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Columbus the Killer


 "He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the New World
And that palace in the sun..."

- Neil Young, "Cortez the Killer" (1975)

I'm aware that I bring up Ozark Softscape's 1984 game The Seven Cities of Gold rather frequently for a title that's mostly remembered today for its influence later series like Civilization. But it's a very significant game for me personally, not only because it was, for me,  an early demonstration of the medium's potential richness and depth, but because some thirty-six years later, I keep coming back to it. There's the cartographical indulgence Seven Cities foregrounds, of course, and an appreciation of the game's mechanics I wouldn't have had at seven years old, especially since so many are hidden, left for the players themselves to deduce. But there's a reason I kept going back, both as a kid and as an emulator-savvy adult, every Columbus Day: a longing for repair, to undo a crime of almost unimaginable scale, to unmake the world around us, built on centuries of blood and suffering.

It bears some explanation how some 180 kilobytes (two floppy disks, one for the game itself and one for player data) is capable of all that. As described in the linked post above, Seven Cities of Gold puts players in the role of 15th century explorers - Columbus, of course, but also those that followed him - those that reached the mainland. In the videogame-y way that the entire defense of a planet or even galactic civilization generally falls to a single, tiny fighter, the player in Seven Cities enacts the entire Age of Exploration single-handedly, as cartographer and trader, and, should you so choose, as evangelist and butcher. Within the bounds of the game, you can recreate much of how it went down the first time, or you can try to find a different way.

Even as a kid, Columbus Day was an odd holiday. Not only was it very early in the school year, but there never seemed to be any consistency as to whether it was a day off or not. And what exactly were we supposed to do for Columbus Day? I don't know which year I started making it a point to play Seven Cities when the holiday rolled around, but it wouldn't have been long after I got the game. Any coverage of the subject in school was pretty minimal, the Thanksgiving Story received far more attention... possibly because there were so many vaguely-associated class activities to chose from. So what education I had came from a few books and, naturally, the manual for Seven Cities of Gold, rather than the curated mythology that comes standard with American schooling for so many. I was lucky in how little I had to un-learn. For instance, that the holiday itself, at least in the United States, had little to do with Christopher Columbus himself, but was more about the integration of Italian-Americans into mainstream (i.e., white) society - the first national celebration appearing in 1892 as a way of lessening tension following a mass lynching event the previous year. The myth of a European man coming to America,  leaving out the bloodshed, was summoned because of the bloodshed Americans were visiting upon those who arrived more recently from Europe than they had... and it's entirely appropriate that neither of these stories involve the indigenous population decimated and slaughtered, by the later conquistadors for sure, but by Columbus himself.

Seven Cities of Gold isn't complex enough to allow players to recreate the crimes for which Columbus was imprisoned, which stemmed from his role as colonial governor. But it does allow for crimes of more immediate contact, of killing off the indigenous population until they submit to the player's will and allow their food and gold to be taken without recompense. It is no doubt intentional that it's very easy to fall into this path: a player fights natives simply by walking into them, so all movement through villages has to be conducted very carefully to avoid this. Since the player's avatar is intended to represent both their character and their troops, we can assume this represents the difficulty of keeping all one's men in line. Complicating this is that some natives will slam themselves into you, depending on the general mood... more and more as they become angry. Small accidents can escalate into bloodbaths with alarming rapidity, so the peaceful route requires absolute precision and patience - prefacing the way modern games will offer a "non-lethal" approach, where one can avoid killing enemies, but will take more effort and time than than simple, lethal violence. That's always been my preferred approach, though, should the game offer such an option... and it has been since the first time  I played Seven Cities of Gold.

Historical games present "what if" possibilities in ways no other media can, that's something important in understanding the relationship we have with the medium as both ourselves, and the mythologized versions of ourselves - both our predecessors and the idealized people we wish to be. Seven Cities is better than most when it comes to this kind of reflection, not only because the simplicity allows us to read ourselves into the open spaces presented, but especially because it's far closer to a sandbox game than most of the titles it inspired. There is no victory condition and failure is simply running out of the resources necessary for mounting expeditions - even when your character dies, you immediately take on the role of their successor. After 1540, the Crown offers no rewards or titles, but the player is free to continue as long as they please. Incidentally, this essential aspect of the original Seven Cities was utterly lost on the makers of the 1993 "Commemorative Edition," which takes the farm more gamified approach of giving the player specific goals to meet. In the 1984 game, any goals were entirely self-determined and self-enforced, leaving the player to read their own meaning into play sessions and campaigns. Where you went with it was as much about you and what you wanted as it was progress and rewards within the game itself. 

What I wanted was to draw maps of a world never before seen, that was unique to my game on my computer... and, even when I didn't understand it, try in some tiny way to make up for the crimes on which I, and everything around me, was predicated... all on two sides of a mere 8-bit floppy disk.

- B

Send questions, comments, and essays defending Columbus to neversaydice20@gmail.com or tweet us @neversaydice2.



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