It must be said: the emulator eliminates many problems, but also creates new ones - in my case, the tendency to a certain "platform perfectionism"; I find it inconceivable to lose even one life and finish the level without having found all the secrets that are hidden there. I have a lot of fun in any case, but very little remained of the abandonment with which as a child I began and ended a game as it happened. Now I get nervous even if I fall once too many in the same cliff, although I just have to press F5 to try again in the blink of an eye (which means that, in fact, when there is a slight chance of making a mistake in a particularly delicate passage, I will surely end up making a mistake. Little responsibility, little attention).
One of the platforms that I remember best from that time was an exclusive pc - or better, it was for me and my brother: we only had the Windows edition, we didn't care that there were other editions. It was Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow, a Disney-licensed game starring a bizarre version of Donald Duck with a Hawaiian name and look (complete with a proverbial floral shirt), invested with the power to turn into a ninja (the "cold shadow" of the title) thus alternating two styles of play: one more classic based on the use of an insect-gun, the other focused on fast stunts and duels based on a ninja stick. I spent a lot of time pondering if there was any identity relationship between Donald Duck and Maui Mallard, exposing - without much success - my theories to my classmates. The game, however, had been given to us at Christmas by an uncle in the form of a mastered copy, accompanied by an elegant colored photocopy of the cover but without a manual, and apparently the story was illustrated in full in the pages of that booklet that we lacked; the (little) text in the game was in English and neither I nor my brother were still able to understand much about it.
- But the most important thing about Maui Mallard was the fact that I enjoyed it incredibly, even more than the beloved QuackShot for Sega Mega Drive, where Donald Duck was instead an explorer travelling from one corner of the globe to another. Maui Mallard was more adrenaline-filled, more concentrated and more indulgent.
In the early years of college I discovered emulators and recovered so much of the games from my childhood, as well as many other titles from those years that might have been part of it, but I had never played them before - especially those from the Nintendo family, which my father used to mockingly dismiss. Still, Maui Mallard was the last title I thought of dusting off. His colleague QuackShot preceded him: I even got to finish it, making my way through levels I had never seen before as a child, stylized versions of remote countries and cultures whose inhabitants were mostly hostile to Donald's invasive archaeological excursions.
It was only natural that I retrieved that title first: I had played it on Mega Drive, I had found the emulator and it worked perfectly. To make Maui Mallard run, instead, I would have had to invent some devilry to make my computer, now too advanced, go back to a configuration suitable for him. The idea that I could simply download a Rom for one of the emulators available to me came to mind only a few years later, when - in a moment of boredom - I gave the voice "Maui Mallard" to Google. I lazily saw a few lines of Wikipedia on the development of the game, I looked at some screenshots, I recorded with a little surprise the fact that versions for Mega Drive, SNES and even GameBoy had also come out.
Out of curiosity, I then tried to download the rom of the game for my emulator of the Sega Mega Drive. The first level - Maui's Mansion - opened on the scenario of a ghostly villa that I remembered practically by heart; the main antagonists were mechanical spiders and disturbing curved butlers who approached the player on tiptoe to torture him with monsters coming out of their trays. It was all very funny, but there was something irritating about it that prevented me from fully enjoying the revival. I remembered the game as completely devoid of music; I have some appreciation for the filmic and videogame narratives that use very little or no non diegetic music, and the absence of a soundtrack had made Maui Mallard's levels more threatening and immersive in my memory. I had no memory of the irritating pseudo-Hawaiian muzak that was beginning to spread even before the player could move and continued throughout the level. It was a perfect embodiment of all the tremendous musical accompaniments I'd heard in my career as a gamer, tracks made of continuous high peaks, almost never discrete or flat, apparently coming out of a toy synthesizer; composed of a few sizzling musical figures like pixilated barbecue meat, doomed to return potentially to infinity, or at least for as long as the player would take to finish the level. In comparison, Maui Mallard's silence seemed to me, as a child, a much more suitable solution.