Welcome to the first ever episode of the Giraffe Feels Podcast. The plan right now is to do this twice monthly, although that will be in flux as I figure out what amount of time I have to create and produce it. Get in touch if you have comments or ideas for sure! Social media coordinates can be found at the end of the episode. 

Primarily, Giraffe Feels is going to be a podcast primarily about retro gaming, but some modern games too. Video games changed the course of my life in many ways and were often part of many of the events that shaped it, as we will see in this episode. This episode is about Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, a game that came into my life at a pretty low point and, years later, influenced the direction my academic career went in. Seriously! Join me, won't you? 

It's going to take a few minutes to set this up, so bear with me, okay? When I was in 5th grade, I had a premonition that things were about to take a turn for the worse. I was sitting on the floor in science class. We were watching movies all day at the end of the year because all our classes had wrapped up a week early. One of the “bad” kids in our grade, who even had a Bart Simpson haircut that was supposedly “banned” from our middle school, was goofing off, messing with a few other kids. I was minding my own business and suddenly he turned to me, this nasty grin on his face, and dumped a pile of pencil shards on my head. 

Everyone around me, including the kids that I had spent the year hanging out with after meeting them in summer camp, totally turned heel on me and laughed along with them. I went to the bathroom, cleaned myself up, and puked in a tiolet from the anxiety flooding my body. I knew I was doomed. 

That fall, after spending the summer hanging out, playing lots of NES games, even attending the Nintendo World Championship, I felt pretty good about myself because I made the final round of kids and was even in a picture in Nintendo Power, school began. This is where the direction of my life changes forever. About a week into the school year, I forgot to go to the bathroom at the end of Resource Room like I normally did. My third period teacher, for science class, made it clear we could not go the bathroom during class. I had never had a teacher who made such a statement, so I took it seriously and began a routine where I would go before class. 

I forgot that day. I had to go really bad during science class and I wet myself after my teacher didn't acknowledge my raised hand for a few minutes. As you can imagine, this did not go over well with my classmates. 

A lot of bad stuff happened after that...a lot of stuff that I did not deal with well until I was an adult. I ended up so psychologically damaged by the bullying and shame that I began going to the bathroom two or three times a class because of my own paranoia. Most teachers rolled with this, a few did not. I ended up with a kidney infection, or something like that, and had to go to a urologist. This is where Castlevania III comes into the story. 

Mu urologist was in the same strip mall that the Shop Rite we went to was. On a rainy early evening, I went to my appointment with my mother. On the way out, my mother suggested we go to the video store and rent a few games for the weekend. That sounded good to me and we headed to the town next to ours, which was called Netcong, which might be familiar to you if you have read Gilbert Sorrentino's literary masterpiece the Aberration of Starlight. This video store often had games right when they came out, which was a bit “timey wimey” back then. Release dates were pretty fluid back then and if you see a date on say Wikipedia, it doesn't mean the game was everywhere like today. 

When we got into the store, I immediately saw the game I wanted. Castlevania III! I had loved Castlevania II. It was one of the first video games I beat. I loved the RPG elements, before I even really knew what that was, and impressed my child study team case manager with the map I drew of different parts of the game. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the back of the car, I think we picked my brother up from CCD on the way home too, staring at the game, so excited to play a new adventure with the Belmonts, this time, with Trevor Belmont instead of Simon. Simon's portrayal on Captain N The Game Master was so embarrassing that it was probably for the best to have a new protagonist. Trevor Belmont came with friends, who I was so excited to meet after reading about them in issue 18 of Nintendo Power, which had a huge guide for the game. 

I got home and played Castlevania III for hours. I got Grant, and escaped the clock tower and its gigantic swinging hands. I went a bit further in the game, but didn't have enough time to finish before having to return it. My password remained tacked up on my wall though. I didn't beat the game until that summer, when I rented it again after watching a friend, beat the game at their house. This was a new friend I had found after embracing fantasy novelists like David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and that Tolkien guy, although I liked Eddings and Brooks more than Tolkien. I literally took notes. I remember his younger sister calling me a nerd. I have this random memory of their mother being super psyched about Michael Bolton. This friend will come up a lot later. 

I had no idea that the RPG influence on Castlevania II  was controversial under years later when I began viewing fan websites on the internet. Castlevania III's “return to form,” so to speak, modeled itself after the side scrolling platform aesthetic of the first Castlevania game. I felt, and still do, very comfortable whipping my way through levels of this game. The major shift, which to an extent was a prelude to the “Metrdoivania” game style of Symphony of the Night and the amazing Rondo of Blood, was the ability to choose which path you took through the game. Eventually, the paths merged, but a gamer could weave through different paths and maybe never even see some parts of the game. I did a replay of the game a few years ago and ran into a level I had never seen before. 

I was so excited for this level of choice because it felt new even though it really wasn't. Choose your own adventure books had existed when I was a child and so had text adventure games like Adventure and Zork. A few years before, I had felt quite daring running around the top part of Legend of Zelda near Death Mountain with only a wooden sword and a lot of luck. It felt so unruly and like I was breaking some set of unwritten rules. I loved every moment of it. 

Unruly, despite clinging to the aesthetics of the original Castlevania, is a good way to describe Castlevania III. Do you take the upward or downward path? Do you keep doing that or alternate? Do you get Grant again this time, or go the lower path to get Sypha who quickly became one of my favorite characters in video games because she was a woman who wasn't a princess or anything like that. Her gender ambiguity, due to some erroneous translating in the American version, further intrigued me as I went through adolescence obsessed with that kind of ambiguous gender aesthetic. When I play the game now, I always take her along with me. Their embrace at the end of the game warmed my 12 year old heart. 

Something else that Castlevania III inadvertently did was influence the direction of my academic career. When I got to college I was introduced to hypertext fiction in a course. I had known about it as a teen, but wasn't super familiar with it until the class I took where we read classics like Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, a retetlling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Staurt Moulthrop's Victory Garden, so heavily influenced by my favorite author Jorge Luis Borges, and others. When we began reading the first one, which I think was Patchwork Girl, the thought that popped into my head was “cool, this is just like Castlevania III!” Despite games becoming more and more non-linear, perhaps too much even today, Castlevania III was the game that stuck out in my mind. I ended up writing my thesis about Borges, an author that heavily influenced hypertext fiction, and then writing my thesis in grad school about The Unknown Collective's The Unknown and Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls. My fascination with the forking paths of Castlevania III led me to my academic research interests years later.