One night while sitting on the couch in my living room I as hit by an overwhelming urge to find and play a specific computer game from my childhood. The only problem: I didn’t know what it was called. I guessed that the last time I played it was probably around 1995 – and my memory of its exact details was hazy at best.

I thought my best chance at figuring this out would be to ask my housemate Dan to help me. He knows everything there is to know about video games. But would he know anything about computer games? Especially one that lived and died before he was even born? The short answer was: not really.

My initial memories were: boulders, diamonds, and snakes that shoot lasers out of their mouths. And possibly spiders. I emailed my brother back in Canada thinking “he was older than me while playing this he might remember the name.” Unfortunately, he remembered about as much as I did.

From this, after some searching Dan came up with “Boulder Dash” – a game where you push around boulders to try to make a path for you to escape each room. As soon as he said it I thought, “Yes! That’s it! That’s definitely it!” I emailed my brother to tell him the news and to stop searching. He sent me a reply saying, “Yes, Boulder Dash does sound familiar.” So, we downloaded it and started playing it. Within seconds I knew that was not it.

I had to email Eddy again to tell him we were wrong and to keep wracking his brain. I even got my mum involved; asking her to check the darkest recesses of our basement for boxes of floppy discs that might have a faded title scrawled on one. No luck there, either.

While Dan was scouring game websites I was Googling “Romancing the Stone” title parodies. I knew I remembered it being called something to that affect. I was too young at the time of playing to have seen the film “Romancing the Stone” or to understand the joke but I remember knowing that there was one. The only result I could get was “Romancing the Throne” but that didn’t seem quite right. Nor did it garner any search results involving a computer game.

After typing into Google every possible combination of the words “game,” “boulder,” “diamonds,” and “laser snakes” we had almost lost all hope. Finally, after over an hour of frantic searching and heart pumping almost-got-its I blurted out the word DOS and it was as if a light shone down from the heavens. With that magical word a whole new world of search possibilities opened up. Dan found a website, a virtual database of every DOS game ever! And what’s even better they each had little screen captures of the game. I now had an image to cross reference with my memory.

I scrolled through tens (maybe a hundred) of tiny thumbnails until I came across something familiar. I let myself get excited because it was so familiar. I enlarged the image and read the title, also familiar; I really thought I had it this time. It was called Pharoah’s Tomb; I searched for other images from this game to further jog my memory, which is when I realised this wasn’t the right game either, but another game I used to play around the same time. I kept scrolling until I spotted it. The name didn’t sound at all familiar, Paganitzu, but the picture was definitely it.

Earlier, to try and help Dan realise whether he had seen the game before I drew sketches of what I remembered some of the levels to look like. They didn’t help him at all, but after seeing the images for Paganitzu I was really and truly sure this was the game I was looking for. I downloaded it (along with a DOS emulator) and began to play. The opening screen had a secondary title called “Romancing the Rose.” Jackpot. I started playing and it all came back to me. I even remember where all the secret passages were for extra points.

It was such a relief to finally have the game in front of me. And just to know it existed at all (I was starting to go a little crazy). It was also fun to see how close my sketches were compared to the actual level. I played it all night long, and the next day, too. And you know what? I still can’t get past stupid level 19!