SPELUNKY
Mossmouth
2012

As much as I believe in the infinite potential of video games, the emotional range and experimental play I’ve seen in the medium, I will betray all those values for the belief in running around as a funny little guy. For the past decade, I’ve pretty faithfully answered “What’s your favorite video game?” with the HD version of Spelunky. The first time I played the shareware version of Spelunky was the night before the HD version dropped in 2012 – I played until sunrise, when the HD game released, bought it, and then played for another two hours before falling asleep. It was the Fourth of July.

In Spelunky, you play as a little explorer who runs and jumps sort of like Mario. You explore short levels and collect useful items (like extra bombs, spiky boots, a jetpack!) and treasure while dodging creatures and traps. It’s all very Indiana Jones, complete with your primary weapon being a whip, and fighting off snakes and spiders feeds later into yetis and man-eating plants. Every time you play, the levels are randomly generated using the best random level generation algorithm I’ve ever seen. They combine small, familiar handcrafted elements with enough care that every game feels unique and yet still thoughtful and intentional with each experience.

The randomness is partly so rewarding because the game is so damn hard. To beat a standard game of Spelunky, you only need to complete sixteen levels, each with a loose time limit of two minutes and thirty seconds before an unkillable lethal ghost will chase you out of them. For your first hundred plays, you might not make it out of the first four-level zone, the caves. It’s not that Spelunky is unfair – once you learn the game’s rules, you can almost always tell when you’re at risk of taking a hit. But the margin for error is just so slim, with only four hearts of health and (without a lot of game knowledge) the inability to gain more than one heart back per level. You will blow yourself up, jump into arrow traps, walk into bats, throw a pot under your feet and run into the snake inside it expecting gold.

One of the funniest things about Spelunky is a good death. You have so much direct control of your character in Spelunky, and so deaths always feel like something you’ve done. The game’s physics engine has such clear rules that you’ll find yourself shot by an arrow, bounced around the level by its momentum, falling into a pond with piranhas and being eaten alive. The game keeps a camera on your corpse even on the Game Over screen summarizing your run, fully aware that a good death only motivates the player more. This same spirit is at the heart of the love for games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Rather than being frustrated at the end of a good run, you simply have to laugh.

I have to admit that for my favorite game of all time, I think it’s pretty ugly. The game’s visual language is incredibly legible, with pretty instant recognition of every creature or trap the game throws at you. But it’s a hodgepodge of adventure movie pastiche, with giant scorpions and a big evil Anubis and thoughtless visual references to tiki, Hinduism, and tribal cultures. I love Spelunky – Spelunky could be better. I still appreciate that it’s colorful and easy to read, but I can imagine a version of this game that didn’t play in an intentionally retrograde milieu.

Retrograde doesn’t apply to all retro, though – the game’s soundtrack by Eirik Surhke is one of my all-time favorites. Its heavy use of the Yamaha DX7 creates a direct throughline to the Sega Genesis Yamaha YM2612 soundchip, iconic for its warm bouncy bass. However, using a proper DX7 gives the game a sonic clarity a lot of those high compression Genesis games lacked – it allows the game to sound like the best version of a contemporary to Streets of Rage or Sonic the Hedgehog. The compositions vary wildly between midtempo jazz, vibey synth soundscapes, and the intense prog anxiety of Jungle B. The fact that I still admire a lot of this music after so much playtime speaks to its generally high quality.

In 2020, Mossmouth released Spelunky 2, a lovingly made game I’ve never been able to connect to. Something about the game language and aesthetic went beyond my relationship to Spelunky. It feels to me like a game designed for speedrunners and challenge runners of the original game. I never became that player – even with all my time spent playing Spelunky, I still only eke out a win one in every three or four plays, and that’s satisfying enough for me. Part of my relationship with games will probably always be reaching the top 15% or so of the player population and never progressing to the point where I need to conquer the absolute peak of mastery to prove myself. I like the stage where I’m being resourceful, scrappy. The first Spelunky has kept me on my toes for over a decade. I hope that feeling never ends.