Let’s Begin With Chex Quest

For me, it all began with a CD-ROM in a cereal box.

This essay is from a newsletter project that I started in early 2020 and abandoned shortly thereafter.

When I first conceived this essay, this first newsletter that will be released before anyone has actually subscribed to receive it (and thus will only be found by people combing through the archive to put the other newsletters in context,) I figured I should make it a statement of purpose, a “games are art” manifesto. I planned on discussing Chuck Klosterman’s ancient (but perhaps still accurate) claim that there’s no Lester Bangs or Pauline Kael of videogames and how I want to fill that void. (Even though I’m probably too late.) I wanted to highlight Roger Ebert’s “games can never be art” pieces, which still, upon rereading, send me into a rage blackout that always ends with me sitting at my computer staring at a Word doc filled with 7000 words worth of fragmented counter arguments. I thought about including some details that might boost my dubious authorial authority, like how my college thesis examined whether people consider games to be art and how I’ve been sporadically writing reviews for a few years.

But all of that is secondary. All of that is about the discussion around videogames; none of it is about videogames themselves, and the only way I’ll ever get to the heart of what I want to say about videogames — i.e. the goal of this newsletter — is to discuss videogames themselves.

And if we’re going to discuss videogames, we have to start where it all began.

And for me, it all began with Chex Quest.

To put it in the simplest possible terms: Chex Quest is Doom. You probably already know Doom; it’s the revolutionary game from 1993 that ushered the entire first person shooter genre into popularity that, also, is about being a space marine tasked with murdering demons from Hell in the most gory way possible, using a variety of weapons, including one called the BFG9000. (BFG, naturally, being short for “Big Fucking Gun.”)

A small team at Chex took Doom’s engine (the underlying code that makes the game run) and refitted it to make a kids game. In Chex Quest, instead of a space marine, you play what appears to be a human person inside of a giant piece of Chex cereal. Instead of fighting Hellspawn, you battle “flemoids,” anthropomorphized globs of slime that amble towards you and try to attack you with their elephant-like trunks. And instead of killing these creatures, you “zorch” (teleport) them back to their home planet using devices that resemble TV remotes, game controllers, and camcorders. (The BFG9000 looks kind of like a toaster.)

The team at Chex transformed Doom’s health packs into glasses of water and bowls of fruit, and so, if you consider the flemoids to be a sort of metaphorical representation of illness, you could argue the game is educational because it teaches kids that eating healthy and drinking water can help ward off disease. Which, considering the whole game is an advertisement for breakfast cereal aimed at children, isn’t too shabby of a message.

The game was distributed inside boxes of Chex, marking the first time a CD-ROM was packaged in a cereal box. That’s how I got my copy. I remember seeing the box on the shelf in the grocery store, it’s cover emblazoned with a proposition too good to pass up: “FREE CD-ROM GAME INSIDE!” I was five at the time, and my family had just gotten our first computer with a CD-ROM drive, which meant we could now run much bigger and more interesting programs than 3.5” floppy disks allowed. My Dad nodded as I pleaded with him to buy it and tossed the cereal in the cart.

When we got home, we installed the game on the new computer and began playing. At the time, the freedom to walk around in a virtual environment that Doom offered was revolutionary, and Chex Quest was my first exposure to it. I spent a few minutes just figuring out how to move my character around, eventually running up to a large door and randomly pressing keys on the keyboard until it opened. Inside was a flemoid that I frantically zapped at by clicking the mouse. After a few moments it disappeared in a flash of red light.

I made my way deeper inside the level. The complex I was in was exuding an aura of foreboding. The knowledge that all around me were enemies that wanted to kill me set me on edge. I made my way inside a room with dark blue walls. I scanned to the right, then heard a strange enemy grunt that sounded like it was nearby. I turned to the left and found a flemoid practically on top of my face, spraying it’s slime directly at me, attacking me with an animalistic shriek.

I don’t remember what exactly I did in that moment, but I remember it felt like an ice bucket of panic had been dumped over my entire body. I remember screaming and pushing myself away from the screen. I felt a level of fear that I don’t think I’ve experienced since.

But this was not a mere jump scare. This was not the fear I felt after getting duped by that video where the monster jumps in front of the camera in the middle of the calm car commercial. This was not simply a trick that triggered my reflexes into a brief reaction. This was a deeper fear, a fear that my person, my body, was in danger.

This moment of fear was my formative videogame experience, my baptism into this world of interactive creative works. Because in that moment I was afraid, yes. But I was not afraid of the game. I was afraid because I was inside the game.

Now my body was still sitting in a chair in my parents’ office, yes, obviously, but my mind was inside the game, and, to a further extent, my hands were inside the game; the keyboard and mouse were a like an electrical connection to that world. And if your mind and part of your body are inside of something, how can you not say that you are inside of that thing? What part of you, as a person, is not inside that thing?

This moment of terror was about me. I was being attacked. I was in danger. And although this overreaction was probably primarily provoked by my youth (seriously, I couldn’t have been older than, like, 7) as well as my anxiety-prone disposition (anxiety being, clinically, the perception of real-world dangers where there are none), this moment is still the perfect illustration of the core element that gives videogames the potential to be the most powerful artistic medium on earth: they allow the audience to be inside of the work.

All other mediums are, by their nature, empathy-based. They rely on the audience identifying with a character that’s making decisions and taking actions. But in a videogame, you are the one making those decisions. You are the one taking those actions. Even in games that give you no choices, the action of performing the tasks laid out in the game ties you into the story more deeply than anything else would.

This immersion provides the obvious thrills videogames are known for — the feeling that you really are driving a race car, or battling space aliens — but it also provides deeper, resonate moments that can teach us about ourselves. Videogames are machines, but when we, as players, unconsciously input variables into that machine that are guided by our humanity, by our souls, sometimes, in rare, transcendent instances, these things can suddenly and shockingly show us ourselves.*

Of course, successfully forging those moments is an ideal that videogames rarely achieve. Just as other mediums often fail to create believable, fully-fleshed, three-dimensional characters, videogames often fail to pull your psyche inside the game and reflect it back to you. All art forms have a select few works that are the wheat and a lot of others that are the chaff; videogames are no different.

Plus there are barriers to entry even with the great, transcendent games. Many games require a certain level of literacy to play — if you don’t know what it means to move with the left stick and look with the right stick, many games are going to feel impossibly inaccessible.

Then there’s the problem of choice. Unlike movies or literature, which are the same every time you consume them, videogames feature content than can be missed, skipped, or avoided while playing, complicating the ability of an author to control the experience. They also require a willingness to play along, a conscious agreement to abide by certain processes.

But even taking all of that into consideration, in my eyes it’s clear: Videogames are the most powerfully personal art form since the novel.

Maybe you don’t believe that claim. Maybe you even play videogames and you don’t believe it. That’s fine. Videogames are what they are. Their ability to stir people’s souls is not contingent on other people thinking of them as art, nor is the survival of the medium writ large.

Nonetheless, ever since that flemoid attacked me twenty-five years ago, there has seemed, to me, to be this gap between the potential I see in these things we call videogames and the perception of the wider cultural world. And although I have many reasons for wanting the world to see the potential of games — most of which revolve around justifying my fascination with them — there is also a simpler, less selfish reason: people are missing out! Videogames can create the same magic so many other artistic works can, but some people will never experience it because they still generalize the entire medium to be toys or pointless diversions.

This project will be my effort to show you what I see, to bridge that gap in perception. I’m planning on writing a monthly essay designed to explore the ways in which videogames are, for lack of a better word, art. Time willing, I’ll also augment those pieces with shorter, occasional updates. If you like what I’m doing here, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to it, donating to my Patreon, or forwarding it to a friend.

I hope that these essays can make people see games in a different light, but really, I hope it makes you want to play videogames and seek out the kind of experience I had.

Or, well…maybe a similar, less frightening experience.

Other Notes:

*While writing this, I discovered Tevis Thompson’s fantastic essay from 2015 about how videogames are the existential art. I read it after the majority of this essay was composed, but I found section three, which describes how interactivity “[sifts the player] through a screen, roughly”, so resonate and similar to what I had already written, I realized that perhaps I had already read that essay, it’s ideas were buried somewhere deep in my mind, and maybe I was subconsciously channeling them. On the other hand, maybe we just came to the same epiphany separately. Either way, he got there first, so he deserves the credit: go read it.

Separately, I was also inspired by Carolyn Petit’s essay about criticism. Go read that too.

A few months ago, Chex got back into the Chex Quest spirit and “officially” re-released the game as well as posting a fantastic little documentary about the game to YouTube. They have since taken the video private and removed the page from their website that hosted the game. I hope they reverse those decisions soon, but in the meantime, a little Googling should turn both up.