The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 85: Red Elf Shot The Food

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.
Thou knowest my downsitting and uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and are aquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thy hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

Red Elf’s copy of the Bible was open to this Psalm – 139 – when he shot the crossbow bolt into his own brain on the 9th of December, 1991. He was, in many ways, a victim of his own fame.

His early works – a clutch of cheap melodramas with titles like Surf City Sodomite and The Devil Hates Tennis – earned him little but scorn from the Berkely community he found himself thrust into after the venomous divorce between his parents, Red Adair and the elf princess Arwen. Strung out on benzedrine and coffee for most of this period, seeking a cosmic ‘inner truth’ beyond his own five senses, he was easy prey for the teachings of Leary and the rising interest in LSD among the intelligentsia of the time. Indeed, his ‘acid novel’, The Exorbitant Melanoma Controversy, garnered massive sales and for a time he was seen as a writer on the level of Tom Wolfe, or possibly Big Boss.

However, he never rose to the heights expected of him, and a sequel to Melanoma entitled I’ve Never Seen Such Bravery proved to be something of a flop, despite offering the ‘inside scoop’ on such luminaries of the time as Philip K Dick, John Lennon and Yellow Wizard. A semi-autobiographical work, it detailed the time that Red Elf and his college buddies had spent exorcising ghosts and dealing with grunts, demons and lobbers in an infinite dungeon on the outskirts of Aspen,

a crazy time that would never come again, when all four of us were drinking potions, eating chicken dinners and diving down any black, square hole with the word ‘exit’ shimmering over it. We learned things then – things about bonuses, about our own nascent sexuality, about what it was to need food – to really need it, badly.

A third novel, Last Exit To Level 87, fared poorly, and Red Elf retired from the literary scene to teach Sociology as the University Of Montreal. It was only in 1985 that Atari Games approached him with an offer to create an arcade game based on Bravery, detailing the experiences of the college buddies. Red Elf was overjoyed, but soon found himself exasperated with the seeming simplicity of the project – the four players would be expected to defeat monsters and collect potions and treasure, rather than smoke copious quantities of marijuana and debate the true meaning of T.S. Eliot. Eventually, he quit the project in disgust. There are still traces of the original novel – particularly the chapter where Death is described as “being somewhere on every level, more than one often like cups of old unwanted expresso”, and his touch making a sound like “a buzzsaw shrieking like terror in a dead tenement at midnight, as the dealers hawk their wares on the street below, faces yellow in jaundiced street luminance of angels”. However, it’s notable that the elf in the arcade version is green, while Allan Ginsberg has been replaced with Thor The Warrior, a communist sympathiser of the period who allowed his likeness to be used. The game was retitled Gauntlet, after one of Thor’s poems on the creeping grasp of capitalism, and, ironically, he became enormously wealthy as a result.

Red Elf did make an appearance in the Atari ST version of the game, but the damage was done – most of the royalties went to Thor, with Red Elf remaining uncredited. In 1991, with new versions of the game planned and his own considerable debts skyrocketing, he chose to end his own life. It’s said that he entered into a suicide pact with Yellow Wizard, but because of the latter’s slow rate of fire, he was able to reconsider before the fireball reached his head, and fled the scene. it’s likely that we will never know the truth of the matter.