The hillside is rough; bare rock protrudes through the ground between patches of scrubby grass.  Despite this, the trees grow thick here, their roots sunk deep into tilted earth, holding on with all their might.  From below, it looked like finding a safe path upward was impossible, but a thorough search revealed a narrow but well-worn animal trail winding a convoluted path towards the top.  The climb is slow, but the top grows ever closer.

With a final burst of energy, you reach the crown and are taken aback by what lay before you – a lake, as blue as the sky above, stretches from just below you towards the forest on the distant hills.  In the center of the lake stands a lone island, ringed with trees, and in the center of that island stands a shrine of whitest stone, its columns radiant in the noonday sun.  From the road below, you would have had no idea such a place existed, but now it beckons to you from across the calm water.

Looks like it’s time for a swim.

THE EXPLORERS

While you may not have ever played out the exact scene above in a game, you have probably (depending on what kind of games you play) experienced something like it.  Games are unique from other media in that they offer a very special, and very valuable, option that others don’t: the possibility of exploration.

Since I was a child, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of exploration.  Most children are.  Heading out into the wide world and seeing what there is to see, always seeking that thrill of discovery.  I was fortunate enough to grow up in a quiet suburban neighborhood surrounded by farms and forest, and also in a time before it was considered an affront to society to let your children wander around outdoors unsupervised.  This meant that, for many years, my friends I were free to wander here and there on foot or on bike, checking out random wooded trails or strange new cul-de-sacs.

When I was in middle school, my family and I moved further out to the countryside of Maryland, to a house that was completely surrounded by woods and hills, with neighbors few and far between.  For an adventure-hungry youth, it was paradise.  I spent countless hours aimlessly wandering here and there, seeing what new secrets lay just over the next ridge.

Of course, as the years passed, I slowly completed the exploration of my homelands, and at the same time, grew older and found myself with less time to dedicate to such pursuits.  Books, as always, were there to help introduce me to entire new worlds, but even the greatest of books could never answer the question “what’s down that other road?”

This is where games stepped in to fill the gap.

IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE

As I’ve discussed before, the key thing that separates games from literature and movies and such is the matter of choice.  Exploration, at its core, is a choice: the decision to look somewhere other than where you have to be.  Most early games offered little in the way of actual exploration, but as technology improved, designers suddenly had more options for presenting their imagined worlds.

Two of the earliest games I can recall that gave me the sense that I was exploring a new world were Metroid and Zelda.  In Zelda, the player encountered a sprawling series of screens linked together to form a seemingly massive overworld; in Metroid, players encountered a sprawling series of screens linked together to for a seemingly massive underground labyrinth.  In both cases, the key ingredient was the always-possible feeling of being lost.

Now, in most cases, making a gamer feel lost would be considered a negative, but in these instances it caused an excited rush of feeling – this was a new experience.   Sure, Mario was great, but you always knew where you were going; in Zelda, starting on the very first screen, you have a choice: Do you go up? Do you go left? Do you go check out that cave?  Metroid was much the same, with its branching corridors that stretched out in all directions.

Looking back, these games don’t seem nearly as vast today as they did back then, and you generally ended up having to go to pretty much everywhere on the map anyway to get through the game, so it is not perhaps as “real” an exploration experience as we might remember.  First impressions  go a long way, however, and these early games set my expectations for what games could do to let me visit new worlds and go wherever my whims might take me.

INTO THE WOODS

In the early 90′s, games were still getting bigger, and the chance for new adventures was growing right along with them.  Many games were still adhering to a very traditional linear structure (in terms of world, not story), but others were branching out into more open experiences for the player.  For me, there were two games in particular that sated my exploratory thirst: Wizardry and Ultima.

Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant was the first Wizardry game I had the pleasure of playing, though the series itself began way back in 1981.  In this installment, you control a party of adventurers unceremoniously dumped on the lost planet Guardia by beings far more powerful than yourselves, tasked with tracking down the Astral Dominae, an object of god-like powers, before it can fall into the hands of the evil Dark Savant.  From the moment you step foot on the planet, the game makes the point that your party, much like yourself, are strangers on this world, and every new road will take you somewhere unknown.

Crusaders was a “3d” game, set in first-person perspective as you moved along one tile at a time through the world.  It was a slow way of getting around, but it was effective in putting you at eye-level, as it were.  Guardia was a large place, and I quickly realized that even in the first city, New City, there was ample space to get lost in.  Traveling the twisting streets of New City revealed doors with strange signs, tantalizing locked doors that I could not yet breach, and rich descriptions of things the poor graphics engine was not yet capable of showing me itself.

Past the walls of New City, the player was free to travel any road they wished (though they might find themselves woefully unready to tackle what lay down some) Stepping off the roads and into the wilderness was sure to lead to a few interesting places.  I recall that the first time through the game, I never discovered the magic store in New City because I, in my linear-minded foolishness, had not bothered to explore a good portion of the city that the story had not directed me to.  It was a betrayal of my own exploratory nature, and it cost me.

In the same vein, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, was another RPG that offered a rich world just awaiting discovery by the player.  U7 returned the player to the lands of Britannia, and once again the face of the world is changed slightly from previous games.  U7 was a big step forward in graphical achievement, and the lands of Britannia were lush and detailed (as viewed from a 3/4 perspective).  Britannia was a large, seamless land, and it seemed that no matter what direction I wandered, there was always something new to discover.  Beyond that, in one of the key differences from Wizardry, almost every environment (towns especially) had entire new levels of exploration contained within their walls.  Drawers could be rifled through, barrels were plentiful and often stuffed full, and, heck, you could even pick up individual rocks just to see if anything was underneath.  Ultimately, much of this was pointless, but at the time it  felt like a huge step forward in creating more realistic worlds, and my explorer heart was set aflutter.

Looking back at both these games (and those of similar ilk at the time), the sense of exploration was greater than the actual act of exploration.  The places I excitedly discovered off in the wilderness in both games were, when all was said and done, places I would eventually have to visit to beat the game anyway.  What was different here was that the games gave me the opportunity to seek them out at my leisure, whether it was time for them or not.

In Part II, we’ll take a look at some games that opened up the realms of exploration even further…