Adventure Gamers' Clubhouse #3 - EcoQuest 1: The Search for Cetus

EcoQuest is a game that I've been meaning to revisit for close to a decade now. I just never had a good excuse to sit down and breathlessly play it from start to finish in one long weekend whack the way I first received it.

I remember it was a miserable late July day in Virginia, the kind where even mosquitoes and horseflies lose their life-saving celerity (though none of their bite) it's so muggy. We'd just gone to the mall for the sake of doing something in more powerful air conditioning than our antebellum house could provide and I picked it up at Electronics Boutique for lack of anything that seemed more interesting.

After all, I have always been a costal, ocean-fixated child. I remember my stepfather's large imposing real wood desk, strong enough to hold the massive NEC monitor that had its own gravitational pull, especially seated on top of the companion beige desktop computer — itself strong enough to hold up the tremendous cube of glass, metal, and plastic, like a hideous office-friend Atlas. I remember the dim light that Electronics Boutique always used, and their spectral track lighting and smoky glass product shelves. I remember my mom's maroon Nissan Maxima and the voice saying "Your fuel level is low" in the mall parking lot.  I remember the smell of Zinka (bought in every color by my mom because "you have to have every color") and the way midges would cling to the screen door.

But I couldn't for the life of me remember actually playing EcoQuest.

I remembered liking it though. Even if it was simple.

Perhaps why it's so unmemorable is because it slides so effortlessly into the narrative of the era. Personal responsibility in conservation and environmentalism was big. The Burger King Kidz Club wanted to rap about recycling. Clinton and Gore were on the horizon and a liberal democratic platform promised environmental policies to preserve the planet and save the ozone layer that sounded impressive on Nick News and CNN but didn't amount to all that much. I guess we did close the ozone layer up and eventually got a handle on acid rain (for a while at least). But it was far from the contemporary approach that at least acknowledges the critical (if not total role) that corporations, capitalism, and imperialist nightmare governments (*cough* America *cough*) allow to perpetuate global policies of extraction, extermination, and waste—even if our elected officials are still beholden to corporate interests and endless greed.

EcoQuest ends up sliding right in there. Picking up trash for points in each room of the game. Young Adam is a real go-getter of personal achievements. And, of course, a legendary hero (literally). Ecological tragedy is met with maybe a MIDI dirge, but is never given a sense of weight or importance. I still don't know if there is a solution to one particular problem in the game that I missed. But I'm not going to look it up because ultimately, it doesn't matter. The game offers solutions far too readily and at no point can it take shots at corporations or governments. Broadly waving its hands to gesture at "humans" without ever pinning down what about humanity is underlying these problems. It's an extremely 90s liberal democrat explaining the Newsweek cover story to their child approach to tackling a real subject that will have catastrophic importance on their life going forward. So it makes sense that it didn't really hold any particular weight for me. I was already more deeply invested in the types of environmental action this game is interested in, that the 90s afforded children, and to be honest — Captain Planet went so much harder than EcoQuest ever dares.

EcoQuest ends up sliding right in there. Picking up trash for points in each room of the game. Young Adam is a real go-getter of personal achievements. And, of course, a legendary hero (literally). Ecological tragedy is met with maybe a MIDI dirge, but is never given a sense of weight or importance. I still don't know if there is a solution to one particular problem in the game that I missed. But I'm not going to look it up because ultimately, it doesn't matter. The game offers solutions far too readily and at no point can it take shots at corporations or governments. Broadly waving its hands to gesture at "humans" without ever pinning down what about humanity is underlying these problems. It's an extremely 90s liberal democrat explaining the Newsweek cover story to their child approach to tackling a real subject that will have catastrophic importance on their life going forward. So it makes sense that it didn't really hold any particular weight for me. I was already more deeply invested in the types of environmental action this game is interested in, that the 90s afforded children, and to be honest — Captain Planet went so much harder than EcoQuest ever dares.

Which isn't to say that it's a bad game. As an introduction to the kinds of mechanics and ideas of play that adventure games involve, EcoQuest is a perfect evolution of Mixed-up Mother Goose and the like. It's not as inventive as The Treehouse and or as puzzle driven as Dr. Brain. It's not as advanced (or as wacka-doodle racist or sexist) as Willy Beamish. It's just a pleasant undersea diversion for a couple of hours.

Ultimately EcoQuest's downfall is that it spends so much time on mystical prophecy and magical marine life that it never allows itself to be a game about marine biology or oceanography. Every animal, except for the giant Whale God (Cetus) is fundamentally a helpless goofball, not a majestic, independent living creature who is tragically suffering under the Anthropocene. Even when liberated from their plight, they're all purely there for comic relief. Adam is the hero, but all he does is pick up trash. Even for the time this feels tragically out of step with the trend toward individual civic duty. Which leaves EcoQuest in a bedraggled place where it's neither endearing enough an adventure game, nor critical enough of an educational game. It's a very lovely PSA about liter and the occasional deep cut like putting cages over propellers (which only Florida kids really knew about at the time from signs all over the manatee zones).

Still it was interesting to revisit, and I hope you enjoy the LP. There's a sequel to EcoQuest that I think I'll absolutely be skipping forever. It came out by the time I'd long since moved on and it looked entirely too juvenile and racist to be worth my time then, and even more so now.

But if you're not done reading, and you want to read about EcoQuest 2, Alexis Ong has a great piece about it for Polygon.