Let's get drunk and play RASTAN SAGA

I get to the local barcade, The 1-Up, about 6:15, a little early. There are a few of these around, but the ones in downtown Denver and Boulder are infested with hip college kids in jaunty hats so it's impossible to get a drink, and the one on Colfax is always crawling with creeps and cops.

​I feed fifty dollars into the change machine and fill up a plastic cup with tokens. I'm meeting some of my oldest friends, Adam and Mio, here to beat the 1987 hack-and-slash arcade game Rastan Saga, known here in America as just Rastan. I figure if we can't beat it with fifty bucks worth of tokens, we'll never beat it at all.

Rastan Saga is no Donkey Kong or Paperboy. Hell, it's not even a Bubble Bobble or a Tapper in terms of name recognition, but the game has a bit of a reputation as being really, really good and also insanely difficult.

From the moment I lay eyes on it, I know Rastan Saga wants to be a Conan game. In 1987, Yoshinori Kobayashi of the game developer Taito was reportedly a big fan of the Conan the Barbarian movie and wanted to release a Conan game for arcades, but they didn't have the rights. What they put out is clearly the Cimmerian with the serial numbers filed off.

Rastan is a loincloth-wearing, sword-wielding, sword-and-sorcery barbarian. Mirroring Conan's fictional life almost exactly, Rastan is now a king who sits on a golden throne a la the epilogue shot of Arnie as King Conan from the 1982 movie, but was in his youth both a thief and a murderer. Unlike Conan, the game tells you that this will be a chronological retelling of his path. In the Japanese version, there is a prologue that tells us Rastan is on a quest for a dragon's head, but those have been removed from the American edition. Most of the artwork on the cabinet itself makes Rastan look like a sandy brunette, if not a blonde, but some of the artwork is just Conan. The Commodore 64 cover of the game features a straight-up rip of Earl Norem's cover for Savage Sword #24.

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There are six levels, each ending with a different boss. The barbarian starts out with a regular sword but a few power-ups along the way give you some extra oomph, like a flail with increased range, an axe with increased power, or flaming sword that shoots fireballs. While it plays really well, the eight-way joystick is a little annoying in tense moments as you can sometimes jump straight up when you mean to jump up and to the right, but that's just the sort of thing you have to deal with in 40 year-old arcade games.

The token machine spits out my fifty dollars worth of tokens and I palm them into a cheap plastic cup before I walk over to the bar.

"What's the cheapest beer you guys have tonight?" I ask the bartender. "It's Saturday night, so there's no happy hour... I guess it's a PBR can," she replies. That's fine with me, so I lay down $5 for my first tall boy.

It's a short walk to Rastan, where I see that it says "Kid Niki" on the side, which means this cabinet was probably converted to Rastan Saga from the Dragonball ripoff Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. Taito only issued Rastan as a conversion kit, so there are no dedicated Rastan machines at all. All the cabinets here at the 1-Up have shelves retrofitted to the side, so I plop my beer and coin cup on my left and play a warm-up round. As you put a token in, the machine plays this deep chooom sound that really tickles your vintage arcade fancy.

Just to my right, the Broomfield High School class of 1986 is supposed to be having a class reunion, judging by the paper sign on the reserved tables. So far, it's just one stony-faced looking guy in a Colorado Avalanche t-shirt and a bomber jacket with his arms crossed, waiting for the rest of his graduating class. To my left is a machine I've never heard of called Jungle King. Nobody touches it all night.

I play my first run at Rastan as a warm-up and am immediately reminded of what I learned last time I played this game. Don't even go for the power-ups on the first level; it's easy enough that they're not worth the time. I do okay for having prepared as well as a ninth-grader before a geography exam, which is to say I haven't touched this game in two months. I figure this practice run is a good sign- I've never truly tried to beat an arcade game in one go. At a Dave & Busters when I was 14, we played Time Crisis 2 for half of our year-end field trip there, but that's it.

The Broomfield High reunion guy steps over and introduces himself as Tom. He tells me that he used to play this game at a local arcade in 1987 and I fight the urge to tell him that I wasn't even born in 1987 and instead ask him if he has any tips. He says no because the arcade wasn't there for long. Drat. Oh well. He sits back down.

Adam and Mio arrive right on time. Adam orders a Coors Light and Mio gets a Dr. Pepper. They haven't been to this particular 1-Up before, so we do a lap of the arcade before we settle into Rastan. The whole place is decorated like you're inside a maze of warp pipes from Super Mario, with amateur murals of video game characters above the machines, the kind my mom paints for play scenes at Vacation Bible School.

The first level of Rastan Saga (or "Round," as the game terms them) is a desolate mountain range with craggy rocks in the background. Rastan the barbarian drops down from the sky and we start slashing, jumping, ducking past waves of bad guys. While the game doesn't have a timer on any of the levels, the sun will gradually go down, causing a really pretty palette change in the parallax-shifting background. The light becomes a reddish dusk and the game gradually throws more enemies at you to encourage speed.

Every round has two sections: an outdoor portion and then an indoor castle / dungeon setting which is evidently the abode of the eventual boss. We manage to get through the outdoor portion of round one pretty quickly. I'm surprised, but pleased.

I head over to the bathroom and a guy is walking out when I'm walking in. He has on a black t-shirt that says in lowercase Times New Roman letters, "not eric." I ask him if his name is Eric and he tells me to fuck off.

​I hit the bar on the way back to the game.

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The inner half of the first round is way harder and we feel the difficulty spike immediately. Among Rastan's enemies, there are devil bats, lizard men, and four-armed aliens who seemingly throw bowling pins at you. But now on round two, there are green-armored goons with two hit points instead of one, and lots more annoying bats that will kill your jump distance if they catch you in mid-air. Some seriously-frustrating gargoyle-looking motherfuckers only ever swoop down to hit you, so you have to strike upwards to attack them, and it begins to feel like your sword is made of dryer sheets since you're never exactly in the right position to make contact.

​One particularly annoying section has you running from bats while a brick wall closes the space between you and a fire pit, but you have to wait to time a jump onto a rope which lets you swing to safety. This was as far as I'd gotten last time I played Rastan, but after just two or three attempts, I'm able to swing past.

Despite my gripes, this game rules. It's a ton of fun. If you manage to strike down while jumping above an enemy, it's so satisfying; almost none of the enemies can block that way. Barbarian power fantasy all around. The environments and enemies are pitch perfect for a sword-and-sorcery game.

There is apparently a Rastan Saga II (known almost backwards outside of Japan as "Nastar") and Rastan Saga III. Apparently, the second installment is boiled ass and the third is perhaps the best in the series, though the title seems to change by the minute. I've seen it referred to as Warrior Blade, Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga III, Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga Episode III and Rastan Saga III: Warrior Blade. The Conan homages (ripoffs?) continue with III, featuring a paint-over of Arnold's Conan the Destroyer pose on the promo materials.

It's becoming clear that Rastan costing only a quarter a play is a mercy, especially when most of the pinball games, even the old ones I love like Monster Bash and Twilight Zone, are a whole dollar. It's going to help us get much further.

We get to the boss, who's a long-armed axe-wielding skeleton with a horned helmet. After a few fruitless attempts, I tag Adam in. He's always been better at video games than me. We realize pretty quickly that he should focus on defense: dodge the swords thrown at you or the boss's axe swings and then sneak in hits whenever you feel safe to. He defeats the boss and we are told, "YOU ARE A BRAVE FIGHTER TO HAVE CLEARED SUCH A DIFFICULT STAGE." Apparently, this too was changed for the American edition of the game like the prologue. Other versions say, "MY JOURNEY HAS JUST BEGUN. THERE IS NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE. I MUST HURRY," which is, frankly, way better. As Adam kills the boss, I realize I've already killed my second beer.

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The second round is a dark swamp and it introduces a new enemy type: snakes. The only way to hit snakes is to crouch before you swing your sword, but that's all fine and dandy since that's what we've been doing half the time anyway to avoid enemy strikes. Thankfully, the difficultly of this new level is down a little bit from the second half of round one, so we're really cooking for a moment.

The Broomfield High class reunion has not materialized and I'm starting to feel bad for Tom. If I were him, I would've tried to distract myself by playing some games, but he's barely moved since he talked to me as I first stepped up to Rastan Saga. He's sitting with palms in his pits, legs spread like he could need to stand up at any moment, and I wonder if his turnout will be better next year for their fortieth. His small eyes are scanning the room as though there's a chance the reunion has gotten in past the ID check and managed to make it all the way to arcade machines and perhaps he has just heretofore missed them.

As we play round two and cross a river in the swamp on slow-moving log flumes, Adam jokes that his favorite part of the Conan the Barbarian movie was when Conan had to carefully jump across slow-moving logs, a classic fantasy trope. We cross acid pits that look more like bubbling root beer than anything else. This environment certainly isn't as aesthetically pleasing as the first, though we're kind of finding our groove and are able to do better at re-tracing our steps every time we die without taking damage.

In the interior half of round two, I notice that we actually might be starting to get kind of good at this. There's a part where you're inundated with enemies from all sides, but to move on, you need to strike downward at a breakable tile to fall into a basement. We die a bunch of times, but eventually start making this buttery-smooth jump off a ledge right through the floor, and since all the enemies de-spawn when they leave the screen, we don't even have to fight them. I've drunk two more beers.

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I know that arcades are, at their core, kind of a scam. Suckers like me pump quarters into a game designed to eat them efficiently. I try to convince myself that as long as I know that, it's better somehow. It mostly works, and we're definitely having fun.

​But we hit a snag. We get seriously stuck here for about a half hour: from the checkpoint, we climb a chain to an upper floor. At the top, there's a fire pit  spewing fireballs for us to dodge. I try to memorize the pattern, but each fireball has a different number of small and big bounces and I've had four beers at this point, so it's pretty fruitless. To make matters worse, on a platform halfway across the bridge, two enemies come at you from each aside and are all too happy to knock you back into the fireballs or into the pit entirely, so we die again and again.

It's 8pm now, so the bar staff comes over the loudspeaker to kick out anyone under 21. The music switches to mid-2000s club bangers and it's at that point that I realize the music for Rastan Saga is really, really good. There are only three songs in the game: one for the outdoor levels, one for the indoor levels, and one for boss fights. The outside tune is a propulsive little beat whereas the inside music's a lot more spooky and fantastical. They don't get old.

Adam opts for an Old Fashioned as his second drink, which here at The 1-Up is named after a video game character, but I can't remember which one (Max Payne? Solid Snake?) because I'm now four beers deep. I stick with PBR, which you know is good because it won a blue ribbon at some point.

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I figured that the alcohol would be the greatest physical factor working against me tonight but I'm finding that my left wrist is developing a bit of a cramp. I guess craning one hand above a jump button and an attack button for two and a half hours continually doesn't make it feel so hot. Adam is feeling the strain too, so we start to switch off a little more often in order to give our poor, delicate hands a break.

I even convince Mio to give it a go and she passes the game back to me pretty quickly. She's never really gone in for the dumb shit that I plan (like blowing fifty bucks on a video game at the arcade just to see if we can do it) and I don't blame her. 

We do eventually get to the boss of round two and as we drop into a room (Rastan always starts things by falling from the sky) with curled snake pillars, I hope to myself that it's some kind of Thoth-Amon-style snake god or wizard thing. To my chagrin, Rastan decides to do that thing that 80s pop culture loves to do where every character has a personality except one: there's the wolfish, dangerous guy and the big, dopey guy and the little, nerdy guy... and then there's the girl. Her differentiating factor is that she's the girl. That's this boss, who is just Woman. She's an unremarkable lady in blue armor. If you look at the game manual it even gives her the boring name "Slayer," when the rest of the bosses are named cool shit like "Kentorous" and "Shukumas." Adam hits her around a dozen times and the game tells us again that we are brave fighters to have cleared such a difficult stage and we're on to round three.

At this point, it's about 9:30 and we've been playing Rastan Saga for three solid hours. Tom's high school reunion crew still hasn't shown up yet, and I think he's started calling people to see if they're coming. I feel pretty bad for him, especially because I start thinking that you couldn't even pay me to go to one of my high school reunions, and I ask Tom if he wants to help us along in the game. "Maybe you can work out some of those 1987 skills!" I tell him.

"No, I'm good," he says flatly. Hey, I tried, I guess.

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We're now out of the swamp and into a deep cave full of purple stalactites and my notes about the experience that I'm taking in my phone are starting to get a little harder to understand after the fact.

We are now fully in sync with Rastan. The game presses in on you from all sides and forces you to react. If the game thinks you're stalling, enemies pour in from the sides to turn up the temperature on you. The music pulses you forward as the game pounds you into submission. Every time you die, you feel like you know exactly how to conquer the thing that killed you; you're not left wondering how to beat it, there's just the question of if you can pull it off. My heart thumps like a clothes dryer with shoes in it. The term "beating" the game has never felt more immediate to me than right now. I try to pound it into submission.

Even so, when we're not that far into the next level, we once again get completely stuck for what seems like forever. Rastan slides down a pretty long slope toward a pit, chased by a boulder. The boulder gains on you, so you have to dodge it before you can get to the bottom of the slope by jumping up and sort of back to the left, but timing it is proving to be really hard, especially when you're also trying to avoid a bat and the dinosaur man and manticore on the platform you're supposed to eventually jump to.

Soon after, you're sliding down another hill which is punctuated by instant-death fireballs instead of rocks and we get stuck here interminably.

It takes everything Adam and I have to get through this section. The first time we actually make it past, we pray that we've crossed the checkpoint and won't have to do it again. Our prayers are rewarded.

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But our luck doesn't hold out for long. 

The next test is harder than it should be: kill a bad guy, jump over the spikes, kill another bad guy, jump over even higher spikes, kill more enemies. But that 8-way joystick is now our enemy as we can never seem to jump that second set of spikes without getting run through a few times. To top it off, the enemies on the top row keep coming down to hurt us while we're trying to do the high jump, and more shit is spawning behind us.

We are running low on quarters. It's 10:30 at this point. My hand is cramping, the edges of my vision are starting to blur. To make matters worse, I've read that the final round (which is still two rounds away) doesn't have any checkpoints, so you have to beat it in a single go. The despair is palpable, and far more powerful than the PBR.

I die one last time. "Fuck this game," I tell Adam, "I never want to look at it again." I watch the whole countdown to "GAME OVER" and have a few second thoughts about letting it tick all the way down. My right hand kind of twitches when it hits three. But that's all. It reaches zero and I pick up my coin cup and my empties.

Rastan is the natural state of life. My attempt to beat the game is unnatural, a whim of circumstance. And Rastan must always ultimately triumph.

It's not all bad. When we walked in earlier that night, the all-time high score on this Rastan Saga cabinet was owned by "???" and was about 230,000. Adam and I have destroyed ???'s legacy. We own something like the top thirty-nine high scores now, with our names switching back and forth- ADM, ADM, ADM, and the DAN, DAN, DAN every few scores. I enter my name one last time into the three letters allotted to claim your high score. It's about 960,000.

As I close out my bar tab, I notice that Tom has moved. They already took the signs away designating his booth as reserved for Broomfield High, so he's up on his feet and playing games. From what I can tell, he's killing it at Galaga, kind of moving his whole body with the joystick. He looks like he's having fun.

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I've got just a few tokens left, so we play Mario Kart Arcade GP, which is technically drunk driving for me.

When I get home, I do the sensible thing. I drink some water. But also, I realize that Rastan Saga is available as a download on the Switch 2, so I buy it there for $6, which, if you're keeping track, is less than we spent at the arcade.

​I still haven't beaten it.

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Photos in the above post were taken by Adam Moore.
Graphics were provided by Jake at Yergs Brand.