My biggest statement of intent for this project to date comes in my Trivial Pursuit entry. I think that keeping up a history of popular video games through a different lens than the nostalgia and commercial interests of the long-term winners is important. There are also other things that motivate me to do what I’m doing. Part of the project is also to excavate my childhood and see how the memories of it stand up to inspection, and to fill in the context that I didn’t have or didn’t understand. I have written about many games from my childhood. Not necessarily, however, many games for children. Or maybe they all were. By my own experience of what I latched onto hard, Stunt Car Racer was a game for children. Impossible Mission was a game for children. Jet Set Willy was a game for children. Everything and nothing was a game for children.
There were games like Granny’s Garden and other educational games which I relate to being for children because I played them at school, but otherwise there is little which fits obviously into the category. At home, cute mascot Dizzy and his fairytale adventures were probably as close as I had to a series of games which actually self-defined as being for children. My parents — younger at the time than I am now — helped play through Dizzy games as well, though. Those games were really hard. When I played Magicland Dizzy for my Super Chart Island entry on it and struggled through the minimum necessary actions to get some specific gifs, I found it wild to remember that I completed the whole game as a young child.
Or at least I completed Magicland Dizzy as in getting to the end and throwing the ring in the volcano, not the final requirement of collecting thirty gems from throughout the world to pay off the devil. We had a good go at that one as well, though, going everywhere and searching what seemed to be mere background graphics just in case there was a hidden object with a gem behind. Dizzy games worked within the still widespread assumptions that games were hard, and games were for children, and there was no contradiction between the two. After all, didn’t I have that much more free time to throw myself at the game again and again, both to get better at its movements and find all of its secrets?
Games for children couldn’t really exist when all games were perceived as for children. By the later part of the ‘90s, though, the perception of games and their audience was a long way along a different road. Sometimes this involved the aggressive sexism of games magazines. The marketing of the PlayStation and many of its games involved presenting outside of the status quo and setting up in implied opposition to games for children. It tried to push Super Mario 64 from being a game for anyone into being a game for children. And having promoted that division, that left an opportunity for the PlayStation to get its own games for children. Spyro the Dragon, a 3D platformer I previously know only by reputation, deliberately fits into that gap for PlayStation games for children. It was a conscious choice by developers Insomniac as they were creating the game and looking for more commercial success than their previous efforts. It might otherwise have been called Pyro and been quite different in tone.
The aesthetic is part of that direction, and it’s an American cartoon one. Spyro doesn’t quite have an angry Kirby face on the cover, but he does have a slightly obnoxious smirk. The other (exclusively male) dragons in the game have a kind of eccentric nobility and speak to Spyro as adults affectionately talking to a child. The plot is a simple one. Indeed, its setup of bad guy Gnasty Gnorc coming in and arbitrarily capturing and magically binding the whole of the rest of the population of the main character’s people is essentially identical to Magicland Dizzy’s. Giving that bad guy a name which includes a homophone for a British/Australian slang word for breasts is also a hint that it wasn’t made here.
After that simple start, Spyro opens up into something surprisingly sprawling. It takes Super Mario 64’s promise of big interlinked worlds further still, with multiple hub levels each containing their own set of challenges and doorways to further levels, any one of which takes time to explore. In place of Super Mario 64’s 120 stars, there are 80 dragons turned into statues, each needing a touch to be restored. You need to rescue ten of them to unlock a second hub world. The dragons are generally less a matter of completing a challenge like Mario’s stars though, and are more waypoints, something reflected in the fact that they act as save points after being unfrozen.
As you unfreeze those dragons they initially also give you advice on your abilities, on fire-breathing and dashing and gliding. It’s a gentle way of introducing concepts, and while the game’s non-linear aspects and multiple dragons giving the same hint mean it can get repetitive, it doesn’t get too patronising either. It’s just a part of a welcome that includes giving you a lot of second chances after failure, and having so many easily defeated enemies. Generally they require one of two possible actions so you just have to work out which of fire or charge to use, but that keeps them from being completely trivial at the same time.
The low level of platforming challenge also leaves more space for a different type of challenge opened up by Spyro’s ability to glide forward and only gently downward, coupled with the wide open spaces. The game soon introduces the idea of gliding over big spaces to reach new places, and gradually starts giving more complex opportunities to use it. The main challenge in getting most dragons was still my own lack of ability in navigating 3D spaces (something I’ve applied to the real world many a time) but there were some that took some thinking. Gliding out into space and round corners is a fulfilling thing to figure out, in much the same way as finding ways to get Dizzy to jump to new places across multiple screens was.
Just as I was getting into the rhythm of rescuing dragons and gliding across the landscape, Spyro the Dragon changed. The second hub world introduced a whole new requirement to meet, in the shape of collecting 1,200 gems across the game as a whole. The gems scattered around the world, in chests or held by enemies, had previously seemed idle compulsion fodder or at most a useful inverse breadcrumb to quickly see which areas I hadn’t already explored. Collection was already a nice feeling, in part thanks to the lovely 3D gold text used throughout the game in a semi-diagetic way, with numbers of gems collected bouncing around the screen. Now collection was a goal in itself, and I had to go back and explore levels with a new eye for detail, alongside a chance to think again about how to reach different areas.
The next world had a different challenge still, in retrieving stolen dragon eggs by giving chase to lurking blue thieves. I read that there is a world you can only access if you collect everything of every type in the whole game. I didn’t get that far, but it makes clear how much the task presented by Spyro the Dragon is one of patience and dedication. There are a whole lot of hidden gems within. The prospect took me right back to finding Dizzy’s own hidden gems, and to the feeling of infinite free time to casually fill, through marking out the totality of a big but easily grasped fictional world. More than any of Spyro’s aesthetic choices or its more generous difficulty choices, it was that utility that placed it into something I recognised well from my own childhood.
