s on at the end. We turned the machine off and removed and replaced the cartridge. We turned the machine off and restarted it. We had only heard the code spoken aloud, and so we typed it in like this: WE5T 1. The day someone told us the code we pretty much ran home from school at 3.30 and rushed to Gareth's bedroom, where his Master System was waiting. West One sounded cartographical it sounded like coordinates or instructions for finding treasure: go west, but only go west one square. Gareth and I did not know that The Dragon's Trap had been made by a developer called Westone, but we didn't really need explanations anyway. Like I said, the code was weird.Īnd the code, someone had told me, was West One. The dragon has cursed you and so you play as the various creatures Wonder Boy has been transformed into: a lizard, a mouse, a lion, a hawk, a.um.merman? This code, though, this magical code dropped you into the endgame and gave you a tonne of gold and gear, but it also made you play as Wonder Boy - at least until you found a transformer room. After all, the third Wonder Boy outing is a game in which you rarely play as Wonder Boy himself. This code was weird, we had heard: there was something not quite right about it. At school - The Dragon's Trap was the great love of my first year of secondary school, which would make this 1990 - my friend Gareth and I had heard rumours about a code for the game's password screen which took you almost to the end of this huge, sprawling adventure. More accurately they are WE5T ONE and WE5T 111 111, since the alphabet The Dragon's Trap provides opts for a 5 that doubles as an S. I had assumed it was my secret - a thing that I shared with the game itself and with an old friend I had when I was eleven. In my childish way, I had assumed that almost nobody else really knew about West111111. And this is something I was not expecting. This most loving of remakes would not have felt entirely legitimate if West One had not worked.īut here's something crazy: West111111 still works, too. I was expecting as much, but it was a relief anyway. West One still works with the new version of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap.
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