UNCHARTED DESERT ISLE — I am in Hell.
For as much as its seven residents wanted to escape Gilligan’s Island, it was a happy place full of coconuts and wisecracks, where the Howells remembered to bring everything anyone could possibly need and the Professor could build anything they forgot.
The place I have been encircling for hours in Bandai’s 1990 NES game The Adventures of Gilligan’s Island is no desert oasis; it is a labyrinthine no-man’s-land designed to drive hapless travelers insane. I was sent here by you, Game|Life readers. To be fair, unbeknownst to me at the time I had the real-life swine flu when I was playing this, so I’m willing to write off many of this game’s issues as merely my own pigfevered hallucinations.
Gilligan is a game about wandering around identical-looking screens in search of people, then wandering back to find the last person, or wandering forward to find another person, and wandering all over until you either complete the level or die. That is literally the extent of the gameplay except for the fact that in every level you find a club that lets you beat on things in an entirely unsatisfactory manner. But I am getting far ahead of myself.
From the staccato opening music that sort of sounded like, but wasn’t quite, the familiar opening of the show, I knew I was on some kind of twisted mirror version of the island. I really knew this when somehow Skipper and not Gilligan had become the main character. He is a formless jellyfish that resembles nothing so much as the child of the two main characters from A Boy and His Blob.
Gilligan follows after me, being possessed of an amazing ability to get lost. This is one of the elements of the design that I will graciously refer to as “gameplay.” I have to keep Gilligan with me at all times by waiting for him to catch up before I leave the screen. I quickly learn that if I’m going to jump into a hole, I have to pace around the hole a few times and hope that Gilligan jumps in first, because of course he won’t follow me.
In “Episode 1,” I was tasked with building a hut. The other four characters from the game quickly, and inexplicably, scattered themselves throughout the maze (Ginger, wisely, did not participate in this project at all). Here, and I swear this is true, is a complete walkthrough of how to finish Episode 1: