… actually, I wasn’t very clued up on video games in 2001, due to not owning any games consoles at the time. I did nonetheless come into possession of an iMac running one of the early versions of what was then known as Mac OS X (RIP king), and it came with a preinstalled RPG called Otto Matic.
In Otto Matic, you play the eponymous character, a robot who has been sent to Earth and then to a sequence of other planets in order to rescue humans from the Brain Aliens, which are trying to harvest human lives and then … actually I don’t know what they plan to do with them. But it’s bad, I guess! The Brain Aliens have scattered the humans across the galaxy in preparation for taking them to their own planet, Planet X. I don’t know why they didn’t just take them straight there. Otto is able to rescue humans and send them to his rocket just by touching them, which is convenient; the more central part of the gameplay consists of making your way across each planet, dealing with the array of malevolent forces that have taken up residence there, and getting to your rocket in order to blast off to the next one.
Bear in mind that at the age of 8 my sole gaming experience amounted to some minimal exposure to online flash games and a few hours playing Pokémon on friends’ borrowed GameBoys Advance. The computer briefly belonged to my dad before it was mine, and so my Otto Matic experience initially consisted of watching him play; he was familiar with strategy games (and is now that rare thing, a 74-year-old with a Steam account) but hadn’t played anything in this genre before, so it took him a while to get to the end of Earth. We were amazed to discover that that wasn’t the end of the game, but that there were in fact a whole nine other levels! The second one was much harder – I still remember from my days of obsessively reading the minuscule amount of Otto Matic meta available online that it’s understood to be the hardest level. My dad never succeeded in beating that one.
After the computer came into my possession (my dad’s main reason for passing it on and getting himself a new Windows machine was, hilariously, that it didn’t have a floppy disk drive), I gained the privilege of being able to play Otto Matic as much as I liked, or at least to play it as long as my mum wasn’t telling me to get “off the computer”. I have to admit that I was “on the computer” quite a lot. I still am. During a brief bout of internet access at this time I came across the cheat codes, which made it possible for me to play through the levels without dying constantly. It also made it possible to instantly complete a level as soon as you set foot in it: I tried this once, went through “completing” every level, reached the victory screen and then started crying because I was convinced that what I had done was deeply morally wrong.
It’s been at least fifteen years since I played this properly, but I still remember the names of all the planets! I’d love to know how many hours I sank into it at a formative age. The basic gameplay was “pick up weapons, use them to attack enemy aliens, pick up fuel, get to your rocket”, but each level had its own sections with different mechanics: riding around in the water attached to a magnet, opening doors by electrocuting them, luring some sentient hammers onto a patch of ice so they could break it, drinking potions and becoming enormous, zipwires, bumper cars. The bumper cars were my favourite: the level was meant to be a sort of fairground world, with sections that consisted of jumping across clouds while trying to avoid falling into oblivion. The music was also a banger!
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m describing this in the past tense when Otto Matic is now freely available for Windows, Mac and Linux. When the original development company was bought out or folded or whatever, they apparently gave permission to Some Guy to release a lot of their games open source for modern systems. I’ve tried it on my pretty mediocre Linux laptop and it runs beautifully; I need to get back to it at some point and see if the gaming experience I’ve since acquired will enable me to beat Planet Snoth at last.