The Brothers Grim

When I crossed the first level of the latest Contra (Hard Corps: Uprising) I did what any self respecting gamer would do. I put down my controller, cracked my knuckles and yawned smugly. Had I been on a stage, I would have also said “Meh, this was almost too easy, not worthy of a champ like me.” As the machine serpent Boss dropped onto the sand, my character walked over to the end of the sand pit and hopped onto a waiting motorcycle. I leaned back, patting myself on the back, and expected to see a screen detailing my stats and the intro to the next level.

The scene, however, switched back to the carcass of the serpent, and I watched in sheer horror as a portion of the machine broke off and flew after me in pursuit. The fucking level wasn’t over! The serpent was a mini-boss! Screaming expletives, I grabbed the controller again as this new Boss activated a huge drill and punched my character into the ground. That was the moment it finally sunk in that I was playing a Contra game. Not just any other run-and-gun shoot-‘em-up, but a proper so-hard-it-will-make-you-cry-tears-of-blood Contra game. I know this game is hard, and I know I will win against the Commonwealth (the current Big Bad), but I wish I could have done it in two player mode along with the red soldier.

My first introduction to video games was an old dog-fighter from the 486 era, and the first proper console game I played was Mario (this was around 1994, just FYI). I played it on my elder cousin’s NES system (the one with the huge chunky cartridges with only one game each) and I was hooked by the bright colours and the cheerful soundtrack, and the Italian plumber’s journey to get to the princess was a large part of my early gaming experience. I loved the exploration, I loved the powers and I loved the sense of achievement I felt every time I discovered a new secret. Then, it got boring.

It might have had something to do with the fact that I could not, for the life of me, cross 1-4. For days, I tried every single trick I could think of. I would reach 1-4 with the fire weapon and a huge number of lives (I can’t recall how many, but definitely more than four, maybe) and then I would proceed to lose every single one of said lives to the evil green minion of Bowser. Rational thought and logic dictated only one course of action, and I quit the damm game. To take my mind off everything, I finally relented and allowed my younger brother to play the game. (There was only one controller, and there was no way in hell I was giving the little spider the controls, even for a second)

As I watched, his childlike squeals of joy (in all fairness, he was still a child then. I on the other hand, was born with the intellect and wit of a man who has lived the lives of both James Bond and Han Solo) as he crossed a level, discovered a secret and got his first 1-up by collecting one hundred coins, turned into tears of frustration. He too, met the evil green minion of Bowser on 1-4, and he too, was found wanting. For days, this situation continued and I watched my brother turn into a husk of a man. All joy was gone from his eyes, to be replaced by a hunger. Often, he would look pleadingly at me, asking me in unspoken words if I could help him somehow, help him overcome that evil green minion of Bowser, and all I could do was shrug helplessly. The evil green minion of Bowser was our Kobayashi Maru, and we were destined to face defeat at his hands again and again for all eternity (or rather, until we discovered the first warp gates the next week, but that’s a story for another time).

We’d almost sworn off gaming altogether, when suddenly, something wonderful happened. We were introduced to the joys of the second controller, shortly followed by the joys of a brand new game that featured Men With Guns And Explosions In The Background. The loading screen was dark and minimalistic, a black background with the name of the game written in a stylized techno-industrial font hanging above an image of the heroes and the menu options (which in those days usually consisted of a choice between single player and two player). Used as we were to the cheerfully happy synth sounds of Mario’s menu screen, the crunching opening riffs of Contra’s menu screen actually made our hair stand on end. So shocked were we by the sheer awesome of the few seconds it had taken for the menu screen to load, that neither of us touched a button, and that was when we got the happiest surprise of that week. The game demo started, and we found that both the players could play simultaneously. Clearly, this wasn’t Mario.

He looked at me, and I could see the gears moving in his head. “Finally!” his manic smile seemed to say, “Finally we can both wreak havoc on these unsuspecting pixels. Finally we won’t be at the mercy of overpowered Bosses! Finally, with you on my side, together, The Brothers Grim can lay to waste whatever the villains of this awesome game that I haven’t even played yet, throw at us.” I gave him a manic, crazed smile of my own as I high-fived him, thinking “Finally! The little monkey will prove useful!”

We got our digitized asses handed to us less than three minutes into our first game. We got them handed to us again, less than five minutes later, and again, and again, and again and again… Clearly, we lacked teamwork and clearly, it was all his fault. I explained to him again and again, and screamed instructions to him as he haplessly flailed around, trying to watch my back AND shoot the afimchis (Hindi for junkie/drug peddler, we had assumed that the guys carrying sacks were drug peddlers since all major Bollywood villains around those times were usually drug lords) heading for him. Things would get more and more complicated when it came to the weapons. It made more sense for me to take the Spreader (that’s what we called the scatter-shot gun), and for him to take the Rapider (ditto for the rapid-fire) since I was awesome. However, exactly why would he need to take F (we couldn’t come up with a name for that one) which to our inexperienced minds was the second most useless gun in the game, was something I was at a momentary loss to explain. (Interestingly, as I became a better player, my weapons of choice shifted to R and F, because an extremely skilled player can do an obscene amount of damage with them. In later games, I would take R as often as I could and leave the S to him. There is a Zen lesson in there somewhere.)

On our umpteenth try, we did manage to break down the wall and proceed to Basi 1 (the letters and the resolution of the game was such that the 1 looked like an I, and so, in our confused minds, Base 1 became Basi, which in hindi means rotten. On our discovery of Base 2, which became Basi-2, we changed the name of Base 1 to Basi 1). Our first reaction was sheer exhilarating joy, which only became brighter as the realization dawned that we had done it together. We cheerfully hollered and scampered around like little monkeys, high-fiving each other as we recounted our wondrous exploits of marksmanship and awesomness on a level that takes less than seven minutes to cross on a good run. Then, as the next level opened, we scrambled to our controllers and started shouting at each other, exhorting the other to simply kill, kill, kill.

We died several times in that level, and we tried again. We crossed that level and we reached Waterfall, home to arguably the worst two-player mechanic ever. We killed each other countless times, jumping and falling stupidly, and I had to reprimand him several times for jumping unwisely (resulting in my death), and jumping too late (resulting in his death). Finally, we reached the top and defeated the Dragon, and jumped through the wound in his chest to reach Basi-2. (In our later runs, he would take the power of invincibility and run across the flaming bridge while I jumped behind him. He’d take the harder route up so it made sense for him to have it. He’d also take the S before the final jumps and set up the M for me, it was one of the few levels I was content to be the side-kick)

Basi-2 is one of my least favourite levels of all times. Its not so much the game mechanic, its mostly the music and the colours. That and the fact that its also one of the least interesting levels in the game for me. We did finally take it down as well, although the bubbles in the Boss battle (you know what I’m talking about) did cause a lot of discomfort. Thankfully, by this time, our teamwork had progressed to a point that we didn’t even have to watch out for each other, we knew that the other was taking care of the enemy just as hard as we were.

I could go on and on about each and every level, but it is literally more of the same. The Brothers Grim face a challenge and beat it down together, whether by force of arms (Snow Field, Alien’s Lair) or by heroic sacrifice (he would have to die in Energy Zone for us to continue, it was impossible to time the damm jumps to avoid the lasers) and subsequent rebirth (he’d take one of my lives in Hangar. The more we played, the more we killed and blew up, the better we became at it. From a couple of squabbling little kids, we became The Brothers Grim, and that is why playing Contra with my brother is one of my happiest memories of all times. Playing Contra with him was one of the first times I was playing something with him, not against him. All questions of sibling rivalry, ranging from the mundane (whose favourite cartoon do we play) to the ones that were truly important (who gets the bigger portions of Maggi) were forgotten as we hunkered down to defeat the evil forces of Red Falcon, and the glory of victory and anguish of defeat was shared equally. This was the beginning of The Brother Grim, and those were some of my happiest memories of my childhood.

As I fall to the sheer number of troops the Commonwealth has mustered, as I fall to the machine serpent and that weird thing on wheels, and as I scream and rage at the screen in Singapore as my bullets tear apart the waves of enemy soldiers, I sorely miss the red soldier in Delhi. I know I will defeat the Commonwealth (the current Big Bad) and win this game, but I only wish I could do it in two player mode, as part of The Brother Grim.