Series starts here.
I pressed on. Kraid was somewhere in this area, and my mission was to hunt him down.
Unfortunately, I fell for the “Fake Kraid” scam. Also known as Mini-Kraid, this guy fooled many a player into leaving Miniboss Hideout #1 too soon. He is a brown a blue variant of the real boss, and is much easier to defeat than the real deal.
Imagine my surprise when I came across “Kraid” and downed him with a single missile.
Feeling victorious, I made my way to the statue corridor only to discover the Kraid statue had not changed.
For the longest time, I thought that either my game was glitched or I needed to go kill Ridley before the statues would change and the path would be opened.
Of course, I couldn’t be sure that the statues were supposed to react at all, or if the path would open if I killed both Kraid and Ridley, but the visual clues were enough for inference, even for a seven-year-old in the pre-Nintendo Power days.
After all, they wouldn’t put a door on the other side of lava just to tease the kids, right?
Emboldened by my apparent success against Kraid, I felt far more confident digging deeper into Norfair to find and kill Ridley.
The place is full of tricky jumps, false floor pitfalls, and lava that drains your Energy much faster than the lava in the earlier stages.
But eventually I got to this freaky space dragon called Ridley. Imagine my surprise when I discover he hits like a truck and requires a ton of missiles to defeat. For whatever reason, this guy wasn’t going down as easy as Kraid. Not by a longshot.
I was beyond nervous. My palms were outrageously sweaty and I kept dropping the controller. I yelled to my brother that I had finally made it, that I found Ridley. He came running in to see me die and die and die again.
I had to sleep on it and come back, let my heartrate calm down.
Now I was far too young to have seen Alien or Aliens by then. These were R-rated movies, after all. But the series had been an absolute zeitgeist. Every 7-year old boy in the U.S. was at least passingly familiar with the franchise. You just couldn’t escape it.
There was this tiny mom and pop video rental store in the small town I grew up in. A dark hallway of a store with pale gray walls and stained wooden shelves. Stores had a different feel to them back then; not the well-lit safe spaces you see now-a-days.
There was a mystical charm to these old stores, a mysticism that was captured well in Mr. Wing’s antique shop at the beginning of Gremlins. This place had that kind of atmosphere.
And one box that matched the atmosphere was the mysterious VHS box for Alien–And Aliens was right next to it.
The strange green glow coming from an otherworldly egg, floating over trypophobia-inducing terrain was enough to forever stick in the imagination of any kid who saw it.
So when I saw the name “Ridley”, of course it invoked memories of the Alien franchise. Parents and “bad kids” talked about the movie every once in a while. There were commercials. We saw Sigourney Weaver’s badass interpretation of the character and tried to imagine what the movie was like.
So kids like me at least knew either the main character or director was named something like “Ripley” or “Ridley”. It at least had me thinking along the lines that this game was some sort of video game homage or interpretation of that film.
Nick Enlowe 