Myopia

Jumping over fences and collecting golden things — that's the level of creativity you'd expect from a piece of shovelware from 1999. Myopia is a textbook platformer with the simplest possible goal: the character moves left to right, jumps, tears its eyes on barbed wire, and has three lives. You can't get more straightforward than this.

The game was made by an unknown developer for MS-DOS, and you can tell right away — a handful of animations, crude menu graphics, sounds like a spool being jammed into a speaker. You play through levels that are exactly what you'd imagine: obstacles in fixed positions, an enemy that patrols back and forth, and a goal where you collect golden coins or stones. After ten minutes, I already know exactly what awaits me in level twenty.

The controls work fine until you hit the most sensitive spot of every old platformer — the jumping. Judging height isn't precise, timing jumps requires feel from three attempts, and sometimes you just don't know if you'll reach something. It's not Sonic and it's not Keen either. It's a game that wants to frustrate you, or maybe it just has no interest in pleasing you.

Myopia got lost in the nineties in a sea of games with identical names or vibes — tolerable ruts without a fatal flaw, but without a single idea that makes a difference. A few people noticed it on disk networks or later shareware sites, those looking purely to kill time. Everyone else noticed it and made fun of it.

Today, when you open it in an emulator, you feel the same resignation as from any other forgotten piece of shovelware. It's not terrible, it's not hopeless. You're simply faced with fifty manageable but fairly tedious levels of challenges that might actually be fun if there was some narrative, atmosphere, or at least shooting behind them. There's none of that. It's just jump, jump, jump and home.

Playing it today is only worth it if you want to touch this specific piece of historical nothing. It's not ironic gaming, it's not discovering a forgotten gem. It's more of a testimony — how you could make platformers with almost zero invention and still find a publisher and a disk slot for it. Now, in a browser emulator, it's a matter of historical research for die-hards who want to see how carelessly this category can be botched.