So back in 1997, I was growing up in a small town in Massachusetts. It had a population of about 1,000 people. It was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody, a really tight knit community. However, I was still extremely anti-social and didn’t have many friends.
Anyways, after school I would hop on my bike and head down to this local arcade, DreamSim. It was about a mile from the town’s middle school. It was pretty shitty and most of the games were dated, even for the time. I wasn’t picky though, and nobody ever went there so I could play whichever games I wanted to. It was run by this nice old guy named Ed, he would always give me a free soda and spent most of his day sweeping dust from the floor. It was a little weird how I seemed to be the only kid who ever went there, but like I said, it was a small town. Other kids had friends. The place was rundown.
There was this one game that I absolutely loved and could play all day long. I don’t honestly know how the old man even found it, it was super niche and made by some indie dev company called Covenant Games. I have a sinking suspicion that Covenant Games was just Ed’s grandson or something. The game was called Night Lurker. It had really basic controls. Three buttons. Block, attack, jump (and a joystick to move around). There were two modes, story and survival. I never really played the story until the very end, but I’ll get to that.
You would control a small sprite, the Night Lurker, and he would fight zombies, vampires, goblins, etc. He had a weaponized flashlight, which is kind of corny in retrospect, but seemed cool at the time. The idea was that you were protecting your town from the monsters that came out at night. In typical fashion, as you went further into the game, there would be bigger groups of enemies and more difficult bosses. I had the high score on the game (obviously, as nobody else ever played it) and had learned all of the methods, learned how to cheese the bosses, learned the hiding spots to regenerate health where the enemies couldn’t get to you. I am confident in saying that I was the greatest Night Lurker player there ever was.
At the end of that year my mother had gotten a promotion which required her to be located in Boston, so we had to move. I didn’t really want to, but there was a huge pay raise and she was a single Mom, so it was kind of the only choice. A few days before we started moving everything out of the old house, I decided I would stop by DreamSim one more time. This time, Ed wasn’t there, and the door was wide open. I wrote a little note thanking him for letting me hang out in his arcade and that I was going to miss him, but I was a little sad that I didn’t get to have a proper goodbye. I left the note next to the cash register, and that was when I noticed something strange. None of the games in the arcade were turned on, other than one. Night Lurker.
None of the lights were turned on, either, so it was basically pitch black in there, lit only by the cloudy daylight coming in through the windows. Against my better judgement (I was 13) I booted up the game and sat down to play. As the screen switched over to the main menu, the light from the tiny TV became blindingly bright, and it took a little while for my eyes to readjust. It was the same as always, but when I tried to scroll over to Survival mode, the game switched back over to Story. I tried this a few more times, and each time it did the same thing.
Eventually my lack of patience took over, and I booted up Story mode. It opened with the Night Lurker walking through Pine Grove cemetery, and there was some dialogue with the “Questmaster” about the Night Lurker’s final mission.
“Night Lurker, I have one last mission for you.” - QM
“What’s the assignment?” - NL
“Destroy the gate through which these otherworldly creatures enter, and then you will be free.”
I remember that line pretty clearly because the screen froze for about thirty seconds.
After saying this, the Questmaster disappeared and the first mission began. In a similar fashion to what I was used to, a hoard of zombies spawned and began attacking my character. I spammed the basic stun punch kick combo over and over again and got past the level with relative ease. Then a cutscene played, and it seemed as though my character was sucked into the forest that surrounds Pine Grove with a gust of wind, and the text “Level 2” popped up on screen.
The forest is called Witch’s Woods, which I’d also seen many times before. However, this time it was different. There was no Great Witch, no goblins, no enemies of any sort. It was just my character, wandering in the woods. And the woods were darker than ever. The Night Lurker turned on his flashlight and began walking, without me so much as touching the joystick. I grabbed on to the joystick but I had no control over the character. So I just watched as it played out, expecting some sort of enemy or something, but there was absolutely nothing. Just my sprite, walking in this much darker version of Witch’s Woods than I was used to, only his flashlight guiding the way. And then my character stopped moving. And all of a sudden, text appeared on the screen.
“You wander so aimlessly.”
And then the screen went completely black. I was pretty shook up at this point. After that, without a cutscene or anything, my sprite was on Pine Street, another area I was familiar with. This time, there were no changes in lighting or anything, and it was as I’d remembered it. I had control over my character again, and fought through a basic hoard of vampires until I reached Ivan the Powerful, a boss that I had also fought before. This time, Ivan was alone, standing in front of a white portal which I assumed to be “the gate”.
I was surprised because it was only level 3 and I was completing the final objective. He didn’t perform any mixups, he just spammed one attack. Bat swarm, which is where he basically just sends a swarm of bats to attack you… as the name would suggest. It’s extremely telegraphed and easy to avoid, and I basically blocked and countered him with the same combo over and over until he died. And then, another cutscene. The portal exploded, and the Questmaster appeared.
“Congratulations! You destroyed the gate, and the town is safe! You are free to go.”
I was still so confused as to why the story was only three short levels long, and why one of the levels wasn’t even really a level at all, more so just a creepy-ass cutscene. However, I chalked it up to my high skill level and the hundreds of hours of practice that made the story mode so easy. After that, I assumed some sort of credit sequence would play, but it just put my character back on Pine Street. Once again there were no enemies, just my character walking, but I had full control. There was none of the usual background music. All that I could hear was a surprisingly high quality sound effect of wind blowing. It was on a loop, so you could hear where it stopped and restarted. And I walked my character all the way to the end of the road. At the very end, a prompt appeared.
“Once you leave this place, you can never come back. Would you like to create a save game?”
I pushed the joystick over to “Y”. I punched in JMR (my initials) and saved the game. And then it went back to the main menu. I didn’t know what the purpose of having a save game at the end of the game was, so I went to try and load it back up to see if I had missed anything. On the main menu screen, there was a new prompt for loading save games, and sure enough mine was the only one there. I clicked on it, expecting it to load me back into the Pine Street level. It didn’t. It loaded up the same version of Witch’s Woods that was in level 2, this time with no music, but the wind blowing sound was on loop. And there were intervals of two texts. The first read:
“You wander so aimlessly.”
The second read:
“You can never come back.”
Those texts cycled as my character stood in the pitch black woods, unmoving. I tried to move the joystick yet again, and had no control. He just stood there with his flashlight pointed into the darkness. And then, it turned off. The text read one last time:
“You can never come back.”
And then the game powered down. At this point I was freaking the fuck out and biked all the way back home, and tried to forget about it. Then we moved, and I more or less did forget about it.
This was a long time ago, and I’m in my late 30s now. I still love video games, and randomly had a memory of that game. I wanted to see if I could find a port of Night Lurker, but I couldn’t find any record of it’s existence online. When I googled DreamSim Arcade, I was half expecting to not find anything, when I came across an old news article about the former location of “DreamSim Arcade” being turned into a McDonald’s. The article said that it had been torn down in the early 2000’s, but that DreamSim Arcade had gone out of business in 1991. Six years before I ever played Night Lurker there. Obviously I’m confused and a little freaked out, and was hoping some nice folks on the internet could find some more information on this place?
I do graphic design for fun, and tried to recreate what that last level looked like… It’s from memory, so it’s a little shoddy.
https://i.imgur.com/ZhsUmKP.jpeg