Ekho Magii (2007)

There are large areas of the world which remain entirely uninhabited. Those places hold a great deal of interest to many – the places where the cold or the darkness or the lack of resources make for such an uninhabitable environment that no human will settle there. However, there are also places where the rugged few choose to make their homes. Places where the environment is a deterrent to most, but where a few intrepid souls stake their claim. Even in the digital world, where space is of no concern and freedom of choice is near infinite, these spaces continue to exist.

There are thousands, perhaps millions of nearly abandoned chat rooms. Message boards that once existed for huge numbers of users, are now ghost towns where only the most loyal and steadfast remain. The high pace and turnover of content online means that things pass in and out of favour, fads swell and bloat, then suddenly shrivel to nothing. But there are always those few, those determined few, who stay around after everyone else has left. Perhaps it is because the little corner of the web holds some sentimental relevance to them, perhaps they are interested in an incredibly niche topic that enjoyed the briefest moment of popularity. Sometimes, they are just too heavily invested to leave.

Such is the case with Ekho Magii. Ekho Magii was released in Russia in 2007 by a company called Razvlecheniya i Komp'yutery. Prior to Ekho Magii, the company were best known for cheap electronic counters used to keep score in basketball or skipping.

It was a slim hand-held gadget – yellow plastic, a red trigger on one side and screen in the centre. The screen was an old fashioned LED display – reminiscent of the simple boxy games that were released in the 80s for popular franchises like Disney or The Simpsons. The screen displayed a small human figure, with a blocky pointed head, whose feet pedalled forward in a circle as if they were rising and falling. If you pulled the red trigger, a musical note came from the figure. Pull the trigger and the blocky boy sings his song and you get a point. That was it. That was the full extent of the game. Your only reward was a rising point counter.

The packaging was very plain with a lot of text. I cannot read Russian, so I sent a scan to an acquaintance who translated for me, then offered some additional insight.

“It mentions that it is based on the playground game, based on the fairy tale of Echo Magic. I looked it up and the children’s game is kind of like Marco Polo crossed with tag I think. The fairy tale is a lot more interesting.

So there's a boy in an old village deep in the woods, and he is in love with the baker's daughter. She loves him, but she can't be with him etc. so every night, he walks past her house and sings this song that is mostly made up of the phrase 'echo magic'. If she hears him, she sings it back. Then one day, her wicked father finds out and banishes her into the woods. It's cold and dark and she gets lost and is stuck there and the boy wants to rescue her, but there's a problem. The wood is full of… I can't tell, in some versions of the story its witches, but other times its like ghosts I think? Anyway, the boy goes out and calls for her to try and find her, and he calls out her name and there's all these replies and he realises that its the witches trying to trick him. So instead, he starts singing the Echo Magic song. The witches sing back, but they can't get it right – its always close, but not quite there. Suddenly, he hears the real version and he follows the voice and finds the girl and they run back to the village and live happily ever after or something.”

In total, about 20,000 units were produced, a ridiculously high number for a project of its scope, and all were sold in Russia in the summer of 2007. The project was poorly managed enough that Razvlecheniya i Komp'yutery had declared bankruptcy within 5 months of its release, so information from the company itself is limited.

So why would anyone buy the game in 2007? To give that some context: Halo 3, COD:Modern Warfare, Portal and Bioshock were all released in the same year. Ekho Magii also pre-dated the popularity of 'idle' clicker games by 5 years. It was an incredibly niche product and would have vanished into obscurity if not for one feature.

It had an online scoreboard.

Karine Salanova is a peculiarly handsome woman. The first time I watch her web cam flicker to life, she is an ocean of pixels and blotches through which a petite, dark woman slowly comes into focus. Her eyes are deep-set and large, her hair is jet black with platinum blonde tips. She stands awkwardly for a moment, waiting for my image to appear in the Skype window. Then she smiles and waves. Her English is good. Slowly, she relaxes as we make small talk. Eventually, our conversation turns to the reason behind our Skype call.

“Would you like to see it?” she asks.

“Of course, do you have it with you?”

Her face flickers with confusion, then she laughs.

“Of course I do. Always, I have it with me.”

She reaches down and fiddles with something at her hip for a moment and I realise it is attached to her belt. The Ekho Magii is faded with age. There is a white mark, a blurred faded wave down one side of the console.

“My thumb,” Karine mutters apologetically. “I rub it when I am nervous.”

The web cam and our stuttering call connection struggle to catch the details of the screen, but then she tilts her hand and for a moment I see it – the endlessly walking figure of a pointy-headed boy. She carefully fires the trigger a few times for me and shows the musical note appear. The screen is hard to make out, the cheap display has started to bleed from the edges and the image of the boy and the musical note are somewhat burnt in from below. As if reading my mind, Karine sighs and reattaches the Ekho Magii to her belt.

“One day, it will stop working I think.”

“You think so?”

“Yes I think so. It is already happened to some people. They were near the top of the scoreboard but then suddenly stopped. I saw them making posts on the internet telling that their game had broken. Some of them bought ones off of Ebay and tried to catch up, but at this point it will be very hard for them to ever get back to where they were.”

As we talk, Karine occasionally reaches down and idly fingers the trigger at her hip. She does it without blinking, without flinching. It is a habit so deeply engrained that I wonder what she will do when the game does eventually stop working.

“Where are you right now then?” I ask.

There is some confusion. She she gives me a brief video tour of her kitchen. An almost comically obese black cat slinks into view in the background, stretching itself across her counter top. It tentatively paces around for a while, then sits by the window and watches the tap in her sink dripping.

“On the leader board,” I say with a smile.

Karine's cheeks flush and she laughs a musical laugh. Even whilst this is happening, she reaches down and tugs the trigger a few times.

“Okay, let's check then.” She takes out her phone and the website immediately pops up. “I am 3rd right now. Yes, that's normal. Sometimes I creep up to 2nd, but not often. Occasionally I sneak down to 5th if I am lazy or don’t prioritise and I have to have a really serious talk with myself and get back up to 3rd. I'm happy at 3rd. I feel right at 3rd.”

I ask her if she knows anything about the other players and she gives a half hearted shrug and the flush returns to her cheeks.

“The person in place 2 is a boy,” Karine says.

“Do you know the boy?” I ask, unable to help laughter creeping into my voice.

“No, I mean I have met him once. We spoke on the internet a few times, but we only met once. He's a little bit younger than me. I think we did sort of flirt a little bit maybe, but it was more like we were trying to um….” she struggles to find a word for a few moments. “Like, measure?”

“You were messing with each other?”

“No, not really. It was more like we were trying to see what each other were like.”

Karine Salanova has been carrying Ekho Magii around with her every minute of every day for the past 5 years. Prior to that, she kept it at home when she went to class, then would return and play for hours at a time.

“I think I was the only person in the top 20 who had a life. I was busy sometimes and so to stay competitive I had to really commit. My fingers would cramp and seize up and I started getting fluid in my wrist.” She rubs the base of her palm with her other hand, then lifts it up to show me a small scar. “Doctors had to cut it open and remove the fluid. It wasn't bad but it wasn't nice.”

Karine has not been out of the top 20 since 2012. She has not been out of the top ten since 2015. When the previous 5th place player suddenly stopped playing altogether (“his game died,” she tells me with a soft-spoken reverence usually reserved for saints and martyrs), she leap-frogged him in to the top 5 and has remained there since.

As we chat, I think we both feel the inevitable coming. I like Karine – she is fun and bubbly and interesting. She has an enthusiasm and energy about her that is incredibly endearing. We can both sense that I am running out of easy questions though.

“So. Why?” I ask.

She nods for a while, without saying anything. Her hand strays down to her Ekho Magii.

“It's a game,” she says with an unconvinced smile. “You know, it's fun!”

“Is it?” I ask.

Again she nods silently. Her eyes start moving uncomfortably round the room.

“It doesn't seem like much of a game. It seems like a job.”

“I don't know. It is fun. When you're doing well, it's fun. And when you're doing less well it really gives you something to focus on. That number just goes up and up and up. That's what is great about numbers, they go on forever.”

“Until the game breaks.” I say, then regret it.

“Until the game breaks,” she agrees. “Or until whoever is paying to keep the server up stops paying. The company who made Ekho Magii have been gone for a long time. Nobody knows why that side of the game is still working. Who is paying for the internet server that the game connects to or the website fees? Nobody knows.”

“I tried to look before calling you, but any information about the company is in Russian.”

“You're not missing anything, I've looked before,” she says.

I want to let her go. I want to drop it, but I can't.

“Why are you still playing, Karin?” I ask.

“It's fun,” she repeats. “It's just a dumb game.”

“Then why are you playing?”

Her hands alternate between firing the trigger and rubbing at the patch of faded plastic.

“Do you think maybe this is just an addiction?” I ask her. She gives me a moan of frustration.

“I've never been the best at anything,” she says. “I have no job, no boyfriend at the moment. But I know that I am one of the best at Ekho Magii. I know that when I am 3rd place, that is who I am – I am the third best person.”

Note: This article was written in Summer of 2018. Karine Salanova emailed me in February 2019 to tell me her Ekho Magii had finally died. The trigger and the display were still working, but her score was no longer updating on the website. She was 2nd place at the time.

She did not reply to any of my follow up emails. I initially feared the worst, however, Karine continues to occasionally update her Facebook and Instagram page. Perhaps she is simply done with the Ekho Magii chapter of her life.

Currently, she is 29th place on the leader board. In the last week, the 1st place player has pulled the trigger of his Ekho Magii 41,042 times.