HIMclub.com: A Tale Of Loss - HIMclub.com

Today I'd like to share with everyone a story that traces along nearly 8 years of my life, stemming from my childhood and finally being laid to rest last year. This is the heartbreaking chronicle of something that will never be: and that thing was called Decay.

In the spring of 2000 (I think), my twelve-year-old self been running high on inspiration after playing various action games on the computer, and decided I'd set to work on making my own. At the time I was unhealthily into gaming (though that habit hasn't really died out completely, it just got swept under a rug), and with school holidays starting I was ready to roll up my sleeves and take on what would end up being the longest-running project of my life thus far.

At the time a friend of mine was pretty into the idea of making something too, so we decided we'd put our heads together to make my grand vision come to life. In coming up with a name, we wanted it to be along the lines of "Something of Something". I'd thought the idea of having the word "Decay" in it would be cool, so for a while it was called "Something of Decay". Later on, I finally relented that I wasn't creative enough to come up with something for the first "Something" and so the project ended up being named "Decay".

Decay was set to be a first person shooter game, put together entirely by yours truly and his keen acquaintance, using the game Duke Nukem 3D as a base. But my vision stretched far beyond that of first person shooter games; I wanted a real, emotionally sound reason for us to be running around in corridors/city streets/jungle terrain with a shotgun decapitating pixellated sprite enemies.

And so, I set to creating a storyline, which as it turns out, ended up being more of the focus of my work than the game itself. You see, Duke Nukem 3D didn't come with much editing capability at the time besides some basic game coding, a level builder and an artwork program. The code was a simple in-game language (called CON files, one or two of you may remember them), and it wasn't flexible enough to allow me to integrate a proper storyline complete with cutscenes, endings etc. So, what I did instead was fill in the story between game 'episodes' and save them in text files, trusting that people would actually quit the game, and go to read the ending in a separate file once they had finished a given episode. How naive I was! But that was how I did it.

The story line's original form, in all of my maturity at the time, envisioned a futuristic cyberpunk world, in a crime-ridden New York, where the regular police force was more-or-less overwhelmed and the last line of defense was in the form of a squad of something like six or seven "elite" war veterans, each with their own skills. (Yes, six or seven people were charged with the role of defending an entire city... great idea Ian.) The player would take up the role of one of said "elite" dudes named Christopher Emmerich (once again, great name Ian). The game started out as an ordinary day at work, but ended in a massive conspiracy involving, get ready, zombies, nuclear weapons, an invasion from Spain of all countries (PRICELESS idea, Ian), government coverups and topped off with a gripping love story in between all these earth-shattering plot twists. (sic)

And guess what? After a year of on-and-off development, numerous restarts and changes to the plot (Spain was cut out, or changed to another country, if I recall correctly... I guess I was starting to get some sense about the political climate), and long after my partner in development had dropped out of the project and found something else to entertain himself with, I finally was to declare the game finished. Sure, the game was still a total mess and some of the levels were so rushed it only took seven seconds to complete them, but it was still a contiguous product with a clear beginning and end, and you could play it from start to finish. But, I had a problem: this was 2001 at the time, and I was in a poor-ass family situation at the time with no access to the internet, so I couldn't exactly just throw it up onto the www and wait for any praise. I couldn't even publish it to pass it around to anyone in town that gave a crap: No CD burner. All I had was a ZIP drive, something that would contain the game on it but no one else had a drive of the same sort that I knew of at the time.

Then, disaster struck: The family bought a new computer, one without a zip drive, and the one I'd been working on was sold. With no burner and no network or anything, my only choice was to hastily copy all of my work onto a zip disk and hope that someday, somehow, I'd get access to another zip drive and be on my way to finally bring my project into the limelight.

Fast-forward to 2004. Three years had passed, and well, I'd more-or-less forgotten about it. But one day, I had the burning desire to resurrect this project and polish it up, then maybe distribute it; after all, all this work had been done, why throw it away? Unfortunately, the zip thing still wasn't resolved, so my only choice, realistically, was to start over. So, I did, but with a number of changes: I was using the Unreal engine to build on, and the plotline had been completely rewritten and significantly retooled from my previous envisioning. My baby would see the light of day after all!

Three months later, I came to the realisation that working with the Unreal engine and producing enough content to constitute an entire game was far, FAR beyond my abilities. So, I gave up on the game element and began working on the storyline exclusively. Fuck it, if my baby won't be a fantastic new game then it will be a fantastic new book!

Then, disaster struck again. The computer was completely messed-up from the abuse that its clueless users had given it (including me), and so it had to be wiped clean. But my work was on there!

It was done. My baby was gone.

From there, after its two colossal failures, I supposed that Decay was something that just wasn't meant to be. Perhaps it should be condemned to my head and my heart, a memory that I will forever cherish, but would never be able to share. I moved onto other things. I was going on seventeen, and the twelve-year-old me that had originally come up with all of this was little more to me than a hazy vision of the past. But I still had that zip disk sitting in my drawer, safe and sound, all that work from all those years ago still preserved in its inaccessible state, like a time capsule.

Then, something happened last year. I found the disk and at this time, I couldn't even remember exactly if there was even anything on it anymore. After all, seven years had passed, and my recollection of the goings-on in the year 2000 weren't so great. In any case, I had access to the internet now so jumping on ebay and ordering a zip drive, even if it was just for this one disk and then doomed to the trash, wouldn't be too hard of a task.

I asked around casually if anyone in my TAFE class had a zip drive stashed away that they'd be able to lend, and lo and behold, one of them did! After a month of waiting and repeated probing (the guy is a lazy bastard, no names), I finally had it. The drive was extremely battered looking and seemed like he'd fished it out of the trash himself, but I'd got it for free and it'd do the job. After all this time of not seeing my work, it'd be the ultimate nostalgia experience for me, and maybe even something that I could perhaps pick up and see how I could improve it with seven years of gained maturity and experience.

I took the drive home, hooked it up haphazardly, stuck the disk in... and there it was! "Decay.zip" was there, waiting to be unearthed!

Hastily, I began copying it to the hdd, and then it stopped with a CRC error. The disk wouldn't eject. I eventually got it out, but the battered old drive had ripped my disk to shreds.

I was completely shattered. It wasn't just unfortunate that this had happened... it was adding insult to injury, as if some force in the universe was laughing sadistically as I tried and tried in vain to recover my old baby from the abyss of nothingness. I still have the disk in case I either gain the ability to travel backward in time or repair destroyed magnetic media.

So, that old dream now lays in pieces, to be cherished by none but myself. But, I've learned a few lessons from this ordeal: Back your shit up, and back it up properly. And don't let your emotional attachment channel into haste, haste that can lead to costly and in my case, irreversible mistakes.